Gustav

It’s been 3 years since Katrina. 1 year after that, Douglas Brinkley published his mammoth book on Katrina, “Great Deluge”. 1 year after that, it appeared in a bargain basin and I got it. 1 year later, I’m almost through with that book.

I suppose you’re wondering, why was I so interested in Katrina? When there are floods in India which are far more destructive, in terms of lives and property?

I suppose that if you were to look closely at most natural disasters they would all turn up plenty of drama, and it’s also that New Orleans is in America, and is therefore the most well reported of all natural disasters.

Why do you think that Cyclone Nargis shone the light on the Burmese junta more than the Indian Ocean tsunami? Because there was less reporting on Burma for the latter incident, and because aid workers were scrambling to more prominent places in Aceh, Sri Lanka and Thailand than to think too much about Burma. But when cyclone Nargis hit, Burma got condemned as the place where the junta was collecting everything for itself and not distributing it to the people.

I guess it has to do with how it’s New Orleans, birthplace of jazz. How it happened to the world’s richest country but they weren’t able to save their poorest people.

It was also a frightening picture of all hell breaking loose, of what would happen to America’s ghettoes if one day the USA were to stop being so wealthy. A society where everything had broken down but everything was kept under wraps had turned into one which was not only full of dysfunctional people but was also a natural disaster zone.

There were robberies, rapes, looting, rampaging, sniping. There was the hellholes that were the convention centre and the football stadium, where people were pissed off, had nothing to eat or drink, there was no sanitation, and people were crapping all over in public. (Although you must imagine that the situation is probably even more dire in places like Aceh and Bihar India, except that those ppl are OK with no sanitation because they never had it anyway.) There was the callous incompetence of the cronies that Bush 2 had appointed to the key aid agencies in the US.

It was as though somebody up there had overturned a very large rock, and exposed the festering reality underneath the shiny façade. Suddenly a lot of things which were simmering under the surface just exploded. The friendly black people who used to frequent your stores suddenly became part of the rampaging horde of looters. The smiling neighbourhood policeman suddenly became the guy who shut you away from a shelter. The mayor, normally full of oratorical bluster, suddenly became the coward who couldn’t do anything.

What made this special and unique though, was the presence of snipers everywhere who would just shoot aid workers and make it impossible for them to do their job without risking their lives.

But in the end, why did I spend so much time reading that book? I guess I just have this bad habit of picking up a book on a whim and finishing it because I can’t stand to leave books unfinished once I’ve touched them.