Let’s remind ourselves of Aesop’s famous story ‘The boy who cried wolf’. Some say it’s a fable, but aren’t all fables stories?

There was once a shepherd’s boy. He constantly pulled pranks on fellow villagers, one of which was that every now and then he would scream at the top of his lungs that a wolf was about to reach his sheep to harm them. When the villagers would arrive at the site, they would find nothing of that sort happening to the sheep. There came a time when the villagers stopped paying attention to his cries. So one day when the canid actually came to eat his flock, the villagers didn’t lend an ear to his cries and the sheep were devoured by the wolf.

This was not the first time that residents of Sindh, especially Karachi, were alarmed about an impending cyclone. Remember cyclone Phet, in 2010? Perhaps it is wrong to draw a parallel between the cry wolf story and the Met department’s prediction because, after all and unlike the shepherd’s kid, the department means well and cares for the safety of citizens.

However, wouldn’t it be appropriate if the Met department did its work a bit more accurately? It is the 21st century, not an era when Poseidon ruled the sea world. For an entire week the media, quoting experts, made a lot of noise that the coastal parts of the province needed to be vacated. It does take a toll on citizens. People who reside in areas close to the sea get alarmed. Those who have relatives living in the central and northern parts of the city go there for a few days, but those who don’t are left to their own devices.

Then there is another aspect to the whole cyclone Nilofar story. (No, the reference is not to Karachi’s patron saint Abdullah Shah Ghazi’s influence on calamities; let’s keep that for some other day.) It is to do with fishermen’s conventional wisdom. You must have heard that the fishermen were least pushed about the imminence of Nilofar. In fact, they made fun of it suggesting it was better that this time round it’s a female that’s going to hit them. Most of them either kept fishing or stayed on shore.

A friend who claims to be familiar with how the fishermen community works said that they know when to leave the sea and when to stay back. According to one fisherman, they have divided each (fishing) month into four moons (as in four weeks) and believe that the water never gets rough during the first moon. It is only when the full moon is about to set that the water gets choppy. So it is basically the third or fourth week that they need to guard against.

Now this cannot be validated or lent credence to. Still, the point is we already live in an age where anarchy can be caused at the drop of a hat. The media has become a bit of a loose cannon. Before it frightens the life out of citizens, it needs to corroborate news and present it in a way that it doesn’t create panic. Met officials, or whoever is assigned the duty to warn us about natural calamities, need to equip themselves better. Sometimes false alarms can cause more harm than the calamity itself, for it can make people take steps that are not always easy to take.

As for the name Nilofar, well, it also means water lily. Probably, not the right name for a cyclone.

Published in Dawn, November 2nd , 2014