Recap

A friend of mine(Dilip D'souza) is currently at Akkrapettai, Nagapatinam, the place that was ravaged by the Tsunami on December 26th, 2004. It was exactly six months and six days back that the three of us(Dilip, Amit and me) trudged through an incredible stretch of slime, slush, shit and carcasses to meet Dr....aah got it from Dilip's blog, Dr. Lakshmi Narasimhan We had decided that we would make the same journey six months later to see what had changed. For reasons that are not important, Dilip is doing that journey alone. He just called me a few minutes back and said simply."Saraansh I am here at Akkrapettai", and I knew that for an instant that we were both thinking of what we witnessed six months back. Its been six months but its amazing that I remember every detail of that day.

We looked and looked and then realised that the only way to reach the Doctor would be walk through almost 2 kilometers of the mix that I described above. So we ultimately decided to ignore the slush slowly oozing into our shoes, and finding a way through the pores of our socks and after a while all I could feel was a squish-squish with every step I took. It was strange that inspite of walking through this we found small things to joke about to lift each other's spirits. We were about 100 metres from the doctor when we noticed a yellow carton and five small toes of a six-year old poking out. That was how we welcomed The New Year 2005.

Read a full account of that day here and here.

Dilip wrote this on his trip to Akkrapettai.