By Aditya Aamir
There is red alert in watered-out Kerala. Thousands are stranded on rooftops, and thousands more on/in “second floors”. Choppers are flying rescue sorties but many of the ‘Mayday-Mayday’ drown in air. Newspapers have stopped landing on stoops. If they do, they come rolled in watery weather. SOS to “water-proof television news” is unstoppable. TV news channels have no time for Atal Behari Vajpayee’s poetry. The tragedy at home doesn’t allow Delhi distractions.
Opposition Congress leader Ramesh Chennithala wants the Army to take charge. Entire localities are stuck neck-deep in rainwater, river water. Thousands have lost home and hearth. Hundreds other are on rooftops. People are in panic. Man is yet to learn how to sleep on a bed of water and rising water is implacable – incapable of showing mercy.
Trains don’t enter Kerala. Steel hulks stopped in their tracks! Bookstore chain Higginbotham’s have shut kiosks on stations where trains don’t arrive. Buses have come up short against rock-falls and landslides. Petrol bunks are closed. Schools are shut. Education is in how to swim through this watery phase.
This, as worldwide people sought safety in the dollar. The rupee has sunk to a new bottom. Gold is cheaper. But the Gulf Malayali can buy gold and yet lose sleep. His house in Kerala is as wobbly as the stocks of Boeing and Caterpillar.
Don’t even talk of electricity and drinking water.
Kerala is on life-support. The death count – 67 till end of freedom day rose to 73 by Thursday morning. How many more bodies are stuck in water is anybody’s guess. Over 85,000 of the living are in relief camps. It’s heartbreaking, the sights and scenes of the helplessness of the hapless. People stranded on heights in winds 60 kmph. Roads ditched. Bridges overrun by water.
Waterworld! Got a boat, got a boat?
Godless Tamil Nadu wrecking revenge on God’s Own Country? So flows barely concealed innuendo. Television channels are alluding to Tamil-betrayal. Tamil Karunanidhi coming face to face with Malayali MGR in afterlife? Sparks flying. All the waters should have gone to Tamil Nadu, but they don’t want.
“What is the AIADMK government doing?” television is asking. “Can’t it see the devastation?”
Rains will lash till Sunday. That’s the Met saying to TV. Unlike print, television news is waterproof. But there are fewer TV sets. That makes it even-Stevens. TV news channels are relaying SOS from rooftops. That is a big help. TV reporters should get Tamra Patras. They are braving water, reporting standing on floating platforms.
People are posting pictures and news on social media – Facebook and Twitter. Somehow broadband stays afloat! The question being asked is how high can you go against water climbing? Ask Idukki Dam and the one on Mulla Periyar. Both went to the brim and then sluiced! The glory of rushing waters is a beauty and 33 out of the 37 Kerala dams have been compelled to remove the hijab.
Those who have landed at Calicut airport will know it’s on a high! Flat-out on a plateau. Ergo, protected to an extent from bloated water. Not the one in flooded Kochi, which stands flat on flatland and is closed till Saturday – portions of the outer wall razed to let out Periyaar, the river that jumped banks.
The last time Kerala saw such flooding – cloud bursts and landslides – was in 1924. Then, there were fewer dams. Damming rivers help contain water. But dams break in different ways. And water released when dammed up against unrelenting nature’s fury is a damn sight more furious than the eye can see.
It’s early, but TV news channels are asking panels about town-planning and lack thereof of good planning. The hilly-side and the town-side. Why is the centre of Kochi a lake? How come Periyaar swallowed Aluva? Yeah, don’t forget indiscriminate tree-felling, underbrush gone, green-cover lifted, the slippery stone quarries where Mohanlal bashes villains in blockbusters?
Development comes at a price. People pay. Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan sounds sincere. He cares. Does the BJP and the Modi government? Can the Centre leapfrog relief currency from Rs 100 crore to Rs 9,000 crore? Modi has called Vijayan again, and again. The Army, Navy and NDRF are on the job. The “Vyoma Sena”, too.
But it is political will that will count. The BJP has its chance, godsend! To make it to higher ground – moral and political. Doesn’t matter. Kerala will be in life-support. Just like the ailing Atal Behari Vajpayee. But Kerala doesn’t have Alzheimer. The water will recede and the Malayali will remember: Who helped, who did not?
Will a former Prime Minister overshadow the unprecedented tragedy of a people – a national tragedy of mammoth proportions? Television media other than that in Kerala has chosen. But nobody in Kerala, where water is climbing staircases, finds succour in Vajpayee’s poetry. It’s a crying shame, but what the Hell! This is God’s Own country drowning in freshwater. (IPA Service)
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