DOHA: For a city known for many things from its adoration of coffee to cinema, Chennai is battling for survival if not life. The record rainfall of the century left Chennai’s national newspaper The Hindu off the printing press, a news of sort in the world of news, worthy enough to be recorded by the BBC. Thousands of miles away, we at the Peninsula newsroom share our empathy in Chennai’s hour of crisis and need.
The Hindu put up web page dedicated to those who need it and offering it. Here's a screen shot captured at Qatar time 5:55
Here’s some of the social media writings penned by our journalist friends in Chennai. Some of them waded through the flood, others stranded in their home or elsewhere while others putting up helpline messages online.
Jinoy Jose, Senior Assistant Editor, Bussiness Line
"Chennai is an overgrown village and the corporation acts exactly like a panchayat with taller ambitions. And it fails flat on all fronts, infrastructure, healthcare, transport, and what not! The police may be efficient, but there is a limit to the things it can do."
Stanly Johny, International Affairs Editor, The Hindu
"Thanks to all those calls and messages. I am OK. I am staying alone so that I just have to take care of myself. But it's …terrible in here. Families are stranded all around the city. Adayar has breached. All major bridges are shut. Bus service has been halted. Cabs were down yesterday itself. The airport is closed. Egmore station is flooded. Suburban trains stopped services. The only reliable means of transportation is MRTS, which took me from Little Mount to Mount Road today. I have been trying since morning all the helpline numbers to get a friend's family stranded out of ?Velachery. Their house is flooded. He, his wife and their two kids, one is hardly two weeks old, have moved upstairs with parents. No rescuers around. No numbers are responding. Either switched off or not answering (We're still trying). Thousands of families like this are stuck. Along the Adayar, I saw, from the train, people sitting on their tin shed roofs and plastic water tanks. They can't climb down as they will drawn. Couldn't find ANY rescue operations around. And it's still bloody raining. This city is collapsing; its people are stuck (and dying) and those who are not are running like rats from one hole to the other!
Gladwin Immanuel quotes few lines from an article: “If urban planners had done proactive hydrological planning, development should not have happened in many areas like Velachery, Madipakkam, Chitkapakkam, Tambaram."
The Peninsula
