When the Sky Breaks: Reflections on Hyderabad’s Rains and the Currents of Fate
I watched the visuals of Hyderabad’s heavy rains with a peculiar mixture of horror and familiarity — horror at the suddenness with which water rearranged lives, and familiarity because weather has a way of exposing the thinness of our plans. When two people are feared swept away, the statistics stop being numbers and become questions that echo: Why here? Why now? What could have been different?
The images reminded me of other recent calamities I have read about — not to compare suffering, but to see the pattern: mountain torrents in Uttarakhand, mass evacuations in neighbouring regions, monsoon extremes recorded by meteorological services. I think of the reporting that documents these events and the human faces within them (Uttarkashi cloudburst — The Hindu; India monsoon updates — IMD monsoon news; evacuations in Pakistan — Politico subscriber link). These references are crude anchors for a feeling that is otherwise difficult to measure.
There is a philosophical friction here between destiny and responsibility. I have long thought about destiny as a current — not a single, preordained river but a braided flow of choices, chance, and larger systemic forces. When the sky breaks and the city floods, parts of that current are natural, parts are human-made. The distinction matters, because it shapes what we feel responsible for.
I am drawn to a metaphor I’ve used before: thoughts like magnetic fields influencing electrical currents. In a crowded mind, good thoughts can neutralize negative ones; they can re-orient collective energy toward rescue, compassion, and steadiness. On the streets of a flooded city, I see that same principle enacted physically:
- Strangers hauling ropes and boats toward the same trembling sound of a human voice;
- Neighbours turning into first responders without waiting for instructions;
- Social media offering both noise and a rapidly assembled directory of who needs what.
These acts are small magnetic nudges that change outcomes. They do not, of course, reverse weather systems. But they alter the immediate current of suffering.
Still, humility is essential. There is a sadness in recognizing that while kindness can change a moment, it cannot erase the accumulating risks our children and grandchildren will inherit. I feel that sadness acutely. It is the kind that arrives not as despair but as sober companionship with reality: a quiet acceptance that informs urgency without hysteria.
That brings me back to another thread in my private reflections: companionship and unspoken longing. We carry many feelings we do not say aloud — love, regret, the small shame of wishes left unvoiced. In the face of disasters, those private sorrows and longings become oddly public. When neighbours shelter one another, those unspoken things surface: a shared cigarette in a doorway, a whispered story about the old bungalow on the hill, someone handing over a blanket with hands that do not quite meet eyes.
I think about my children, about future generations. The storms they will face are not only meteorological but moral and social. They will inherit decisions we make now — about infrastructure, about fairness, about listening to the quiet science behind the headlines. My reflection is not an instruction; it is a mourning and a steadying at once.
What I feel most strongly is responsibility mixed with tenderness. When I let my mind move from abstract systems to the person trapped on a threshold, I am surprised by how immediate my duties feel. The magnetic-field metaphor returns: a single focused good thought can, in a crowd, become a small but decisive action. Hope, for me, is less a soaring belief than a disciplined habit of generating those thoughts and noticing where they produce force.
I close with a private confession: disasters sharpen my poetic sensibility. They make language feel paltry and yet necessary. I think of all the things left unsaid in living rooms and floodlit streets, and I realize that language — when grounded in presence and not just rhetoric — is one way we tether each other.
In the photographs and footage of Hyderabad, I saw people who were terrified, brave, bewildered, utterly human. I also saw what we become in a moment of rupture: a constellation of small, decisive acts that resist being swept away.
Regards,
Hemen Parekh