Word: cherrapunji
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Just north of the border with Bangladesh, the hillside village of Cherrapunji offers an even better insight into India's water paradox than the view from Captain Singh's cockpit. The women of Cherrapunji are small and muscular, their cheeks lined with the same parched wrinkles as the wild land of their birth. Their sinewy bodies tell the story of how, six months of the year, they lift empty oilcans on their backs and trek a kilometer to a stream to fetch water. "Still, there isn't enough," says widow Dorjon Nongrun. Once called the "Scotland of the East...
...traps to stop the deluge from washing into Bangladesh. A rain-harvesting scheme died after residents complained that maintaining the water tanks was too expensive. But the larger truth in a country where droughts and floods are annual events is that only catastrophe prompts action. That may come to Cherrapunji one day, as it did to others this year. But for right now, it never rains in Cherrapunji. And then it pours...
...memorable assignment in India was his 1951 pursuit of a monsoon. New York wanted a photograph of a violent Asiatic downpour. Unfortunately, it was the driest season in a quarter of a century, and with New Delhi wrapped in a drought, Burke pushed on to the Khasi Hills at Cherrapunji. reputed to have the world's heaviest rainfalls. The moment he arrived, the rains ceased. Just after he left, 30 inches fell. As a final blow, he was arrested for taking surreptitious pictures of a perfect formation of monsoon clouds from a Calcutta-bound plane. Indian law prohibits taking...
| 1 |