Christians cower from Hindu backlash in Orissa (click here)
Wed Sep 3, 2008 10:55am IST
By Krittivas Mukherjee
TIKABALI, India (Reuters) - On a starry night last week, as Lal Mohan Digal prepared to go to bed, a mob of raging, machete-wielding Hindu zealots appeared above the hills of his mud house and swarmed over this bucolic hamlet in Orissa....
State of Orissa
Orissa tornado: five minutes of destruction (click here)
Rajkanika (PTI): Concrete roofs ripped off and thrown at a distance, so also a tractor and dozens of houses razed to the ground; all in a matter of five minutes.
A walk through the three km, devastated by a tornado in Rajkanika block of Kendrapara district yesterday afternoon, looked as if it had been bombed, a PTI correspondent visiting the area saw.
The tornado, which had taken a toll of 10 lives and injured over 250 persons in 11 villages, cut a 200 metre swathe for a distance of nearly 3 km, destroying everything in its path.
In Ganja village with about 500 houses, one of the worst hit, concrete roofs were ripped off and flung at a distance of 25 to 30 feet, while there were no trace of thatched houses.
But incredibly enough, villages located hardly 200 metres away, remained untouched.
"I was standing outside my house when it suddenly became very dark and a strong wind started blowing. I could see a huge column of black cloud spiralling towards me about 2 km away," Ashok Panda, a resident of Baghabuda village, said.
As the funnel shaped monster sped towards the villages, it started to rain accompanied by hailstorm.
"It looked like the trunk of an elephant touching the ground advancing our village at high speed. I rushed inside and could see through the window a tractor coming to the village lifted up to a height of about 20 feet," he recalled.
The tractor crashed killing its driver Bishnu Charan Nayak. Panda said "I saw bullock carts and roofs flying in the air. But my house, which was only a few feet away, escaped the whirlwind."...
