Saturday, July 30, 2005

The aftermath...

One of the things I was going to mention in this post was a small factoid: Mumbai now holds the record for the most amount of rain received in 24 hours. Unfortunately, Thite beat me to the punch by saying this in a comment on the previous post. Feel free to check that out for the numbers...

Turns out the city hasn't yet moved on - a sizable number of people still don't have water or electricity. As usual the authorities are taking their own sweet time getting things fixed up - calling each other names, playing the blame game, and diverting attention away from their sheer incompetence seem to be at the top of their to-do lists...In that respect, things haven't changed - not even this kind of disaster could manage that...On top of that, the bureaucracy is going to waste a huge amount of time in completely useless paperwork - time that could have been spent on relief operations. To paraphrase a wise man, "The government is an ass."

The news shows that people in the affected areas are getting increasingly restive. They've been blocking roads, letting the air out of bus tyres and causing whatever havoc they can, all in the hope of speeding the relief process. Hopefully this will make the authorities sit up and take notice. I have a better idea, though - send the local corporator, MP or whoever a warning - say that the entire neighbourhood/ward/whatever will summarily vote for the opposing candidate in the next election unless things are made to work within 24 hours. If that doesn't work, nothing will...

Still, any canny politician knows the ancient maxim: Public memory is short. Let's hope that doesn't apply in this case - this is not something that should be forgotten quickly.

Thankfully, the agitations are completely run by ordinary people. As of now, there are no demagogues taking political advantage of this tragedy. The average Indian politician is of no help - they have neither the wit nor the wisdom to lead or act effectively. As Dune says, "A leader is he who keeps a people from becoming a mob." Out here, a leader is a person who knows the buttons to push to rouse the rabble, and is sly enough to realise that he might get something out of it...

Star News was showing videotapes of the flooding, made by people shooting from windows and the compounds of their buildings. That really brought home the extent of the floods - all this time I had a sort of academic understanding of it - no real first hand experience.

There was one video taken from a great height, that showed it all - no roads visible at all - just one huge lake, with trees incongruously placed here and there, and stalled cars and trains, as well as people trudging resolutely through waist deep water. In some cases water went as high as 10 feet. No wonder they called in the navy...

At least 800 people are dead. That is not a small number. But as Stalin once said, "The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of a thousand is a statistic." Sad, but true. Just hearing numbers like that desensitizes you. You have to really think about what the number means before anything vaguely resembling an emotional response comes out.

Hats off to the good samaritans who did what had to be done - hundreds of them did a great job distributing water and biscuits to people struggling to get home. These are actions that save lives. Dumbasses with political power, take note.

The sad reality is that Mumbai's disaster management began and ended with the aforementioned heroes(and that's exactly what they were - contrary opinions, bugger off). While no one envisaged anything like this, surely a sensible disaster management group could have adapted plans for other eventualities to this situation. As it turns out, there was no disaster management group, or any plan of any kind. Words - that's all they had - empty words. I tend to be a little verbose at times, but at least I know that words are supposed to mean something. The people in charge don't even act like they're trying - all they do is talk. WTF??!!

Ok, so this post has turned into a full blown rant...Hell, a situation like this deserves a rant. Rant away, Mumbai bloggers!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

wow... u do hate the govt...

"I have a better idea, though - send the local corporator, MP or whoever a warning - say that the entire neighbourhood/ward/whatever will summarily vote for the opposing candidate in the next election unless things are made to work within 24 hours"- that would be really interesting!

But you have a really biased view against the govt. Although i can do better, i wont agree that all they are doing is talking. Of course, they are playing politics in this too, but we can see some work being done.

One more thing... Theres no other place to put this comment.... so here it is:
It's good that the people who started the Tsunami rumour have been charged with culpable homicide.. Thats what those freaks deserve!

Anonymous said...

Correction in my prev comment...

Although *it can do better, i wont agree that all they are doing is talking.

Anonymous said...

One less reason to make an engineer a manager, didn't design the transformer to work effectively through it entire life in the first place. ;)