Tempestuous. That is exactly what storms in our neck of the woods aren’t. A couple of years ago, Cyclone Phet wreaked havoc on TV channels and newspaper headlines across the country. The one thing it did not do, thankfully, was cause a whole lot of damage. For weeks, using ludicrous meteorological reports and expert commentary from everyone, including Redbeard The Pirate and Cock-a-Doodle, the weathervane on top of Merryweather Tower in Karachi. They used satellite imagery from Google Earth, digital mapping from the United States Geological Survey and, of course, fishermen from Mubarak Village liveblogged the entire event, right up to the point when the eye of the storm came up to Abdullah Shah Ghazi, bent down to kiss the entrance to the mausoleum and made a quick U-Turn towards Oman. Viva la Sufi!
The Met Office of Pakistan is no joke either. Billions of rupees are spent on state-of-the-art equipment that allows the average meteorologist to chart, map and sometimes predict the paths of weather systems in and around the homeland. This usually happens before, during and after the monsoon season, which; thanks to global warming, is around now pretty much all year round. This, as you may well imagine, has made life very hard for the people of the Met Office, who (up until a couple of years ago) were limited to being a subsidiary of PTV’s 9 O’ Clock Khabarnama. In fact, a large number of my well-informed friends have long believed the Met Office to be a figment of PTV’s imagination; mostly because they have rarely gotten anything right.
This belief was shattered by the Met Office’s handling of Cyclone Keila, the uber-storm that threatened to take out the Sindh and Balochistan seaboard, right up until it took a U-Turn off the coast of Gwadar and plotted a new course for, no points for guessing, Oman. To their credit, our fearless weather-witchdoctors had been insisting from day one that this storm could pose no threat to Thatta, Badin or any other coastal area protected by the patron saint of Karachi. Even Gwadar, where a high alert was in effect and evacuation camps had all been set up, was completely missed. No fishing villages blown away, not a lot of fishermen lost at sea and no water damage to federal secretaries’ priceless huts on French Beach. Damn, so close!
On the flip side, the Indian media has been on the warpath. Apparently, Keila had already left its mark on the coast of Mumbai before we even heard about it. The headlines and news channels were all over the story, accusing Pakistan of tapping into HAARP technology (Google it!) and manipulating the weather through a comprehensive three-prong strategy employing the supernatural potential of black magic, the terror of the Taliban and the sweet worm-tongue of social worker extraordinaire, Ansar Burney. According to my sources, the cyclone suffered a fainting spell at the sight of Burney and promised never to come back if the humanitarian of the year was sent to Africa and never allowed to return. The jury’s still out on whether Pakistan should negotiate with belligerent weather phenomenon.
The common man though is more concerned about what will happen to him. And why shouldn’t they be? After all, they pay rent on this land in blood, sweat, tears and Abdul Hafeez Sheikh-tax. Aren’t they entitled to a false sense of security? Shouldn’t defunct bodies such as the many disaster management authorities be helping them out in their hours of misery? While the answer to all these questions, in theory at least, should be yes; things are not so simple in real life.
As with the legendary ERRA, the PDMAs and even the National Disaster Management Authority are simply a repository for officers too incompetent to be entrusted with the mundane tasks of running a government. They are, instead, made responsible for the welfare of those rendered most vulnerable to the vagaries of nature. So the next time you find yourself on a train heading to nowhere and end up cursing the monumental idiots who run the railways, spare a thought for those who live at the mercy of the weather and our all-weather sifarshis. May God have mercy on these poor souls!
