My favourite bits:
"If one lived in the suburbs abutting the Adyar or Cooum rivers or in the suburbs that used to be lakes before greedy real estate developers (and greedier citizens like us) turned them into urban jungles, it was likely a nightmare."
"Social media was amplifying aid requests from a small part of the city. The wealthier, social media-savvy side. There were several parts, particularly in north Chennai that were in scarily bad shape and had no one tweeting or Facebooking on their behalf. Social media, we realized, was a middle-class-centric echo chamber. "
"NRIs simply had not heard back from their old folks in West Mambalam and Ashok Nagar for 24 hours, and that was enough for them to assume that escaped crocodiles that had mutated thanks to submerged electrical wiring were on their way to devour their parents."
"the uncomfortable truth this incredibly huge army of volunteers is likely to conveniently ignore is that the poor in India live in conditions that no civilized society should tolerate.
The slums on the banks of the Cooum have always been mosquito-infested hellholes and now they are mosquito-infested sludge-filled hellholes."
"We also realized that in the entire group of 200, there was not a single public health expert or even someone with experience in relief operations. It was a bunch of really passionate folks figuring things out on their own, and while definitely making a difference, could have done so much more if governments and institutional experts in relief were less sceptical about social media and its ability to connect people.
We had no access to information from the National Disaster Response Force in terms of where they were operating, who they had already rescued and where food packets were being air-dropped."
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