Making Lemonade!

Schools were closed for 10 days during the rains and after. The kids naturally, had a blast! cycling ...,

Cricket...

The stands....

and a form of country sledding with home made 'vandi's or sleds.These are made with three sticks, a few ball bearings , string and enthusiasm. They come apart after a couple of rides, but the kids fix it and trudge up the hill again for that wonderful, bone shaking ride downwards till they land up laughing, breathless thrown up on a grass bank and the contraption under them comes loose again.

the engineers

Weekend Hideout in Ooty

Here are a couple of reasons why you should think twice before you buy that little weekend bungalow in Ooty, especially from developers.





These buildings sunk a few feet below road level.And are hanging on

Devastation in the Nilgiris

(courtesy Prince Patrick)

The Difficulty of Doing Good

A record breaking amount of rain in the Nilgiris.

Reports of people being buried under landfalls and houses that crumbled under the onslaught of continuous rain and wind and mud that came suddenly sliding down trickled in by word of mouth because power lines lay broken as trees crashed everywhere blocking off road access for many hours. We didn’t have access to radio and were spared the sights on TV news channels for a few days.

But even looking around the school in our area where as many as 200 people were housed in 3 rooms tugged at the heart.

I thought since it was on my doorstep I should go see what was happening. Harassed officials were slowly getting a semblance of order. Food was donated by several charitable organizations and delivered by the hoteliers associations. A couple of plastic tanks supplied water. A medical team came everyday to attend to any signs of spreading disease
.
Everyday was spent waiting for the minister to come and solve their problems. After three days, his PA turned up and gave them Rs.2000 each. Later a blanket was supplied.
Of course, it all became a matter of survival of the fittest. It is really tough in this kind of situation to impose any kind of discipline. Sifting the genuinely-in-distress from the hangers on who were there to see if they could get any freebies is a sensitive issue. In that short space of time, officials can hardly visit the affected areas and identify the people who have lost the most. They rely on the area ‘s leaders who are not too reliable. Given the politics of the situation, I think the government did a great job with immediate relief.

(pic courtesy: The Hindu)
Still people had many wants and demands. A few friends and I collected some used clothes and took them there in a hurry. But the officer in charge was loath to distribute them. Every time some kind of relief appeared, numbers seem to double magically. And fights escalated. He didn’t want any more trouble than he could help.

Now the school has been emptied. Some people have gone back home and hopefully to their jobs. The truly displaced and the jobless are housed in another location. They wait in hope for more hands and relief measures to help them.

We have become a nation where we wait for someone to help us out. But can we truly blame people who are so poverty stricken that they have to grab all they can?

Zapping the Gap

Once you stop writing; it’s difficult to start writing again. You wonder why you should.
But maybe it’s a habit that doesn’t let go off you so easily.

So here I am again.

Woken up by the torrential rain and wind that hit us in the Nilgiris, so hard. Leaving so much devastation. I took my camera to take some pictures but somehow it didn’t work. Probably it meant that we shouldn’t be getting voyeuristic pleasure out of other people’s distress.

But people were anxious to show how much they’d suffered. .Cracks in the walls, roofs, broken walls, damaged floors, mud hanging over on the pitch of the roof,.
Hoping that we’d help in some way .The pathos of a new house for a new young couple with just a window frame left standing over the rubble; the roof blown away.

After a while, you are not absorbing anymore of the sad scenes because life is going on around you .
Five small kids sitting around a carom board in the watery sunshine on a ledge above a road half covered with mud and stones.
That picture stayed with me and helped obliterate the others a bit.