Mumbai Meri Jaan
I saw this picture first time in 2005 when Mumbai faced a kind of flooding due to torrential rains, a nightmare that caught the city totally unawares. Like lakhs of Mumbaikars I was caught in the rain too, but safe and sound, and well cared for in the Police Training School where I was in the middle of a training. Because the school was at a height, and because there was no TV in the School, we did not realize the enormity of the situation (an enormity which strikes only once you ‘see’ some things or ‘experience’ things first hand), despite the various wireless messages which went on throughout the night. Early next morning when we did venture out to gauge the damage the sight that beheld us is etched in memory. Deserted cars, dead bodies, washed out roads. It was only late that day that I had reached back home. And everyone everywhere had a story to tell – either horror ones of how some people sat in cars, with windows rolled up, waiting for the waters to reside and dying of suffocati