PAANI (Indian Express 11 September 2010)

“Did you pray to the God here at this temple in the morning to spare you from the Yamuna floods?” thundered the Zee TV reporter, half-submerged in the Pracheen Shiv Mandir complex on the banks of the river in East Delhi.
Deftly balancing a rainbow umbrella and his camera, the cameraman walked down the steps of the temple to where the reporter was standing, his trousers rolled up to the knees.
The target of the reporter’s question was the hapless young priest, Bharat Bhushan, who fumbled and stammered before nodding what looked like a half-yes and a half-no.
But the reporter didn’t need an answer, he had one already. “What can God do? The God has drowned,” he declared, looking straight into the camera. The camera moved to the deity who sat in her place with a stone smile on her lips, muddy-brown water lapping against her feet.
This was just one of the over 20 TV teams that had found perches for themselves and their OB vans along the banks of the Yamuna waiting to record the “catastrophe of sorts”, the “10,766-crore-litre deluge”, the “moment when cars will start swimming and the city will start drowning”. Happy children, with more than enough water to splash around and bathe in, shouted, “Aaj ki Taaza Khabar.”
They had all started work early in the morning, primed by some newspaper headlines that the end was near, that it would come around 4 pm. That the water could cross the 207-m mark, as it did in 1978.
After around 6 lakh cusecs were released into the Yamuna from the Hathni Kund Barrage in Haryana Wednesday, the river rose to reach 206.03 m this evening — 1.2 m above the danger mark.
By Saturday morning, it is expected to rise to 206.35 m, and maybe even reach the Ring Road. But the Central Water Commission said it wasn’t going to breach the 207-m mark.
But those were only facts that came in the way of today’s lovely TV story.
At 4.03 pm, the deluge didn’t come. The reporters looked confused. A reporter from India Live stood valiantly, waist-deep in the river, doing her flood piece. That was the lowest vantage point. As she stood under the bridge, telling the world that Delhi was about to drown, Pawan Mishra, a slightly puzzled bystander, made an obvious point.
“But this is where the Yamuna flows. It is the river’s space. Why are they all making it seem as if the river has expanded?” Mishra said.
But Mishra confessed to having played his own part in the tamasha. Somewhat guiltily, he said he had succumbed to the invitation of a young reporter who, speaking in Punjabi, had urged him to roll up his trousers and get into the water. He had done so, but the river had only lapped his ankles. She had egged him to go farther. But from where they were standing, the river had looked menacing to Mishra. He had chickened out. Later, he was looking for her.
“They are like butterflies,” Mishra said. “They skip from one spot to another, stand on the bridge, go down to the river, they do all sorts of things,” he said. “I have been watching them for a while. One of them asked me to ask for flood relief on camera. But I don’t even live here. I only came to watch the 4 pm deluge.”
One cameraman said his channel had given him specific instructions to show the water as if it was a threat.
“Of course this is a flood,” he said, pointing to a few jhuggis that had been submerged. “We do what we are asked to do. We will be here late into the night. You never know when the floods will come.”
In 1978, the river had crossed 207.48 m, affecting over 250,000 people.
But today, when no deluge came, the reporters began to take U-turns. One channel said there was a “Brake on the floods”; one reporter, a cloud over his face, said there was “no hope of floods”. His anchor had a ready explanation: a crack in a dam in Panipat was the reason why the flood had got delayed.
At Boat Club near ISBT, TV crew had hired rickety boats to do their “piece-to-camera” or “walk-through”. Around 74 boats and 68 divers were kept in the standby mode by the Delhi government but at the Boat Club most boatmen made a killing by renting out the boats to TV crew.
A member of a television crew stationed near the Yamuna said the boats could be used for rescue operations with the cameras in them. The media was doing public service, he said.
In a far corner, Doordarshan reporter Anuj Yadav stood with his team. “We are reporting the truth. There are no floods here. The other media are reporting Delhi will be flooded in 24 hours. This is creating a crisis,” he said. “This is Peepli [Live].”
A few steps away from this moral high ground, a young TV reporter climbed on to the roof of a house, adjusted her hair and began to speak. She was out of earshot.