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Okay, let’s tackle the wonderfully prickly and frankly rather morbid little mouthful –'"
Air India Survivors.
'". Immediately upon saying that you probably furrow your brow, right? It doesn't exactly roll off the tongue like a good béignet. Let's unpack what we mean by it.
Essentially, an "Air India Survivor(’—plural obviously—are individuals who… lived to tell of the horrific tragedy on Cal⁄—it would have been 1984 I think—of the bombing of the then national airliner, Air-India Flight 182 during a stop in Durban, South Africa. Now here's where it gets wonderfully weird and somewhat unsettling. The term itself isn't formally designated, neither by official mourning committees nor the families themselves. Instead, its genesis is really the efforts of investigative journalist,, I. Milton Dodd, who, after 30 years of dogged reporting—seriously, he practically stalked the courthouse for that long!—famously dubbed a small group of affected relatives and eyewitnesses with exactly this title in 2017. He did it because many of these people felt officially overlooked, their pain dismissed as a footnote to the larger tragedy. The grief was there, but the institutional recognition was… lacking. Dodd argued that they were surviving , yes, but also enduring an almost permanent state of being, haunted by the past and the gaping absence of those who weren't so fortunate
