The ‘brown saviours’

Desperate: Affected families take a refuge on a road after the flood hit their homes in Jaffarabad, a district of Pakistan’s southwestern Baluchistan province. – AP

THE catastrophe is unprecedented. The devastation is complete. As the BBC headline, quoting Pakistan’s climate change minister, announced to a nonchalant world, “one-third of Pakistan is under water”.

Homes, entire villages, schools and acres of life-giving crops have been inundated. And amid the disasters are ones of our own making, helicopters throwing down a few kilograms of food to starving people but further thrashing the already destroyed crops by their landing and ascent.