Tsunamis do not have names. Ten years after the deadliest tsunami in recent times struck the coast of several Asian countries including India, it is remembered primarily by the year of its occurrence (2004) and the unbelievable destruction it wrought.
Tsunamis have no names, at least not yet. Nor do earthquakes or floods. In fact, it might appear absurd to most people that natural disasters can even be given names. Yet it has been common practice for quite some years now to give names to one highly destructive kind of natural calamity — the cyclone.
Less than 15 years ago, few people in India associated cyclones with names. Cyclones were just terrible storms that rose in the Bay of Bengal and hit, with a kind of unpleasant regularity, the coasts of Andhra Pradesh or Odisha or West Bengal, or of neighbouring Bangladesh. Cyclones were identified by the year of their occurrence, and remembered for the devastation they caused. But they remained nameless. Even the massive cyclone that struck Odisha in 1999 and caused enormous destruction, taking a toll of about 10,000 human lives, was known merely as the super-cyclone.
The system of naming of Atlantic cyclones (known as hurricanes or typhoons), is a fairly old practice, but giving names to cyclones that originate in the northern Indian Ocean and affect South Asian countries began only at the turn of this century. The system was formalised at a meeting of the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) in 2000, and the first cyclone was named in 2004.
Eight north Indian Ocean countries, namely, Bangladesh, India, the Maldives, Myanmar, Oman, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Thailand, were asked to contribute names so that a combined list could be compiled. Each country gave eight names and a combined list of 64 names was prepared. This list is currently in use, and all cyclones arising in the north Indian Ocean are named from this list, with one name from each country being used in turn.
Almost 38 or 39 names from the list have been used up, but since many cyclones dissipate long before they hit land, their names rarely figure in the papers or other media. The names that people do know about, and remember are, naturally, those that were most destructive ones, or very recent. Aila, in 2009 is remembered with a shudder for the enormous destruction it caused in West Bengal and Bangladesh; Phaillin, also for the damage it caused when it hit the Odisha coast in 2013. Two harmless cyclones, which also might remain in people’s memory, are the more recent ones of 2014 — Hudhud, which threatened the east coast of India and Nilofar, which was expected to, but did not, devastate the western coast.
The names in the cyclone list are usually words one associates with storms; words which mean water or wind or lightning in various national languages. Sometimes they are names of other things — birds or flowers or precious stones. The name ‘Aila’, contributed by the Maldives means ‘fire’, the name ‘Phaillin’ from Thailand means sapphire, the name ‘Hudhud’ from Oman is the name of a bird, probably the hoopoe, and the name ‘Nilofar’, given by Pakistan, is the Urdu name of the lotus or water lily. The eight names suggested by India, and which are in the list of 64, are Agni, Akaash, Bijli, Jal, Leher, Megh, Sagar and Vayu, meaning in that order, fire, sky, lightning, water, wave, cloud, sea and wind. Five of these names (that is, up to Leher) have been used so far.
With global warming causing a large number of extreme weather events, cyclones seem to occur with frightening frequency these days. Yet remembering them or discussing their impacts, or warning people about them, seems to have become easier in recent years.
Perhaps it is because we have become better at disaster management, perhaps it is because giving a cyclone a name makes it easier to spread the word.
Perhaps it is also that naming these wild winds gives us the illusion of having tamed the untamable?
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