How Vizag is coming back to life
Indira Gandhi Zoo, Visakhapatnam, late night on Sunday, October 12. Cyclone Hudhud has let up after battering the coastal city through the day and the zoo authorities have just realised that the boundary wall of the hippo enclosure has been breached.
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| Thalapati, Vizag zoo's male hippo. |
They are horrified to find that Thalapati, the male hippo, has strayed out of home. This is dangerous because if Thalapati enters the city, he could be traumatized as well as cause trauma. A bunch of forest guards and the zoo veterinarian, Dr Srinivas, launch a search in pitch dark. They spread out in all directions and start calling out for Thalapti by name, like harried parents looking for a missing child in a fair.Thalapti emerges from his hiding about 100 metres from home and follows his handlers back into his enclosure, giving up his runaway/missing status of a few hours.
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| Thalapati in his enclosure that is exposed to harsh sunlight through the day because of the loss of tree cover. |
"Thalapati quietly followed us back. Even now he can stray out because we have not been able to close up the breach effectively. But he has not attempted to run away. He is a good ward," says Dr Srinivas with parental pride reserved only for an unquestioningly obedient offspring.
Dr Srinivas is justifiably proud. Thalapati has good reasons to abandon home because it is not the same anymore. Hudhud has stripped the 600-acre forest naked of its thick green cover. The harsh sun is baking Thalapati and he needs regular drenching from buckets of water to keep his cool.
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| Hudhud robbed the 600-acre zoo of its greenery. So many trees were felled that it took two days for the zoo authorities to clear the roads with help from Reliance Foundation volunteers, JCBs and power-saws to clear the debris to be able to reach the animal enclosures to feed them. |
But, home is home, even if severely damaged. Vizag is home to no less than 16 lakh people and, come Diwali, each one of them showed exactly the same obedience, discipline and resolve as Thalapati. Diwali fell on October 23. In the eleven days after Hudhud, the sun had baked the bald trees across the city to a combustible brown and the debris all over the city into crisp, dry powder-keg.
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| A regular Vizag street on October 29, two weeks after Hudhud. Highly combustible. |
The city was a tinder box. One spark could have started off unmanageable fires all over the city and visited upon it a second catastrophe within ten days.
So Vizag collectively gave up Diwali!
"It was the most awesome Deepavali I have experienced in Vizag. It was so quiet on Deepavali that it was almost eerie…pin-drop silence. Parents didn't have to console their children, the latter themselves gave up fire crackers on one appeal from Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu. Such was the collective discipline of the city," said AVSS Rao, head of construction of Reliance Jio.
In the districts and villages around Vizag, farmers and fisherfolk have suffered major and lasting damage to crops and livelihoods. But within the city limits itself, the biggest loss has been a kind of disrobing of Vizag; the sudden snatching away of its thick green cover. "The morning after Hudhud I was wondering if I was in Vizag. It seemed so different," an Andhra University student said.
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| The 600-acre Andhra University was a veritable graveyard of trees. The after the cyclone there was hardly space to walk on the roads, forget driving. It took dozens of varsity workers and Reliance Foundation volunteers, armed with power-saws more than four days to clear the debris. |
An estimated two million trees have been uprooted or stripped of their foliage but even Vizag's trees are done with the mourning. Though they took the worst of the Hudhud battering, the recently barren, sad-looking trees are sprouting fresh green leaves, as if rebooting Vizag, giving it new hope. The brown mountains in the background are also throwing up patches of fresh green.
This never-say-die spirit of Vizag, this resilience of it's human, animal and plant kingdoms, seems to have infected even the inanimate: the government! The administration restored electricity to most parts of the city within six days and, with help from citizens and NGOs, restored the city roads in double quick time.
Rarely do governments come out unscathed in such situations but Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu is being applauded for his swift and decisive relief work. Re-greening Vizag is on the mind of just about anybody you meet. That's perhaps why Naidu is drawing up plans for the massive campaign that envisages planting one lakh trees in 15 minutes!
Andhra University Vice-Chancellor Prof GSN Raju captures the mood. "Regaining Vizag's greenery is going to take a lot of time and hard work. But it is heartening to see that the trees themselves are leading the fight back. Big trees that were uprooted and had no hope of survival are sprouting new leaves lying on their trunk!"Just like this decades-old tree we found in the Andhra University campus:
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This tree symbolises Vizag's state-of-mind: I may have been laid low, but there's no way I'm taking it lying down!