The day the sea changed everything: How Nepal flood fury brought back memories of the devastating 2004 tsunami

On Wednesday morning as the visuals of the Nepal floods began coming in, I was literally shaken. As a journalist who had covered conflict zones, the Chennai floods, Cyclone Gaja, and the Easter Sunday bomb blasts in Sri Lanka, this should have been just another news story to report.

My job was just to report on the people awaiting news of their loved ones from Nepal and seeking information from the Indian Embassy in Nepal and the Union government. I spoke with a few family members whose whereabouts are still unknown. Most of them could not speak; one young woman was crying non-stop as she waited for information about her mother who had boarded a bus to Kailash Mansarovar.

But hearing the young woman, my thoughts went back to December 26, 2004, the day a tsunami struck the Tamil Nadu coast, wreaking havoc on the coastal villages. This was the first natural disaster I covered as a journalist—a cub reporter, rather. Working at a television channel, I finished my work in the edit suite and returned home only by 6 am. But at around 7.15 am, my Nokia phone rang and a government officer said, “The ocean has come into the town.” I didn’t know what it was. I rushed back to the office and by 7.30 am, the then Chief Minister J. Jayalalithaa had left her Poes Garden residence to rush to the spot and assess the situation. I was waiting with a microphone and a camera person. As I shouted, “Madam…” her car stopped for a moment. The state did not even know it was a tsunami. “It is a natural disaster. The government will soon assess the situation and take necessary action,” she said. I was supposed to follow her in the convoy. As I rushed to hand over the cassette used to record her soundbite, she smiled and her convoy held for one more minute. She went to the nearby Pattinapakkam area. But as information began flowing in, she proceeded straight to the airport to fly to Nagapattinam and Cuddalore. Cuddalore was the worst affected then.

The day began then. There are stories a journalist covers, and there are stories that stay with you. The tsunami of December 26, 2004, belongs to the second category. I had covered political rallies, elections, protests and accidents before. I thought I knew what it meant to report a tragedy. I was wrong. Nothing had prepared me for the scale of destruction that unfolded along Tamil Nadu’s coast that morning. As journalists, we are trained to seek facts. But in those first hours, facts themselves seemed to struggle to catch up with the catastrophe. As I travelled towards the affected areas, the landscape changed. The familiar coastline had become unrecognisable.

And then there was the sea. It was strangely calm. That image has remained with me. The sea looked almost innocent after having taken so much. I remember the faces more than the statistics. A mother waiting for news of her child. A fisherman searching for members of his family. People walking from village to village, asking whether anyone had seen their missing relatives. For a journalist, those moments create a painful dilemma. You have a professional responsibility to ask questions, gather information and file your report. But standing before someone who has just lost a loved one, you also wonder whether you have any right to interrupt their grief. What do you ask a mother who is waiting for her child to return? What do you say to a fisherman who has lost his entire family? Sometimes, the most appropriate journalistic response was simply to listen. The tsunami also taught me the difference between reporting death and reporting grief. The death toll could be counted, but the grief cannot be counted. It can only be felt and explained in words as I report. Twenty-two years later, the Nepal tragedy has brought those images back.

In fact, since 2004, my visits to Chennai’s beaches and the long coastline are very limited as the sound of the sea every time brings back those dark days, making me recall how a huge grave was dug and all the corpses on the shore were buried at one stroke.

Journalism is often described as the business of telling stories. But during a catastrophe, it becomes something deeper: the responsibility to bear witness. It was a natural disaster. But for those of us who witnessed its aftermath, it was also a lesson in human vulnerability, resilience and compassion. And for me, it remains the story that taught me that journalism is not just about recording history. Sometimes, it is about standing close enough to history to feel its pain.