Rain, fire, poetry and carping

There is nothing like a massive disaster, natural or man-made, to bring out the poetic fancy in some. Confronted with the twin tragedies in Maharashtra last week, The Hindu could only think of a minor and entirely forgettable character in Shakespeare`s "As You Like It".

"The property of rain is to wet and fire is to burn," this fellow seems to have said. Well, yes, because as the paper went on to note the paradox was striking: water on land and fire on water (the ONGC platform). Altogether over 500 people died. This is par for the course, though, in India where even the failure by municipal authorities to build suitable drainage systems leads to hundreds dying and thousand being rendered homeless. The problem was that last Tuesday Mumbai received a record 94.4 cm of rainfall. This was more than the 83.8 cm Cherrapunjee had received in 1910.

The fire on the rig was a different matter. In a freak accident an old ship kept banging into it and that caused the fire. The fire will cost us dear but as The Pioneer waxed eloquent, " Thanks to the efficiency, determination and courage with which they responded, 355 of the 384 people working on the platform had been rescued by Thursday night while 12 had been declared dead and 13 missing. The magnitude of their achievement becomes clear on recalling that a devastating fire had claimed the lives of 167 of the 226 men on board Occidental Petroleum`s North Sea oil rig, Piper Alpha, on July 6, 1988. Earlier, in March 1980, 123 persons were killed when the Alexander Keilland oil rig in North Sea`s Ekofisk field, broke up and capsized... Mr Aiyar rightly underlined the priorities when he told journalists on Wednesday that his first concern was rescuing those trapped on the platform and matters like production loss and the causes of the accident would be looked at later. These now needs to be addressed. At 100,000 barrels a day, the platform accounts for 17 per cent of ONGC`s production."

The Express, not ordinarily given to poetry and heroics, also went in a mild rapture. "Mumbai emerged from its recent trial by water, somewhat dishevelled, but with its spirit intact. Cities, the wise say, should be walled with the courage of its inhabitants and the Mumbaikar has displayed this quality in abundant measure, time and again, recovering with alacrity from reversals of every kind: riots and bomb blasts; building collapses and fires; and, of course, floods."

It then took the government to task for failing to warn, prevent help, and assist. I wonder, though, what anyone could have done. This kind of angry yelping sounds appropriate but serves no purpose really.

The Telegraph, published as it is from Calcutta where even daily life is an ordeal comparable to what happened in Mumbai last week, was more reasonable. "There is something monstrous about the rainfall, which reached 944.2 millimetres in 24 hours. It is the highest recorded rainfall in 95 years and not even Mumbai, the financial capital of the country, efficient, focussed, ceaselessly at work, can cope with that. The best infrastructure would totter under such torrents, and Mumbai`s spread includes the very poor and the very rich."