Mumbai falls to its knees...

This was going to be a long rant on the devastating rains a couple of days ago. Unfortunately, the comp unexpectedly restarted when I was writing it, so I'm gonna be writing the whole thing from scratch. To save time, I'll just give a blow-by-blow description of what happened to myself and the rest of my family, followed by a little something on the rest of the city.

Let's start with me. Having set my priorities right, I decided to bunk college after lunch for a TopCoder SRM. This decision turned out to be providential - there was only a light drizzle at the time I reached home, but shortly after that the heavens unburdened themselves and blasted the city. In less than an hour, my building compound started flooding. The roads followed suit in minutes.

Anyway, I was sitting pretty and doing the SRM, pretty happy that I'd escaped the deluge. Just before I was about to submit the room's fastest 250, my net went down. My reaction: WTF!!! Luckily it came back a minute later, but I'd lost the first place and had to be content with second. I started up the 500 and finished coding it up faster than the rest of the room. I'd just finished testing and was making a minor change before submitting, when BOOM - my net was down again...My mom was reluctant to let me use dialup for fear of blocking the phone lines, but that idea went down the drains(which were already filled to their limits) when the phones went dead a couple of minutes later. Having no choice left, I went off and watched TV for about 15 mins, giving up the SRM as a lost cause.

My mom had been trying to get through to my sister in college for quite some time, but the Orange network went down soon after it began pouring. Eventually my sister got through to me and told me that getting out of college was impossible - the entire area was flooded. She planned to wait it out. What eventually happened was that a big group of about 5-6 people went wading through knee deep water to her friend's place, and ended up staying overnight.

Meanwhile, the ground floors of all the buildings in the area were flooding - people living there were moving upstairs in a hurry. Worse still, power failed a little while later - and remained gone for about 24 hours. The net was gone even longer, more's the pity...

More horror stories:

1. My cousin walked from Juhu to Bandra in what he claims was 'neck-deep' water.
2. My dad got home the next day at around 2PM - apparently they got to Vile Parle in a colleagues car, which they had to abandon since the roads were blocked by cars left behind from the previous day. The owners had apparently decided that walking was more practical and left their cars behind wherever they could. Since it was pouring terribly and the street lights were out(there were power outages all over the city), they didn't exactly park by the curb...So my dad and his friends ended up walking from Nanavati hospital to Bandra.
   
3. My aunt took 7 hours to get from Colaba to Bandra. I thought this was some kind of a record, but listening to the radio disabused me of that notion when someone mentioned that it was the 21st hour of his commute home...
4. My other aunt couldn't even get home to Andheri - the roads are still littered with cars so it's pretty difficult to get through.

Thankfully my entire family is safe, and I haven't heard of any casualties among friends, except for one who slipped and hurt his leg in a manhole...Unfortunately, the same is not true for everyone - Thite mentioned that a friend of a friend of his was killed by a falling wall, and another friend's friend's mom was drowned in Kalina...Terrible.

I ended up missing my TOEFL, which was scheduled for Wednesday. There was no way I could have actually reached Saki Naka under these conditions, but we found out later that there had actually been a land slide somewhere there. Once again I am miraculously saved - though of course, it only looks that way in hindsight.

Schools and colleges have been declared closed for 2 days. This leaves only Friday, and most people have decided to give it a miss, just in case something happens again...and for other, not so cautious reasons...like another TC SRM!

Things are returning to normal, but all is not yet well in Mumbai. It's gonna be a few more days yet...still, the legendary Mumbaikar spirit will pull through as it always does. Just goes to show - Nature's blind, insane fury can destroy us and our creations, but it can never permanently defeat the combined power of the human spirit and human intellect. Nature, thou shalt be humbled yet!