Bad news on a conveyor belt as Yaas gets closer

Tauktae, named after the Burmese gecko, has just left our West coast mauled. Now, a deep depression in East-Central Bay of Bengal has intensified into a moving, lethal force—christened ‘Yaas’, after an Omanese tree.East and West confound us; danger pounces on us from every cardinal direction. Yaas, about 600 km off Port Blair as we write this, will intensify into a ‘severe cyclonic storm’ in a day, and worsen into a ‘very severe’ one in another day. In short, another super cyclone for Odisha and West Bengal.This alert reads like one in a series of old-style telegrams that carried bad news on a conveyor belt—like war dispatches from the frontline. 

There’s little doubt that nature has declared war on us. Repeat offenders that we are. The sea surface is so heated, it’s lashing out at the adjoining landmass in episodic bursts of anger. A pandemic is already sucking the breath out of our lungs, and another devilish duo stalks us in deadly chiaroscuro—fungus, in black and white. One who warned us about such a dystopia has just left us, as if in despair. Sunderlal Bahuguna always said we cannot afford to imagine ‘development’ as a set of goals to be accomplished against nature—we must move in harmony with it, as part of it. That nature will eventually engulf and destroy that which tries to exist in utter contravention of its rules. Remember those trees the brave women of the Chipko movement tried to save, inspired by Bahuguna and his intense, homegrown conviction? Those trees, those women, and Bahuguna … they stand like lost sentinels calling to us again. This time, it’s not just the Himalayas that are at stake, but the whole chain of beings on this planet. The Global Climate Conference in November under UK-Italy—both scarred Covid survivors—better give us a blueprint for the future, if there is to be a future.