When 25-year-old Sahil Thakur saw the video of a temple in Himachal Pradesh being washed away in the aftermath of a deadly cloudburst last month, he was too stunned for words. At least 30 people were offering prayers on 14 August, news outlets reported, when the small temple dedicated to Lord Shiva collapsed, entrapping the devotees under the rubble.
Thakur lives barely 20 minutes away from the disaster site in Summer Hill, which is nearly seven kilometres from his hometown Shimla, the summer capital of Himachal Pradesh. It wasn’t just the casualty—nine confirmed deaths— that was too close to home. It was the disaster too.
“I’ve never seen a cloudburst in Shimla before,” Thakur, a travel vlogger who chronicles the beauty of his Himalayan home state on his YouTube channel, tellsThe Established. “Such events don’t happen here. The last time I heard of a cloudburst was in 2013 in Kedarnath.”