Kolkata’s indelible image of brilliance and beauty turned into a nightmare as the famous monsoons awash with waterlogging left the luxury icon completely halted. Videos of a magnificent blue and silver Rolls Royce Ghost stranded in a waterlogged street in Ballygunge, South Kolkata, seemed to have gone viral.
The view of the luxury sedan, of approximately Rs 5 crore in value, stranded mid-road while relatively lesser cars such as the shabby Maruti Alto and two-wheelers groomed through the deluge was a cocktail of shock, amusement, and a heated discussion on urban infrastructure. The incident starkly reminds us that no amount of advanced engineering can outrun the fury of nature or a city’s drowning drainage system.
Urban Infrastructure Woes
While the devoid Rolls-Royce might stand alone for stunts, it is really symptomatic of a much larger systemic malaise affecting urban India. Kolkata is a city built on a low-lying deltaic plain. Among the cities, it suffers flash floods. Drainage systems, often decades old, get floored by sheer breadth of rainfall, particularly coming from the heavy downpours.
This event signifies the need for upgradation in urban infrastructure to meet the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, direct attributes of climate change. The incident brings into sharp focus the gap between rapid growth in the economy and lagging civic amenities.
The Great Indian Monsoon Challenge
Luxury car owners in India face the monsoon season-a unique and often costly trial. Cars such as the Rolls-Royce have low ground clearance with heavy electronic concentration and are easily damaged while wading through moderate water. Once water gets into the combustion chambers, the engine can go into failure from hydrolocking, which will drastically raise the repair bill to several hundreds of thousands of rupees.
This is something that happens to almost all high-end cars during floods, contrasting greatly with the more rugged ones designed with high ground clearance that could take such incidents in their stride. The online one-liner, “Lord Alto Zindabad,” reflects this reality as it cheers the survival of cheaper, mass-market cars over the fragile nature of ultra-luxury cars in the face of unpredictable weather and road conditions in India.
A recent media graduate, Bhumi Vashisht is currently making a significant contribution as a committed content writer. She brings new ideas to the media sector and is an expert at creating strategic content and captivating tales, having working in the field from past four months.
