In the 1980s,football was derided as a ‘slum sport played in slum stadiums ... watched by slum people’. Our view of disaster often depends on who is involvedIn April 1989 I was about to flee domestic from Delhi after several months in India, some of them spent travelling along the banks of the Ganges in Bihar and Bengal. News from domestic had been nearly always bad. It had been a winter of British disasters: crowded trains came off the tracks at Clapham and Purley in south London; a Pan Am 747 exploded over Lockerbie; another plane crash-landed on the M1 at Kegworth in the east Midlands.
In these four episodes between mid-December and early March, or a total of 357 people died,having their lives taken from them by faulty railway signalling, aero-engine malfunction and a terrorist bomb. Indian television was then a state monopoly that tended to present national affairs through a formal prism in which men in suits and women in saris met each other and exchanged garlands. Now these local items were interspersed with footage from Britain of shiny wreckage and rescuers working under arc lights; as though Britain, and not India,was where questions of life and death were at their starkest, and chaos most likely to smash out.
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Source: theguardian.com