Flood Line

The severe floods in a capital city of a southern state in India recently were the point of discussion. Being away from home it is natural for us to seek out as much information as one can by traversing across different mediums ranging from news channels, online newspapers and social networks. Personally having been in the center of quite some ferocious floods in the commercial capital of the country, I know it can be unnerving, extremely troubling and also a wakeup call personally and for the governance as well. My own personal encounter with deep waters was in Mumbai. I was staying in those days in Chembur. I travelled to Nashik on the weekends to visit my parents and one Sunday I got back by the Kasara local amidst extremely heavy rain, the local delayed by almost 4 hours trundled into Kurla station at 3am. Stepping out I gasped as I saw the waist high water all around glistening in the few lights that seemed to remain lit. It seemed like the sea water had taken over the city. Suffice it to say it can be very unnerving to stand on the steps of a structure surrounded 360deg  by water. Those days with adrenaline running high, it was the dominant fight hormone and not the flight hormone which seemed to take precedence. Today I would probably call it foolish bravado. I walked almost 8 kms to my home in waist high dark waters, trying and trusting the central divider holding the lampposts along the road, as an indicator. With not a soul on the road and passing trucks creating mini Tsunamis and me holding my bag high above my head, it was a crash course in military training. I survived that and also remember  relishing my mother’s home cooked parathas and peanut sauce untouched by the Mumbai waters. Braved and saw many floods after that but not as unnerving as this particular one, capable of giving goosebumps even today.

Floods have turned worse over the years and it has less to do with unnatural rains and more to do with reduction of surface area for water to get absorbed and run away. When we appreciate the neat well laid out cement paths in the thousands of modern housing societies that have sprung up neck to neck in any piece of real estate that appears to be staring emptily at the sky, one could do well to note that it is going to collect water which needs to run off. Just look up at the Sq. kms of clouds spread in height and surface area. With sufficient combination of humidity and gravity they need to come down and cover similar surface area. If it comes down in a hurry it will need to work out its way across the stern and unfriendly cement blocks that are unwilling to accept it. If the clouds are in a hurry to let go there may not be enough time for the water to work its way out of  the new narrow maze created to lead it to the water bodies. So then there is the back water pool that gets created similar to a dam. Instead of a vertical wall what we have done is created a combination of horizontal wall and vertical walls for it to navigate. The sea has its own challenges probably. ‘Look guys hang on, I cannot accommodate the bergs coming downin the Artic taking over my volume and then you come down in a hurry. Let’s flood the land for now ‘

Nothing will change for now except for some serious debates, angry fist shaking at the civic bodies, calling the builders as corrupt leeches, and abusing politicians. All well-deserved undoubtedly. But it is unlikely to change much. The greed is too strong. Why blame only these people? Each one in the world today is bubbling with greed. Not just the politicians. Every one of us working in any field is greedy to fulfil their materialistic needs, be it personal devices or homes. So it is we who finally feed into this frenzy of building which in turn leads to a corrupted morass and nexus of the aspirational and the opportunistic where ethics struggles to find a foothold. We are all equally responsible. So will we stop our own quest? We won’t. Will they stop because of niggly little bothers like floods. They won’t. Everybody is too busy satisfying their wealth lust before they die having accumulated enough for no one in particular! But that is another story.

Social networks are the first to spring to attention for any activity. More than the emotional slant towards an event it is about who is the first to share the morbid news, the first to gather as shocking data as possible with pictures and the first to make comments on the general socio- politico impact of the situation. Everyone has a voice these days. Rather words these days that flows incessantly across tireless bands of the spectrum. If nothing interesting is happening we can even fish out old shocking videos of disasters and circulate them as those representing the latest one in the news. Should shock in short. Sadistic pleasure unknowingly cloaked under pretentious concern abounds.  The organizations of politicians too are under so much pressure that they even start ‘photo shopping’ visits by heads of states to indicate the proximity to the scene of the disaster. Not the fault of the leader but of his PR team for sure.

Then the news channels. When their reporters are not busy trying to find the deepest end of the water to stand in and speak with Asthmatic fits, they also try to annoy poor residents trying to find their own peace and pressurize them to give equally annoying answers to how they are feeling. With a whole city cut off from electricity for their own safety, why would a woman on the street standing in waist high wter, complaining about how the authorities are not doing their job by not providing electricity, will make news is amazing.  Then there are local Charlie’s, hoodlums in their lanes trying to politicize the situation by organizing their own protests and blocking an already bothered population from moving around.

The most curious part of this whole grave situation in a key metro of the country was the lack of relevance for the mainstream media. For starters they seemed to be not sure if probably the city really belonged to the country. For anything beyond a thousand kilometers of the capital is probably beyond their definition of national and newsworthy. A city marooned and turned into an island with 250 deaths may not be exciting enough for them to get the required turn of heads to the TV. So they reluctantly had intermittent reports of the continuing cms of rain that offloaded from the skies. They got excited when a key government reporting channel did the Photoshop. Here was a chance for them to batter the image of the country and in return get the required TRPs.  And once that wore out they returned to their more exciting news of odd and even number vehicle road laws. Wow that must be really exciting.  One thing has happened for sure and for good. The mainstream media had lost their authenticity by biased attacks on the new government and now with the lack of attention to a national disaster have lost whatever little support they had.

The floods must have affected not just the physical property of the people but their psyche as well. It will take some time for them to come to terms that this was not only unusual but very dangerous and that it could happen again. Will this shock be enough for them to demand strong actions to environmentally protect the city? Will other cities sit up and take notice? Will people stop blaming weather systems for their agonies and look at the damage they have themselves caused? Only time will tell.