The Mumbai monsoons hit the city badly on 26th. The view of the Andheri-Kurla road outside from my 5th floor office was very sad.
I took a few videos of how bad the flooding was, with water gushing out through open gutters; and how people were wading through neck high water levels and getting rescued from nearly submerged buses.
Note: The videos were taken with Nokia 6680, and are in the .3gp format. You would need Nokia multimedia player or Quicktime movie player to view them.
Video 1 - Check out the flow of water gushing out through gutters and nullahs. The flow was so strong, that people were getting drifted along with it. Ropes were used to rescue people stranded in buses.
Video 2 - People standing on roof of buses and cars. You can also see a lot of people forming human chains and wading through neck high water.
Video 3 - People atop the bus. Check out the flow of water.
Video 4 - Mumbai Halted. Total breakdown.
Video 5 - People getting rescued from the bus. You can see the ropes being used to help stand in the strong current. It was the general public (mostly people from the offices in our building), who took it upon themselves to rescue everyone. Had they waited for help, it would have ended up in vain. The rescue work started at 4:30pm and was completed (2 buses) by 7:30 pm. There were lots of ladies and children in the buses, and seeing them come out of the gushing water was a heartfelt sight.
Technorati Tags: mumbai, monsoon, video, nokia, andheri, bombay
It was about 11.30 AM on Jul 27 when I started my two hour walk to bandra. That experience was an eye opener and really showed the human side of the city. There were people who were distributing breakfast on the streets. One man on the middle of the road was pleading with everyone around to eat something. “Please kuch nashta kar lo, aapko bahut dur jana hoga.” There were people who were distributing biscuits and hot tea on the streets. Outside one building at Khar on SV road, the people from the building were getting big flasks full of tea and giving to all those stranded and walking. I had a cup of tea there and continued my walk home. Finally reached home at 1.30 PM on jul 27.
The people of bombay really showed their human side on that day, which was really very touching!!