As a first-year PGP student at IIM Rohtak, watching the floods from afar wreak havoc sent a chill down my spine and I was gripped with crippling anxiety, knowing that while I was safe, my family and friends back home were not and there was only so much I could do. Fear became my constant companion and I remember the taste it left in the parched corners of my mouth as the news of an impending disaster started settling in.
College had just begun, and I was starting to get used to the MBA way of life only to end every day with a routine and extensive research on the updates on the flood situation in Assam. Two weeks later when I spoke to her again, my mother’s voice didn’t sound excruciatingly exhausted over the phone for the first time in a long time as she told me that she woke up to a glorious sunrise, the brightest kind, a blazing yellow. Life must go on, tells my mother, as she describes to me how people back home are picking their lives back up, bit by bit. She also tells me I was lucky that I made it out of there and it was both liberating and frustrating being made aware of it.
As the flood-waters recede, the Mahabahu rebrands itself for it to come back again the following year, leaving people with a perennial sense of overwhelm in the wake of the devastation, a loss that stays with you forever.
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