Anand Mahindra on Thursday responded to Jet Airways ex-CEO designate Sanjiv Kapoor's post calling the industrialist's comparison of the deluge Dubai saw to Mumbai as "incorrect".
Mahindra's post featured a video showing waterlogged roads in Dubai, accompanied by the caption "Nope. Not Mumbai. Dubai." Kapoor, pointing out the analogy, said Dubai wasn't designed to handle such heavy rains, unlike cities such as Oslo which are accustomed to snowfall. Clarifying his response to Mahindra’s post, Kapoor further wrote, “Ok, upon re-reading the post, maybe it is not mocking Dubai. However, the point remains Dubai was not built for heavy rains, no matter what the source of the rain (seeding etc). It would be impractical to build cities to handle any extreme weather scenario, however unlikely.”
"I’m glad you subsequently retracted your comment implying that I was mocking Dubai, Sanjiv. In fact, the only purpose of my post was to highlight how atypical this weather was for Dubai. For example—to use your own analogy—if it had ever snowed in Mumbai, I might well have said: Nope, not Oslo, Mumbai.
For the very same purpose of highlighting how atypical this weather was for Mumbai; Not to mock Mumbai," Mahindra wrote on Thursday.
"I recommend that it’s always good to: PAUSE before you PUNCH. REFLECT before you REACT," he further wrote.
Dubai is dealing with a deluge after a storm in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) dumped a year-and-a-half worth of rainfall in the desert-city in just a few hours. Several videos showing many localities in Dubai submerged under water have been doing the rounds of the internet, one of which was shared by Mahindra. His post went viral. However, social media weighed in with different opinions and didn’t quite agree with the comparison.
“Yes Anand, but Mumbai has not been built on a desert. What’s happening in this part of the world is unexpected. Mumbai was built around climatic conditions on which monsoons were a part of. Hence we could do without the sarcasm in the comparison,” one user wrote.