Monsoon Messes Mumbai

Front View from my Office

It started raining from Tuesday afternoon and no one would have thought that the rains would create such a major havoc. By 4PM the traffic had got jammed and then the things just went worse.

We thought rains will stop by late evening but rains had a different POA. It was raining cats and dogs and it kept raining continuously.

It was difficult to get out of the office complex as the water had clogged like hell and the flow of water was scary. I gave up all my thoughts of going home and decided to hangout at my friend’s place, which is hardly 3 kms from my office, but by the time I started moving out even that didn’t seemed possible. My colleague (GSG) and me opted to stay at another colleague’s (RD) place. We left office by 7.30PM and by walking we covered a distance of 1.5Kms in 45min to reach his home.

Pic taken at 4:00PM

Cell phones, wallet, belt, watch and footwear, all were wrapped in plastic. Water was up to the knee level and we were walking bare foot. Soon we were on the highway and the scene over there was horrible. All buses, trucks, cars, bikes and other private vehicles had no scope of movement; huge crowd was on roads walking towards their destination. The flow of water on roads really took my breath away. One side of the highway was completely filled with water and even the divider was not visible. In sometime we realised that there is no point keeping the umbrella open so we just closed it and started enjoying ourselves in the rains and traffic.

There were a lot of volunteers on road helping people to guide the way. Gosh that was amazing. Then we reached a point were the water was above thigh level and it was flowing with a great speed. For a moment it scared all of us, and then we held each other tightly and marched towards our destination. It was worth an experience.

There was a complete black out… no electricity.

We reached his home and fortunately he had clothes that could fit us ;-). After settling down, calls were made to the family and close friends… network was completely f**k*d.

His wife made tea for us, which was the best thing to have at that time. After that we had dinner and kept discussing about a hell lot of things. We were fortunate to have a shelter (& food) at his place. A lot of my colleagues and seniors stayed in office till 5AM.

Thanks a million to RD and his wife…as it’s rightly said: A friend in need is friend indeed.

A lot of people walked 5 – 10 Kms in the night to reach home or friend’s place. Some stayed in buses and cars, some in near by hotels, some in office and some in tension and botheration.

At some places, people left their vehicles on highway, buses were parked were they got struck. It was only after 4 - 5 AM things slowly started moving on. The whole of Mumbai went stand still on Tuesday Evening/Night. Look at coincidence the date was again 26, (26 Jan – Gujarat Earth quake, 26 Dec – Tsunami)

God bless all the people who are struck by the gruesome rains… these kinds of incident brings one closer to life… don’t ever take it for granted.

This was a lifetime experience, but this is just the happy and first part of my story, the scary part will hit the Blog soon.