As heavy rainfall brought life in Dubai to an abrupt halt, Mahindra Group chairman Anand Mahindra took to Twitter to share a video of the flooded city and said "Nope. Not Mumbai. Dubai."
The rains across the UAE have been attributed to cloud-seeding, which the UAE conducts to increase its dwindling, limited groundwater. The state-run WAM news agency called the rain Tuesday a historic weather event that surpassed anything documented since the start of data collection in 1949.
Many on social media corrected Mahindra, pointing out that "Mumbai was built around climatic conditions on which Monsoons were a part of" but Dubai has been built on a desert.
Former Jet Airways CEO designate Sanjiv Kapoor noted that Mahindra's was an "incorrect analogy."
"Dubai was not built for such heavy rains - rains that would flood most cities. A better analogy would be if it suddenly snowed heavily in Bombay, which was obviously not built to handle snow at all," Kapoor said.
Would people in snowy Oslo mock Bombay, he asked.
"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," he said in another tweet.
"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 !!," another user wrote.
