When nature play its game no one can win. This time its nature is playing with Kerala and its people. Remember Gujarat 2001 Earthquake but deep in the 2018 Kerala floods. 35 of the 39 dams in the state have been opened to cope with 257 percent more rainfall than usual. Lakhs of people have had to move to temporary shelter homes and over 100 people have died. This is a disaster that will leave the state paralysed for quite some time. Last weekend, when the disaster was just rolling out, a young man in my neighbourhood in Kochi told me not to donate to the chief minister’s disaster relief fund because the money would go to the mythical ‘tukde tukde‘ gang, the left-leaning anti-nationalists of everyone’s fever dreams. I ignored him and dismissed him as a rare freak. Little did I know.
Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan (as far as we know, working in tandem with the Opposition) is doing everything he can to make sure that everything is back to normal and as many lives as possible are saved. The damage is estimated to be of Rs 3,000 crores.
In the last 24 hours, my parents in Kerala went incommunicado. There was no way to reach them or my relatives. Eventually, when I did manage to reach them, I found out that my father and his scooter had taken shelter at a friend’s house far away from home. My mother and my 99-year-old grandmother were sheltering friends whose house has been flooded. My timeline is full of stories of Malayalis in the state and elsewhere moving mountains to bring safety and comfort in this time of need said by daughter whose parents are facing flood.
If this is what divine intervention looks like, I am okay with that, you misogynistic losers with your petty obsessions.
