Maria Thomas
"Can you actually think of a situation, where the assets that you worked your entire life to build getting destroyed in no time? How about losing those close to you?"
I am talking about the Kerala Floods of 2018.
I was in Bangalore at the time.
I remember, from the first week of August, the duration of my conversations with my family and friends in Kerala were dropping down. “It’s raining, I’ll talk to you later”… “Can’t here you, it’s heavily raining”… “Hi, are you still in college? Our schools and colleges are closed, we are on leave.”
Even though our conversations were mainly about the unusual rains that time, honestly, I didn’t take it as a big deal. But later I started to realize that the intensity of the rains were growing bigger. Each time I went through news apps, I felt heartbroken. From August 9 2018, state news channels got filled with terrifying RED ALERTS! RED ALERTS! And RED ALERTS!
On August 10, half of the Kerala was declared as flood hit. I will not forget that day as it was my little brother Appu’s birthday. When I called him to wish him, he said “This is my best birthday ever, because I don’t have to go to school.”
Many of my friends and family were displaced, they had to live in relief camps for many days. Some of my friends had to literally stay on top of their houses for 2, 3 days as they were isolated and army could only help them after 3 days. Their houses, their properties, everything were very badly affected. One day, when I came back from college, I saw one of my PG mate crying out loud, "My parents' mobiles are switched off, I think they are no more." Thank God, her parents were actually safe at some other district's relief camp.
Social media got flooded with #DoForKerala.
Each and every day, social media got flooded with selfie videos of people crying out loud for help from the police or the army. At the same time, chaos of the situation was getting even worse because of the spread of fake news.
I really felt like, “I must also be there, I don’t want to be alive without my dearest family and friends." This may sound funny. But that feeling wasn’t that funny. I tried booking buses and trains like a mad person, but, nothing worked. Transportation was stopped, the roads rails and air ways stood still.
Therefore,I had to be on the safer side, and witness my people suffering. But, I was very much involved in the online rescue mission. I was constantly on social media sharing information regarding availability of resources, the location of relief camps etc.
From August 12 2018, Kerala's own army, the fishermen joined the rescue operations. Keralites will be forever thankful to them. This one video of the selfless actions of a fisherman was viral even in international news channels.
This happened on August 18, a pregnant lady was rescued by the Army, and later she gave birth to her baby. World watched this particular footage holding their breath. Here is the coverage of this news by the Hindustan Times.
Thank God, none of my friends and family lost their lives. But how can I not bother about those 400 people who did lose their lives, their families? How can I forget the fact that more than 10 lakh people stayed in Relief Camps with limited resources? How can I forget that my land lost 11,000 houses and 46,000 hectares of crops. So, that’s one year of devastating Kerala floods of 2018!
Manorama is one of the best news organisations of Kerala. Here is a video, that tells the story of Kerala Floods 2018. This is just a 4 minute 30 seconds video, but the situation was really beyond you and I could imagine. Honestly speaking, I could not stop my tears watching this video.
A personal experience:
Our parish and the surrounding areas were all converted into relief camps during the floods. It was during the same time, we had our most beloved festival Onam. We, the young people of our church, actually planned many programs for Onam as early as a month earlier. But unfortunately, we were shattered. Kerala was put on pause. I remember, I even took break from college, and went back home. All of us spent the whole day of Onam at the Relief camp..
But, we survived the floods. The Christmas season came, the organisation of the young people of our church made a small promo dance video for our Christmas celebrations "Little Angels 2018" and the theme of the video was "How we stood together to fight the Kerala floods, ignoring our Onam festival, and how Keralites are going to celebrate Christmas together"
Here is the video, the music used in this video gives us a scene of both Onam and Christmas. We all wore Kerala set saree (that we usually wear for Onam celebrations) with the red Christmas hat :) That's the Malayalee spirit:)
NB: Soon after I wrote this article, Kerala was again hit by floods of an even greater magnitude. Although it lasted only a few days as compared to last year's, the damage in terms of life and property was more. The coverage of the natural calamity was again not taken up by many major news media outlets and contributions received was also less compared to last year.
Comments