Thank God the blog and my computer are back to life. Although Sidr did not hit Dhaka very hard, we did have a 24 hour power cut across the country. During the outage the day after Sidr we had no way of knowing about the carnage in detail. The papers had no real news. There was an eerie silence over the city as we collectively suspected the worst.

That Saturday night, generators kept the lights on in some buildings, shops, and apartments. Entire swathes of the town, however, were lit by lamps and candles. By chance I was driving by the Parliament building quite late. The building, in fact the entire compound, lay in total darkness. It was an apocalyptic vision. One of the major landmarks of the country, the stately symbol of our democratic government, had melted into the night. I could only imagine what Khaleda and Hasina were doing in their sub-jails at the parliament compound: writing memoirs by candlelight, knitting sweater vests, regretting their misdeeds…what a sorry state for Bangladesh. There were rumors everywhere: the dead could number into the hundreds of thousands! The government has cut power on purpose! All cell phone signals are down! No one knew any real news, how many had died, how many were affected, when the electricity would return. Over those 24 hours water stopped running as the pumps no longer worked, generators failed, cell phones ran out of charge, there were fuel shortages everywhere and food prices inevitably lurched up. Relief came the next day for Dhakaites as power was restored in spurts, a few hours here and there.

Words cannot describe the agony and grief that is all over the TV channels now. To have lost everything after surviving two rounds of devastating flooding, to have lost little ones to the tides, corpses of man and beast rotting in the same watery grave…the living are in mourning. At this hour we need not only monetary aid but also spiritual succor.

I recently came across this 1988 Op-Ed in the NYT that is still sadly relevant:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DE7DA1F3FF934A25752C1A96E948260