#DeleteMonday with Floodlines

by Radhika Viswanathan

This week’s Delete Monday podcast recommendation is from Vaaka Media co-founder and producer, Radhika Viswanathan.

With the monsoon setting in nicely in Bangalore, and heavy rains hitting our doors and windows every night, I can't help but think back to the rains twenty years ago, in this same city. Back then, the rains would arrive with delightful regularity, beginning around 3 or 4 pm in the afternoon, just when many people in the city (including me) would be heading back home after work or study. And it would rain. Sheets of rain.

I spent a lot of last year thinking about and recording people speaking about the rain for our podcast #Kaalavastha in Kerala. Our neighbouring coastal state has been battered by devastating floods year on year, and everytime it rains where I am, I find myself thinking about the floods. Will they come again? What will happen when it does? Will we be prepared? Will we face up to the damage we’ve already done? Is it too late?

It can be hard to listen to a podcast with the rain beating down, but a good podcast can spirit your mind away from the present. In these quarantine days, I’ve listened to the Atlantic’s excellent series on Hurricane Katrina, Floodlines, which retells the story of New Orleans and its people as they faced a most devastating disaster. It’s a fabulous series of reckoning, and I can't recommend it enough. The audio is fantastic - incredibly immersive and the story goes so much beyond an event: and that is really how these disasters play out. They build over time, and then they hit.

Where to start? With the first episode, of course, Antediluvian.