Rain damage part 2

Every weekend since the heavy rains of Mumbai (26th July 2005) has been spent in salvaging items that were soaked in the dirty water that entered my home.

This weekend I discovered more stuff that needs to be thrown out or destroyed:

• Some 10 to 20 EP (Extended Playing) records stuck together on account of leaving them out to dry. Maybe we should have separated them before drying. But then, with such a small home, it is not possible to spread each one around.
• More books disposed off; these simply refused to dry. I noticed that most books printed in India (with the low quality of paper) dried easily; the books printed outside of India have high quality paper and maybe the resin content in them is so high that the pages stick together and don't let them dry. After trying out all kinds of tricks like blow drying with a hair drier to putting them in a conventional oven, they did not dry. Maybe I should have tried out microwave oven.
• Memorable photographs like those from my Swiss visit - both negatives and developed prints - destroyed. With no backup on the digital media, its as good as history.
• Most audio CDs that I tested seem to work without problems. The covers (or liner notes as they are called) of some of them had to be disposed off. Almost all of my "Moment Records" CD collection lost their liner notes. Prime among them was an autographed liner note by Pt. Shivkumar Sharma and Us. Zakir Hussain. I had gotten this after attending a musical performance by them in Mumbai.
• Most of these Moment Records CDs featured pleasing prints of various traditional Indian paintings/scenes.
• Lost an entire book that came along with a 4-CD set of Pt. Ravi Shankar (issued for his 75th birthday celebrations) appropriately titled "In Celebration".
• Lost important interpretation of the Vedic chants from Taittiriya Upanishad from Pt. Ravi Shankar's "Chants of India". This interpretation has been described in the liner notes as being "quasi mathematical" and gives a computation to find the happiness or joy of the enlightened compared to that of the ordinary mortal and the relation in terms of all the other hierarchical entities that exist in between.

All in all - a loss that is going to be irreplaceable and not easily forgotten.