The city has witnessed its fair share of trauma over the last 20 years. Each event that took lives altered the psyche of its residents in some way or the other. But I think more than communal riots and bomb blasts, the rains of July 26, 2005 caused intense psychological damage to the city.
It was around 4 pm on that fateful that there was a cloud burst and the intensity of rainfall was beyond what most of us had seen here. I had the misfortune of being on holiday in the city. The heavy rain didn't stop for a few hours and the combination of nature's forces, which included a high tide, and human negligence (storm water drains clogged with garbage) turned places like Andheri and Santa Cruz into a poor man's Venice.
I was fortunate enough to be at home when the heavens opened but I watched with horror, how people were swept away by the flood waters. Some died after falling into manholes, some got electrocuted. Life in the suburbs came to a standstill. People stayed in railway stations overnight, some walked 12 kilometres through waist-deep water and yes, strangers turned into Good Samaritans.
There was no electricity for 30 hours and of course, the landlines were dead. You'll hardly find a person in the suburbs of Bombay, who won't have a 26/7 story. Of course, there were chants of "enough is enough." Irate citizens vowed to hold the government task. That never happened but the trauma of the floods persists. Now-a-days, the minute it starts raining heavily, suburban Bombayites panic. It's impossible to get an auto-rickshaw, buses are over-crowded and there is fear in the air.
6 years later, how would the city handle a similar situation? I think we'd be caught as unaware as we were in 2005.
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