Treat water sources as precious resources

I had a magical childhood. In the late 50s, I lived on Nathan's Street on Harrington Road, with just a chain-link fence separating this colony of eight bungalows from the Madras Christian School.

- KRISHNA MOHAN

Magical, because the colony was filled with kids and we measured the passing of time in the games we played; we had the kite season, the tops season, the marbles season, the cricket season, the hockey season, and of course the rainy season when we frolicked in the muddy waters of Swaminathan Bungalow to catch as many tadpoles as we could. My most vivid memory of the rains in Madras was being taken to Spurtank Road to watch the Cooum River in full spate. In those days, it seemed like a once-in-a-lifetime event and we were awed by the strength of the water in the river where we would catch tiny fishes every so often.

Today, a combination of unregulated and rapid urbanisation and climate change has resulted in more frequent extreme weather events. Now the city of Chennai fluctuates between floods and drought. In 2015, we had our worst floods ever, and in 2019, our worst drought on record, when we almost hit ground zero and drew frequent comparisons to Cape Town.