It was around 5 the next morning that I woke up to a hissing of the wind. It was no light hiss; rather, a mean shrill. At first, I thought I was dreaming. But I wasn't. Trees were being hurled right outside my hotel room window. There was a storm-like feel but even I hadn't imagined the destruction that lay ahead. Winds at a speed of about 270 kmph were ripping through the carefully laid-out gardens at the Oberoi: there was not a single tree standing erect. They were slowly falling, succumbing to the onslaught of this treacherous cyclone. It never stopped. The pounding continued unabated. There was a fury in the air which one had never seen before. On our part, every hotel guest was too much in a stupor to realise what was still to come. It was a cyclone which was to die down in a couple of hours: instead, it intensified at noon. Flights were then cancelled. I called home and office several times. I kept reassuring my family that we were safe. But were we? I was to see later the destruction around me. Friday went by with each of us quivering under the might of this unrelenting cyclone. It stopped not once, lashing rain with every cycle. It was Nature at her possible worst. The Oberoi continued to function but the cracks could no longer be hidden: the pool doors cracked, trees shed all their coconuts and flung them into the pool. There was not a tree or bush left standing. The general manager's Cielo was now parked under a huge tree. When we sat down for dinner on Friday night, I couldn't eat. I had to be in Delhi on Saturday: I had invited people over for a house-warming party and here I was stuck in the middle of nowhere. But nothing had prepared me for the day after. On Saturday morning, I forced the hotel to ferry me to yet another hotel where, ostensibly, the phones were working. We travelled a distance of 3 km in about an hour-and-a-half only to find that there too phones were dead. It was then that I decided to hazard a risk: I went off to the airport. But there was no airport left, certainly not as we know them to be. The airfield was in waist-high water. Step ladders were strewn around like unwanted fruits from a tree.
But the airfield posed no trauma as compared to the sight of infants dead and carcasses strewn all over the place. Bhubaneshwar was a ghost town as if it had experienced a nuclear attack. Not a 0soul on the streets. Cars atop trees and not one electric pole standing. This was the capital of Orissa and I use the tense with merit.
So, Saturday was spent yet again without any hope and, worse still, without any information. We didn't have any contact: no television, no phones, no electricity, no communication but only a surfeit of rumours.One which suggested that the cyclone would now return to Bhubaneshwar on Sunday as well. It was then that I decided enough was enough. I took a risk which many thought would be foolhardy and outright stupid. I convinced the hotel to give me a car on Sunday morning: and that morning, I sped towards Visakhapatnam. Barely 25 km on our way, we fortuitously survived a breach in the Daya river. We reached Visakhapatnam at about 5 pm on Sunday, October 31, and as I was checking into the Park, I realised the enormity of what had occurred.
I have learnt several lessons from it. One, we have no government that actually cares; there were people dying and the tragedy is no one knew what to do! Two, when it doesn't happen to us, we simply don't care.
While the rest of India prepares to usher in the festival of lights, there are many million homes in Orissa that have had theirs extinguished. We haven't lost as many people in Kargil as we possibly have in Orissa: we need to do something about them.
A state has been almost wiped off the map and it seems no one cares!
The author is the chief executive of Equus Advertising and lives in Delhi
