Nov-2011: Flood Time Art Works

Left: Chao Praya Riverside near Santi Chai Prakan Park, Bangkok, on Nov 6, 2011 late afternoon.
Photograph by Sompote P.

See the benches around that big tree!

Click to view more photos from this trip at:
Kandaphati's Posts on Facebook. (16 photos)

View the slideshow of this same set of photos at:
Photobucket See this Album at Kanda's Google Photos.

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Below: This cute animation by Herotowaiwai has inspired positive attitude amongst the sea of increasing negative thoughts and deeds that came with the staying floods.

My video description here is for those that do not understand the Thai language:

Once upon a time in Thailand, a piggy saw that brick house was the strongest. He therefore built one. Others also followed suit.

One by one, the traditional style houses and the trees that surrounded them disappeared.

Gradually the ground was covered with hard concrete.
Canals were filled up and became roads.
Cities expanded fast....
Soooo fast!

Meanwhile another piggy also built his house for the future.

Now when it rained, raindrops could not go down the ground like before, nor could they go to the sea...
(Cute animation here.)

It flooded. Townfolks had to evacuate.
They wondered why the piggy's traditional Thai-style wooden house did not submerge.

(I liked this part....)
That's because the house might look old-style but it was an innovation!

The next part made me smile... with tears:

Not just bad things happened during the floods. Good things also happened:

Donations flooded in.
The military, the police, and the volunteers all came to help the flood victims.
People who used to work in the factories had the chance to go back to their hometown and became "wisers in the paddy fields".
Gone are the political conflicts [esp. b/w the Reds and the Yellows] ... (sadly, this is not 100% true)

We saw lots of flood-time innovations.
Students could get out of their classrooms to learn from the real life.
City folks could go to the upcountry to visit their relatives...

I loved the last part that says:

Floods come and go.
Do not let our hearts be flooded.
WE MUST SURVIVE.

"EM balls" were introduced. Volunteers came to various centers to knead EM Balls. Hundreds of thousands of EM balls were thrown into the flooded areas with the belief and the hope that they would reduce the increasing stench and the germs in the trapped flood water.

One day a well-known chemistry professor gave an interview on TV and said EM Balls did not help. He gave good reasons.

Needless to say, that was quite a shock.

But sooner, various authoritative spokespersons retorted. They said, actually there were many types of EM Balls.

Oh well....

GPEN shows the most wanted type of EM Ball for all of us.

Original illustrations " EM BALL 2.0" by GPEN.
Animated by me with GPEN's permission to display.

Again and again we witnessed millions of sandbags failing their mission in the flood war. The authority was desperate in saving money-making city centers and industrial estates. They followed the experts' advice and installed lots of "Big Bags", which are huge stone bags. Longer and longer walls of Big Bags were erected, to the despair of the residents on the other side of the walls. Water did slow down the flow on the correct side, but that's it. Meanwhile, there were a few other experts that said nothing could stop the water mass - not even Big Bags!!!

The illustration on a flooded map by Aloud Bangkok was a hit as soon as it appeared. →

Source: Aloud Bangkok's album on Facebook.

When GPEN displayed this below, it also became talk of the town:

"What's your name?"

In some places, the flood water was confined by the sandbag piles and big bags walls for weeks. It could not go away quickly. Soon the smell was unbearable...

This one below makes perfect sense:

"Whale, go take a shower!"

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Big Bags are not almighty.

More and more people are calling them
"Big Bad Bags."

We all hope
that they and their little brothers
don't have to stay around
for too long ......

Kanda