We, the aqua magicians!

 

We, the aqua magicians!

Remember the week before last I ranted about the deadly humidity and many of you totally understood what I was complaining about? Perhaps our collective prayers moved the powers that be and the next day as we were driving up to Delhi for a couple of days to do some long-pending work, it started to rain on the way. It rained and rained in what maybe is the proverbial cats and dogs fashion, so much so that the visibility got very poor and I could enjoy neither a nap nor my knitting. My attention was on the road ahead trying to see what the driver could ram into

View through the windshield

  even in that very little traffic on the expressway. I     was nearly as scared as I generally am while going  in the fog when I cannot see beyond a metre on the road. 

 Yet when the friends we met said, “You brought rain  and respite from the heat and humidity,” I beamed  and puffed up with misplaced pride as if I was actually Indra, the God of rain. Sorry for that though!

This feeling very soon evaporated when I looked at reports about heavy incessant rains in some parts of our country. As usual this started off traffic jams and inundated roads and soon turned into floods, submerging all that is on land, causing a major disruption in the lives of those affected.

As the week ended and I was sitting unaffected,   back in my safe haven, I got a short heartfelt message of sympathy from my dear friend Cynthia from Zambia that she was sorry for the floods in India.

What? It hit me like a blow. I stopped forwarding the ‘forwarded many times’ Tik Tok videos to victims on my contact list and wondered – but isn’t this the usual scene in India in this season?

Strangely enough what came to my mind were the words, “Spring is the season, that is the reason, the reason you know...” (song from an old Hindi film Julie). In my mind I replaced spring with monsoon and it all made sense.

Since the understanding of seasons sank into my mind, every year I have heard of floods in some part of our country. Yes, you are right, that is a lot of floods and yes, they do cause unspoken amount of damage to lives and property.

These raging waters caused by heavy non-stop rain, bursting of dams and swelling of rivers in plains and coastal areas, or cloudbursts and landslides in hills mean people lose their homes and sources of livelihood. Displaced, they go through physical, mental, emotional and not to forget, financial agony during the floods and even after the water has receded. That also means loss of millions of rupees in rescue, relief and rehabilitation work and naturally a big minus in the economy. And Covid-19 has not even pardoned that.

But see, going on a mental excursion and retaining the flavor of this blog, I want to tell you how in spite of all this, Indians are resilient and do not let nature’s rage spoil their time on this planet.

The noise of prayers and havans to first please the rain god for his timely arrival and the taste of flavourful pakoras with endless cups of fragrant chai as the Monsoon makes its presence felt, slowly change into complaints of wet clothes not drying, the smell of damp, seeping walls and leaking roofs, fungus and gastrointestinal problems, as rains keep lashing the country. In the low-lying or flood-prone areas people have already started moving their things and cattle to higher regions to escape the gushing waters. As the skies continue to cry non-stop, buses stop plying, trains are diverted, flights cancelled.

An old picture (but the scene is common even now) of children playing at a water-logged street after heavy rain. [Photo/Xinhua]

Slowly the villages, towns, fields, roads and rail tracks lose their identity and turn into lakes and quiet dry river beds transform into frothy oceans of muddy waters. The Met department starts its annual ritual of reporting how high the water level in various rivers has reached as well as how much below or above it is ‘khatre ka nishan’ (danger level or red mark).

Rudely woken up from its slumber, the rescue machinery gets into action. Every year our soldiers confirm our trust in them as they are called in to fight this absolutely non-army issue. The navy boats and air force helicopters whiz and whirr to save lives even as the newspapers are printing pages and news channels filling in hours showing the scenes of humans, animals and standing crops being washed away by the force of gushing waters, while the rains continue.

Soon various government organizations too get into action. Thousands of sand bags are placed to erect walls to stop the angry waters and they wash away with the fast flow of our mighty rivers that we sing in praise of the year-round. 

Without sparing any expense of time, money and energy, a fairly large number of political bigwigs of both the ruling party and the opposition take up the skyward task of conducting aerial surveys of the various water-logged regions (Whoever has heard of drones?) and like some celebration the news media extensively cover these photo opportunities, peppered of course with the emotional reactions of these enlightened humans among us lesser beings.

What follows hence is a mad race for relief operations. Various official, political, social, educational, charitable, (forgive me if I missed out on any kind) buy or collect truckloads of food, clothes, medicines and building material and transport it to the areas hit by this age-old calamity. Every citizen is awash with an overwhelming sense of generosity and happily takes out the clothes and utensils they do not want any more to ‘voluntarily’ give them or rush to the shops to buy ‘items for flood-relief’ (leaving it for you to guess) for the needy. I have no idea how much industrial production and economy it kicks up, but I am certain that it boosts the feel-good factor.

I have a job to do and goals to achieve

Simultaneously going on are charges of corruption in the purchase and use of building material and long volleys of claims, counter-claims of how many of those cartons, sacks and trucks actually reached the flood-affected people and areas. 

A few weeks are taken up by this exercise and then comes the turn of the third R i.e. rehabilitation after this destruction and devastation. What is done for that you might ask. I do not have confirmed information, but one thing that I strongly believe in is that we Indians are a very self-respecting atma nirbhar (self-reliant) nation. We rise from the ashes, or rather quagmire (literal and figurative), picking up our lives even before it is time to celebrate the festival of Dushehra around October. Millions of flood-hit start their ghar wapsi (return home) with their precious belongings which they could manage to save or salvage, clean up, and rebuild their lives.

Then comes winter, followed by spring, summer and rains i.e. the foreseen annual natural disaster - floods, and the exercise is repeated in the same or other areas.

Do not ask me why even 74 years after we took charge of ruling own country, have we not found a permanent solution to or are unprepared for this annual ‘natural calamity’. I am neither a politician nor a policy-maker, I am only telling the story.  

But now you can understand why my heart aches for the people of Germany, Italy, USA and wherever there have been floods especially in the last two years. First shaken to the core by an unseen virus in its cruelest form and then hit by irate, unrestrained flow beyond their defined boundaries, of their otherwise obedient, beautiful rivers, these poor people from developed countries have zero idea about how to live with this wrathful expression of nature.

A scene after flood waters receded in some part of Germany.

Perhaps this is one big lesson they can learn from our Bharat Mahan. After all, next month we will celebrate that one similar dark rainy night of deluge some 5,000 years ago, Lord Krishna Himself appeared on our very own sacred land and then preached us through the Bhagwadgita how to live a life of contentment and  purpose without expecting any fruit/reward.

Cheers to our spirits! The few feet of water is only for a few weeks, friends are forever!

                                                                                    - Anupama S Mani

NIFT student Aditi Singh’s photoshoot to draw attention to Patna floods goes viral. The Guwahati Times

Do not break the spirit