Hurricane Ida

 North East part of US has been terribly affected by the hurricane 'Ida'. Newspaper reports 20 dead in flooding in a small Tennessee town (population about 6.7 million). Ida's land fall in Louisiana (population 4.6 million) left 1 million people without power, for weekS, meaning more than at least, 7 days. Yesterday my niece, a resident of DC messaged me that she's receiving calls from friends from different corners of NE of US that they are without power from Monday (she writes since Tuesday which is our Monday) indicating today they're without power for the fifth day. 

With this backdrop,  I come to  one of my experiences during AMPHAN 2020 in West Bengal. Its from one of the very senior CESC personnel, grandson in terms of relation, with distinguished academic profile, the son of my own niece. At that time, I just gave him a call to assess the situation. I write in exact verbatim "Dadu amra khub chape acchi, dudin bari jete parini" , (Grandpa, we're under tremendous pressure, I couldn't go home for two consecutive days) On enquiry I was informed that in one side the pressure from WB ruling party and at the other end the unreasonable and furious local residents. In Kolkata (population almost 14 million and densely dotted with buildings) the power were restored in 4/5 days except in some very specific places in deep south like Behala and Tollygunge who faced  power shedding for a week or so. 

My conclusion is that, we urban people are not only impatient but not amenable to logic how a catastrophic situation impacts the public life from a natural calamity of the magnitude of AMPHAN. The fatality figure in WB(population about 96 million) was 118. Readers are requested to compare with the US data. The problem is that the service providers are always at the receiving end and there's a tremendous trust deficit between the service takers (whose expectation levels are very high) and service givers. Urbanites in this country in particular, should think themselves to be extremely privileged, certainly comparable to the privileges enjoyed by the people of world's most developed countries with most modern infrastructure. At least the data explains that.