Day 80-2011 : Mother Nature Strikes...And How!

I haven't been able to post anything over the last couple of weeks.  I haven't been lazy; just did not get the time to pen down my thoughts, due to a number of circumstances.

The main culprit has been my travel schedule.  Looks like March is turning out to be as hectic as the previous two months on the travel front.  I have been now to Shirdi, Nashik, New York and Ahmedabad in this month.  The incident at Shirdi was of course a shocker.  By the way, we have been able to make some headway into the matter after I wrote the letter on the 9th of March.  Since then the SP of Ahmednagar District has taken interest in the matter and has promised strict action against the guilty cops at the Shirdi Police Station.  The visit to Nashik was wonderful as well.  One of my uncles, Ramesh Iyer, is a nature enthusiast, and specialises in terrariums. All of us like the place, especially the kids.  The weekend after Nashik, I had to travel to New York and then the following weekend was Ahmedabad.

This post however is not about my experiences during all of these trips.  It is about nature.  And its fury!  On Friday, I had taken the day off to prepare for my New York trip.  I was however, looking up the BB every now and then. Sometime during mid-morning, I got a note from one of my colleagues that he was on a conference call with Tokyo and the colleagues in Tokyo mentioned that they thought they were experiencing tremors. After that, there was only a flood of emails about the natural calamity striking Japan.  It has since been confirmed that all my colleagues in the firm based out of Japan are safe and there has been no loss of life.  Now, considering the scale of the disaster, this must be some sort of a miracle!  I am told this is purely because of the fact that buildings in Japan, especially in the urban areas are built to withstand very high intensity earthquakes.  This earthquake was the strongest ever recorded in the history of the country with a magnitude of 8.9 on the Richter scale.

But then, there was more to come!  The earthquake triggered of a Tsunami which hit the coastal areas of North-Eastern Japan with a vengeance.  Some of the pictures on television were horrendous and heart wrenching.  The sheer size of the Tsunami waves was literally washing away anything that came in its path.  Houses, cars, planes, ships and everything else was washed away through fields and villages.  Just watching it made me shiver, I cannot even begin to imagine what people in Japan must be going through.  The calamity is also a setback to Japan's attempts to come out of a recessionary economic phase.  Some might argue that the resultant reconstruction activity would boost the economy.  There is, however, no proof of it from past such events. 

The twin disasters have also opened up possibility of another monumental disaster occurring.  The overheating and the resultant fires at the nuclear power plants in Japan is a huge worry across the globe.  People are fearing another Chernobyl like calamity.  There are reports of traces of radiation being found in nearby areas of the power plants.  This has, of course, triggered another debate around the usage of nuclear energy, which I am sure, is likely to continue for a while in the foreseeable future.

While all of this is happening, my thoughts go out to the thousands of people who have lost their lives, those who have lost their near and dear ones and those who have lost their livelihoods.  We should do all we can to help the Japan and its people at this critical juncture. 

Mother Nature provides.  But just like your real mother, sometimes Mother Nature pulls out all the stops to remind you who's the boss!

Take care.