Say rain and our hopes soar. When the blazing sun is merciless all summer, the scene in the entire state was similar to that of the climax scene in Guide where everyone’s head turned to the sky, desperately looking for rain.
And so it did rain, and how! It rained cats and dogs, complete with thunder and lightning, bringing on a spectacular, if somewhat scary, show in the sky. If awestruck people gaped at the stormy scene with their jaws and eyes wide open, they were quick to pay homage to Nature with their cameras.
Long past midnight on Thursday, Hyderabadis woke up and pointed their mobiles at the sky, capturing the drama up there for posterity. Many of them had never seen anything like it.
So, on Friday morning not only the city roads, even Twitter and Facebook were flooded with videos.
In Hyderabad the one that trended was the one taken by Rahul Sachdev. The 30-second video hit 50k views. Rahul himself seems the one most surprised at it, “I had no idea that it would reach that mark. Some of the shares of my video which went directly and not from my wall even touched 1 lakh views. It was something to be witnessed and those who couldn’t see the sky saw my video and were pretty thrilled about what they slept through.”
But there is a reason why Rahul was awake. On the ninth floor of his apartment building, the winds shattered and broke the window pane in his residence and so, “it was an open clear view for me. Since I couldn’t sleep I took the video after returning from a small walk in the rain in the dead of the night,” he giggles. Rahul did try and cash in on the views, albeit on a lighter note. The restaurateur that he is, he suggested that the view can be best enjoyed over sandwiches at his eatery.
With smart phones introducing slo-mo and photo stitching facilities, rain, thunder and lightning seems to be the in thing to capture. Until now it was nature and environmental photographers who were looked up to for that ‘strike from sky streak’ but with many people taking to photography, it became a personal challenge to capture something within a fraction of a second to get the perfect shot of the strikes. “Not to forget FB live. It is another option to tell news instantly, especially when rain is the most needed luxury. Something captured in India during the day is viewed with a lot of enthusiasm by Indians settled abroad the moment they log in, in the morning. Live view on FB is also used to build the enthusiasm, it is like a wait and watch game — it rained there, will it rain here now?” explains Sanjay Borra, a vlogger and owner of Hyderabad street photography page.
To see the popularity of rain, run a #rain on social media sites and you will be inspired with the ideas. Who knows, you could be trending next.
