Cyclones and Hurricanes

Would anyone of you want to be the guy sitting in a shelter and watch helplessly as his boat and house are battered and torn apart by Hurricane- Ivan as a garbage bag torn apart by a pack of dogs? I certainly don’t want to be. I would be a sick bastard if wanted to get badgered by a hurricane.

I have confession to make, when I was a kid I was big fan of cyclones (we call hurricanes cyclones in India, a gift from the Queen I guess, may God keep on blessing her (sic)). I always looked forward for them, October and November is our cyclone season. Nellore, the place I grew up is in the cyclone alley and infamous allover India for bearing the brunt of cyclones every time they pay a visit to India. Nellore was not on the coast per say but a good 30 km away from it.

My house in Nellore faced east and thus the coast, The big living room looked out into the east, I used stare into east in vain hope for a cyclone. I am not sure why I hoped for a cyclone, it may be that I could a holiday from school, it may be that I could see the awesome power it packs or may the deepest reason is to enjoy the destruction it causes.

One cyclone was so huge that it rain 100 cm in one single night! 4 feet of rain? Everything which could hold water was overflowing, from the river to the small container in my backyard, the whole city was flooded. Lot of people lost their livelihood, fields got flooded livestock got washed away.

One of the ecological disasters happening and waiting to happen is this current fad of aquaculture. The lure of easy money makes decent people do some really filthy things. They dug up the one the most fertile regions in India. The fields which have been producing one of the best varieties of rice are now filled with brine and shrimp is grown. So when there is flood, theses act like small reservoirs and hold the flood for a little while and burst with awesome force causing heavy destruction.

I surely miss the hurricanes, of course minus the destruction they cost. As I kid I knew about the destruction they caused but somehow it didn’t matter to me, now it does. I was the other day thinking could cyclones be mitigated somehow in the ocean itself before landfall? Did anyone work on this?

After moving to Calgary all I could hope is for big snowstorm, every winter morning I peer through my bedroom window hoping for one foot deep dump.