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31 August 2005
Hard times at the Big Easy
Last month's ghastly 24 hours of cloudbursts in Bombay and this Monday's slow, benumbing disaster in New Orleans demonstrate chillingly how ominously vicious water can be. On 26 July, a city of more than ten million was quelled into submission by incessant downpour. More than 900 lives were lost and a month on, Bombay has still not managed to recover from that single day of anonymous judgement. New Orleans knew its slayer to be a fiery demoness as she brooded and bred in the bay whenceforth she finally made assault on the city ripping open its brittle levees and forgetting it instantly. Water -- it lives in and exorcises the hearts and minds of all, it manifests itself in festering carcass, swirling eddies, floating rooftops, lost wives, fungal cornerpits on walls and the smell of bloated death.The calamity in the Gulf Coast seems to multiply manifold with each passing hour as witnessed by the condescension-laced rhetoric when somebody said "it's like living in a Third World country". Yet, when Bombay suffered through its torrential downpour there were scarcely any reports of unrest, arson and violence as there are now from New Orleans. It asks of course for a fascinating study in contrast -- while Bombay took the blow full-on with all its residents on board a ship bereft of a soothsaying foremast man and losing a few thousand of them, three hundred thousand of those in New Orleans evacuated to safety well nigh in advance of the broken ridges thanks to expert weather forecasting.
It took the fortitude and magnanimity of the many hardy souls of Bombay to provide shelter to neatly-dressed executives in ghettos and slums, secure safe passage for children and the elderly through the mighty squall, rescue bus passengers before the ferocious onslaught of rain-mud-slime-saltwater whooshed the vehicle off its nervous footing whence all the while the government stayed a safe distance from and above the anguished hoi polloi of its citizenry beseeching patience, betokening exasperation and bemoaning its helplessness. New Orleans now is off-limits to all bar emergency management officials, Red Cross volunteers and local police authorities. The hundreds of thousands who are stranded by the waysides north-east-west of the submerging city have no answer to how long their nightmarish exile will be prolonged for and to what pillaged, battered, foul household they will return to. A city that was already dubiously distinct for its tattered poverty will return from its siege to even more telling misfortune and chasm.
