Floods in India: The Natural Way To Curb Black Money?
Thanks to Anna Hazare's fight against corruption a tremendous awareness has been created in India regarding the huge amounts of black money reserves held inside or outside the country. This emerging fact must have inspired "Mother Nature" in some way or other to try contributing towards efforts to uproot the evil!
Assam, an Indian state in the North Eastern region of the country, had been reeling under disastrous floods due to days of incessant rains in the later half of June, 2012. Rising waters of all major rivers had submerged extensive areas in almost all parts of the state driving people out of their homes and to relief camps, if any. Many had perished and here, as usual, Nature targeted mostly farmers and poor people. But nature had an altogether unique plan this time.
Just like in the rural areas rain waters had flooded Guwahati, the main city of Assam, submerging streets, lanes and colonies. People had to trudge through waist-deep water outside their homes and had to live with knee-deep water inside. Nature had not discriminated against the poor here. Water sneaked into all the exposed houses irrespective of the levels of affluence of the inhabitants. And, something...more refreshingly different!
In a big wetland of the city flood affected local people suddenly found hard currency notes of high denomination floating around. Forgetting their watery woes the inhabitants dived into the flood waters and swam around enthusiastically to catch as many notes as possible. They were frenzied at the prospect of harvesting hard cash instead of the small fishes that normally come in large numbers during floods. One youth died in the mad rush for the weird windfall.
As the flood waters refused to budge from the city for two more days the police and local authorities hardly showed any interest to pursue and investigate the matter apart from speculating that the flash floods must have swept away somebody's treasure kept safely underground or over-ground. But media and elite circles charged that the wealth had to be somebody's black money and that the authorities were trying to hide his/her identity. There was another delicious speculation that somebody took resort to the ‘natural’ way to 'legalize' the black money! In short, Nature had done a tremendous service in midst of disaster.
The local inhabitants got into such a manic spell that they tended to search any puddle in the roadside or anywhere for notes!
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