and God made a wind to pass over the earth, and the waters assuaged… —Genesis 8As soon as the idea of the Deluge had subsided,/A hare stopped in the clover and swaying flowerbells, /and said a prayer to the rainbow,/through the spider’s web…. Gush, pond,– foam, roll on the bridge and over the woods; /black palls and organs, lightning and thunder, rise and roll; /waters and sorrows rise and launch the floods again. — Arthur Rimbaud: ‘After The Flood’There is a gentle calmness, and great sense of relief that presides over the simple statement concluding the Genesis account of the Flood. God, we are told, made a covenant with man after the Flood, undertaking never again to visit such a cataclysm upon him in punishment for his sins, and the rainbow was the symbol, and the reminder, of this compact. The understanding, of course, was that, for his part, man would have learnt never again to give cause for another Flood. But in Rimbaud’s poem, it is an animal and not man that expresses gratitude to the rainbow, while the latter returns to his own old ways, causing the poet to invite Nature to unleash her fury again upon the earth. There is a frightening contrast between the soothing Genesis account of the end of the Flood and the violence of Rimbaud’s imagery of what might come to pass after ‘the idea of the deluge has subsided.’ It is a warning to be constantly conscious of what led up to the Flood and of the pain and suffering it caused; an invitation to introspection and stock-taking; and an injunction against easy forgetfulness of both cause and effect.There is then a case for such introspection now, after the flood in Chennai, in a mood of some humility and soberness that abjures edgy defensiveness toward, and angry rejection of, criticism in favour of receptivity toward messages of lessons that must be learned and warnings of mistakes that must not be repeated. The worst and most self-defeatingly insensitive response would be one that seeks a punitive insistence on the court-room requirements of impeccable proof and evidence for every adverse assessment made, as opposed to a patient allowance of criticism, or even recrimination, from a citizenry that has lived through a hellish experience. The state and society alike must accept the wisdom of a stock-taking — one that covers aspects of both state functioning and societal response —that is informed by such an attitude of patient objectivity. It is in this spirit that the following comments on governance and social behaviour in a time of crisis are offered.Casualties directly attributable to the flood in southern India and Sri Lanka are estimated to be in the region of 400 deaths, the destruction of a hundred thousand structures, and losses amounting to Rs.20,000 crore. This is a crushing blow for any region in a country in the low-to-middle-income range. A further major human loss is that due to morbidity – principally in the form of gastro-intestinal disease unleashed by the impact of the flood on public hygiene and sanitation, a situation compounded by the damages suffered in the flood by the public and private health facilities.There are obvious lessons in this for governance and state policy. The state cannot embark too soon on efforts aimed at the systematic maintenance of tanks and canals, the prevention of deforestation, the regular repair and cleaning up of drainage outlets, the upkeep of roads that should be built to withstand the routine phenomenon of rains in a tropical country, the clearance of structures that are unauthorised (or ought never to have been authorised) standing on water-ways and flood outlets, and attentiveness to environmentalists who have for long been warning against compromising the ecological status of marshlands. These are aspects of long-term policy. In the short term, it would appear that the official machinery was found wanting in its ability to deal quickly and effectively with the flood crisis. Indeed, a major issue that has arisen is the manner and timing of the release of water from the Chembarambakkam tank in Chennai. A substantial body of opinion maintains that the water should have been released in stages over time, in manageable quantities, and not all at once in a crisis response to the possibility of a breaching of the reservoir’s walls, with little warning to the citizenry or regard for the carrying capacity of the reservoir’s flood outlets. With more considered state action, Chennai might well have been spared the drowning it actually ended up experiencing. It is just as well that the written, visual and social media, and political parties, were on the spot to facilitate the flow of information and opinion on the rains and how they were dealt with. What Amartya Sen said in the context of famine is clearly valid also for other natural disasters which are aided by human intervention: the role of parliamentary democracy and a free Press cannot be overemphasised. Amartya Sen also pointed out, in the context of famine, that starvation is largely a matter of what he called ‘entitlement-failure’. In a time of floods or famine or cyclones, the most vulnerable are those equipped with the poorest entitlement structures. In Chennai, the greatest suffering was visited upon those without access to even semi-pucca dwelling units (an aspect of capability-failure that is seldom taken into account in assessments of money-metric poverty). Our favourite pathology, caste, again raised its ugly head as an aspect of societal response to the floods. In parts of the state, upper-caste people diverted relief supplies intended for Dalits, thus ensuring for them exposure to both the greatest initial vulnerability and the least subsequent redress. Tellingly, the job of cleaning up the garbage — ranging from animal carcasses to human excrement – was left to safai-karmacharis of predictable caste affiliation: these have been requisitioned from other parts of the state to clean up Chennai, with apparently little attention paid to the amenities of gloves, boots, masks, or even proper arrangements of accommodation and food for the workers.Religion, too, has had an interesting part to play in the sociology of the flood. By all accounts, the Muslim community has quietly and unflamboyantly played a magnificent role in rescue and relief operations conducted in Chennai, with countless accounts related of mosques offering shelter and food to thousands of people rendered homeless in the floods. It bears particular mention that the flooded temple in the Kotturpuram area of Chennai was restored by Muslim volunteers. Christian churches, too, played a stellar role in throwing their doors open to men, women and children in need. Amongst the many lessons to be learnt after the flood, surely one signal lesson should be that of calling into question the ambition that some of us harbour of sending certain people off to Pakistan!