"Chaos and gun fire." Not in a terror attack. "Armed thugs have taken control of the convention centre." Not in any enemy action. "Eight squads of 11 officers repelled." Not on any war front. "Unimpeded rapes and assaults." Not in any communal violence in India. "Shoot at sight order." Not to quell any rebellion.

All this happened in New Orleans, hit by the killer hurricane Katrina a few days ago, and, more important, to the victims of the disaster. Look at how the New York Times depicts what happened to the unfortunate victims, in thousands, looking and longing for help, food, water and shelter. The victims were held hostage by the thugs. "Chaos and gun fire hampered efforts to evacuate the Superdome," the paper says, quoting a police official.

Superdome is the place where the victims took shelter to escape the flood that engulfed two thirds of the city. "Armed thugs have taken control of the secondary makeshift shelter at the convention centre," the official continued. He said that, "The thugs repelled eight squads of 11 officers each he had sent to secure the place and rapes and assaults were occurring unimpeded in the neighbouring streets as criminals 'preyed upon' passers-by, including stranded tourists."

Compare the tale of New Orleans with the story of Mumbai, which was hit by killer rains a month earlier. Thousands clamoured for food, water and shelter in New Orleans. There was no one to give any. "Even as they were clamouring for food and water, dead bodies slumped in wheel chairs and wrapped in sheets lay in their midst," reported the media. "Some people have not eaten or drunk water for three or four days," said the office of Emergency Preparedness in New Orleans.

In Mumbai, not thousands, lakhs were stranded on roads and in offices. Most homes were thrown open for stranded victims. In many homes, kitchens worked round the clock to cook and feed them. For, they were not victims, but 'athithis,' special people, in the eyes of a traditional Indian. They are entitled to respect, not condescending compassion. Even though the state had absconded in Mumbai as much as in New Orleans, not a single case of rape or molestation was reported. Not a single case of theft. Not a single case of lawlessness.

Not just when the killer rains hit Mumbai, even when the killer tsunami hit the east coast of India and thousands died and hundreds of thousands had to be fed, the story was no different. Every one was fed. No one went hungry. From the word go food was no issue. Whether it was devastation by hurricane in Andhra or Orissa or Gujarat or destruction by earthquake in Gujarat or Maharashtra, the story was the same. It is the families, communities and society in the neighbourhood that first arrived to take care of the needs of those in distress.

Look at how an Indian village, comparatively 'less civilised' in the eyes of the West and also the modern Indian, responded with instant relief when two trains collided with each other. It was near a distant village in Punjab at 2 am in the morning. The whole village woke up to know of the train disaster. But it was all dark. They lined up and started their hundred-odd tractors and focused their headlights on the smashed train to begin relief work. As the victims were shivering in the cold, villagers brought huge haystacks and set fire to them to provide heat. They set up a makeshift hospital in a nearby Gurudwara and opened a public kitchen to feed them. A team selected by the village panchayat took care of their belongings, cash and jewellery and handed over the whole inventory to the authorities. Not a single rupee of the passengers was lost. A village of couple of thousands fed over 50,000 people every day for over a week. This was twice the number of people who needed food in New Orleans! And just a village looked after them.

How is it that in New Orleans disaster generated not instant relief but more disasters, mobs and thugs taking to violence, rapes and loot, and how is it that the ordinary people of India turn into relief workers instantly? The reason is not difficult to find. India is essentially a tradition and community-run and not a system or state run nation. State, as Emile Durkheim warned the West, is too a distant a mechanism for instant intervention, particularly in a crisis. It is a whole series of intermediary collectives, the family, neighbourhood and community, which act as social safety net normally and in emergency.

The West has undermined this social safety net in the name of unbridled individualism. With the result the West has become state-dependent, and overly. While the state runs on rule of law, society in India runs on the age-old principle of 'dharma' that has survived the modern state and its rules. Traditional values are self-policing, but the rule of law needs enforcement. So in the West unless the state steps in there will be loot, rapes and violence where relief is needed. This is what the tale of two disasters, the one in Mumbai and the other in New Orleans, demonstrates. And yet ask the West, they will tell us how we, particularly our villages, are less civilised than them and, more important, half of our own intellectuals will agree with them!