Katrina!

No, wait. Don't get excited. This is not about the Kaif girl in India. This is about the huge hurricane named 'Katrina' that is hitting New Orleans as I type this! The met department is about to call this the 'American Tsumani'. This is one of the series of interestingly named hurricanes that hits the US coast evey year (George, Dennis, Ivan, etc). It is normally the Sunshine state - Florida that welcomes all these evil hurricanes and packs them off to other states to cause further damage.

Katrina was named a 'Category 5 hurricane' (evil witch from hell) till yesterday, but apparently today it has subsided to 'Category 4 hurricane' (just plain witch from hell). I guess the Mayor of New Orleans will be happy : "Hurray, Katrina is gonna submerge our city in only 20 feet of water, not 22 feet as we had feared!"

It was nice to see the amount of preparation that goes behind welcoming the evil hurricane. Most of the people are evacuated from the cities in the path of the hurricane, unless you are a media person, in which case you will be travelling INTO these cities with your video camera! It was also very nice to see the amount of responsibility shown by the city Mayor in handling the situation. This no doubt keeps the death toll low. I heard a CNN report about a huge hurricane that hit New Orleans in 60s that caused, quote, "more than 60 deaths". Apparently it is a record so far for the city. Our Mumbai broke the record by 10s of times very recently. That shows how badly prepared we are to face natural calamities. Life is cheap in our country because we have so many people, so apparently we don't care.

We have a trip coming up this weekend and I am wondering if Katrina is going to create any problem in our trip. In case YES, I hope it will at least be the other Katrina ;-)