Dubai is dealing with a deluge after a storm in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) dumped a year-and-a-half worth of rainfall in the desert-city in just a few hours. Several videos showing many localities in Dubai submerged under water have been doing the rounds of the internet. From roads and malls to the airport and subway, several parts of Dubai have been drenched due to the torrential downpour.
Amid this, Anand Mahindra also took to X to share a video of roads in Dubai flooded with stagnant water. While sharing the video, “Nope. Not Mumbai. Dubai,” the Mahindra Group chairperson wrote on X.
Mahindra’s post went viral with over a million views. However, social media weighed in with different opinions and didn’t quite agree with the industrialist.
“Yes Anand, but Mumbai has not been built on a desert. What’s happening in this part of the world is unexpected. Mumbai was built around climatic conditions on which monsoons were a part of. Hence we could do without the sarcasm in the comparison,” one user wrote.
Another user commented, “But difference is - yesterday flooding and water logging everywhere in UAE including Abu Dhabi, this morning life is back to normal in Abu Dhabi. 95 percent dried up and roads are clear, sunny too.”
As the billionaire’s post garnered traction, it also caught the attention of Sanjiv Kapoor, Jet Airways ex-CEO designate. Retweeting the post, he wrote, “Incorrect analogy. Dubai was not built for such heavy rains - rains that would flood most cities. A better analogy would be if it suddenly snowed heavily in Bombay, which was obviously not built to handle snow at all. Would people in snowy Oslo mock Bombay?”
"Ok, upon re-reading the post, maybe it is not mocking Dubai. However, the point remains that Dubai was not built for heavy rains, no matter what the source of the rain (seeding, etc.). It would be impractical to build cities to handle any extreme weather scenario, however unlikely," Kapoor wrote in a separate tweet.
"This is not normal rain in any city! If seeded, it produced much more than they would have been expecting. A year's worth of rain in a few hours!" he added.
Soon after, Anand Mahindra reacted to Kapoor's tweet and said, "I’m glad you subsequently retracted your comment implying that I was mocking Dubai, Sanjiv. In fact, the only purpose of my post was to highlight how atypical this weather was for Dubai."
Accepting the olive branch, Kapoor replied, "Absolutely. My initial reaction was triggered by, and directed to, the responses by others to your comment, many of which were mocking/gloating. Which is why I subsequently went back and added my follow-up comment."
Meanwhile, by the end of Tuesday, Dubai received more than 142 millimetres (5.59 inches) of rainfall over 24 hours. of rainfall over a period of 24 hours. The emirate experiences 94.7 millimetres (3.73 inches) of rainfall in an average year, as per data from the Dubai International Airport.
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