Krupa Ge, the author of ‘Rivers Remember’, talks about surviving the 2015 Chennai floods and making sense of its chaos
As published in Nature inFocus on 26 March, 2020.
On the second day of City Scripts: An urban writings festival, held by the Indian Institute of Human Settlements, Bangalore, writer, editor Krupa Ge spoke in a sombre tone when she said, “When we think urban floods, we think water. What we should be thinking is sewage.” Ge was a panellist for the session ‘Water Over the Bridge: A Conversation About Floods in Cities’, where she spoke about her book, Rivers Remember: The Shocking Truth of a Manmade Flood, which gives an in-depth analysis of the 2015 Chennai floods. “My childhood home was devastated in the floods, and when I asked — how did this happen — the answers were not forthcoming,” she added. The book expresses both, the outrage of a citizen caught unaware and Ge’s journalistic pursuit as she files RTIs and combs through government documents looking for probable answers. Peppered with personal stories of people whose lives were laid to waste by the floods, Rivers Remember will haunt you for days.
How did such a catastrophe happen is a question that we seem to be asking ourselves time and time again. In 2019 alone, more than 1500 people lost their lives in India due to extreme weather, and floods were reported in multiple states — Bihar, Odisha, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Kerala. “Cities and rivers go together,” said journalist, writer Vikram Doctor in his iconic article — Rivers that remember and cities that forget (Ge’s book title is a nod to this article). “Yet cities have a strange tendency to forget their rivers,” he adds. With a book like Rivers Remember on your shelf, forgetting will not be that easy.
I had a quick chat with Krupa Ge, after her session, about the writing of her book and how she believes that the first step to implementing better disaster management practices stems from local action.
Read the complete interview here.