A few days ago a friend forwarded me a picture showing airplanes parked in the flooded Kolkata airport. They looked like seaplanes sitting on water.
He wrote “The rains are wreaking havoc wherever they go… Now people are fearful of rains. No longer the fun they used to be.”
He’s right. Once the onset of monsoons was an occasion for huge celebrations. Dr. Sulochana Gadgil, one of India’s most eminent monsoon scientists remembers those days.
SG1: And in fact, although the monsoon comes year after year without fail, every year, once the onset is declared by IMD, it actually the stock markets go up.
When I lived in San Francisco, on drippy grey cold rainy days I would miss the drama of the Indian monsoons.
RAIN THUNDER
Thunder. Lightning. The rain coming down in torrents, Vegetable sellers scurrying for shelter, plastic sheets wrapped around them as makeshift raincoats.
Roads flooded. Rivers overflowed. But the joy overflowed too. Like boys playing football in a sodden field - gloriously muddy.
FOOTBALL
No wonder no season in India has as many songs as the monsoon. It’s a season meant for song. Many written by Rabindranath Tagore, India’s Nobel laureate.
RAIN SONG1
Nature has its own music too like the hundreds of frogs croaking in ecstatic chorus.
FROGS
All that still happens. But as my friend suggests the headlines are telling a scarier story.
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata
In the last few weeks we’ve seen monsoon disasters across the length and breadth of India. Way up in the Himalayas, the pilgrimage to the holy shrine of Kedarnath was suspended because heavy rains caused floods, landslides and killed at least over 20 people. Pilgrims and trekkers had to be evacuated as the route was washed away.
CLIP1
In New Delhi students in a basement coaching centre drowned when they were trapped in the basement unable to open the biometric-enabled door because the electricity had been turned off as the streets flooded.
CLIP2
And way down south in the hills and forests of Wayanad in Kerala, hundreds died as a Biblical deluge of floodwater, boulders and mud buried everything in their path. In one village 90% of the people died.
CLIP3
Everyone talks about climate change. Extreme weather events have become the new watch word. But as one of India’s most eminent monsoon scientists, Dr. SUlochana Gadgil, says rainfall fluctuations, severe peaks and troughs, have always been part of the monsoon story. But what’s changed is the land on which this rain falls.
SG2: And I must say, impact of anything, whether it is hurricane or intense rain depends not just on the rain, but on where it falls, what you have done with the land surface.
Houses and hotels built willy nilly, mining quarries. Highways. As forests are chopped down who will absorb that rain?
Ecologist Madhav Gadgil, who happens to be married to Sulochana Gadgil told India Today TV that much of the area where the Wayanad landslides happens is ecologically sensitive. Yet quarrying and mining and building resorts continues unabated.
MG1: round the tea estate, there are lots of tourist resorts where they are building lakes and so on, which are further, uh, increasing the burden on the, uh, geological structure
He alleges political parties have little incentive to change. In fact they want to blast tunnels through those hill slopes in the name of development.
MG2: that tunnel would involve a lot of, uh, creation of, uh, rock rubble blasting that will further send shockwaves and make the fragile hills already, which are fragile, further are prone to landslides.
But retired geologist Dr. K Soman told The News Minute water has memory, it remembers the paths it used to flow along no matter what has been built there now.
It led my friend columnist Paromita Vohra to wonder in a recent column for Mid-Day newspaper whether it was just the rain that killed all these people. Or some bizarre illusion of progress disconnected from reality?
PV1: If our relationship with the world is so abusive, is it any surprise that romantic rain is breaking up with us? We may forget our place in the world, but water, as it keeps reminding us, has memory.
But we only remember to forget.
RAIN SONG2
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata for KALW.