It’s not one of those moments that you want to re-live too often. The Mangalore Beach Monsoon season is a dangerous time. I acted purely out of instinct on those days in India, and the repercussions of what happened were quite extraordinary.
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I was flown into the small, coastal town of Mangalore as an expert to assist in the construction of a series of coastal protection structures for a beach in Mangalore called Ullal. Each monsoon season homes are lost from beach erosion.
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Mangalore Beach Monsoon
One afternoon as I was overseeing construction work by the sea, I heard a nearby crowd scream by the water’s violent edge.
I saw a women’s body wrapped in a web of sari material floating face down and drifting out through the waves.
We can skip through the painstaking details of resuscitating someone’s lifeless body back to life on a beach surrounded by two hundred screaming people. It was a nightmare.
As the women’s body (alive once again) left the scene in an ambulance I received hugs and prayers and touches to the forehead and feet. Out of the two hundred beachgoers, there was no one else that could swim, just me. And the waves were rough! The monsoon season had started.
Two days in a row
The next day, at sunset, it happened again. Three hundred people crammed onto the beach, right on the water’s edge. Screams of families pierced the air, as five bodies washed out to sea.
Swimming through monsoon waves, holding a drowning victim wrapped in heavy, wet material was terrifying. By the third woman, the CPR, and the chaos of hundreds of people screaming I was nearly dead myself.
It was a horrible day, with a couple of casualties. But people around the Ullal praised me for those I had saved.
After that day, shops in town offered me free food and drinks for the rest of my stay. People on the street watched in awe as I walked by. It was surreal.
Once the story made the Indian Times newspaper headlines, even more people came to the beach (to see what all the fuss was about). My team and I set up a barrier, no one else was getting near that water while I was around.
I told various interviewers that ultimately:
People need to learn how to swim and be educated on the power of the sea.
But, how do you teach a billion people a skill overnight? The Mangalore Beach monsoon season occurs every year.
Letters of gratitude
I received letters of gratitude from around the country. But the most heart-warming experience came from a knock on my door one afternoon about a week after the event.
Two young boys arrived, carrying a bag of apples from a village on the other side of the country showed up. They were the sons of a woman I’d rescued. In broken English, they told me about my newspaper-photo shrine in their home and the many blessings I had received and shall always receive. It was an amazing conversation.
After several hugs and a selfie on their old Nokia phone they left.
Shortly after, I received an invitation to the governor of the state’s (Karnataka) house for dinner and had offers to stay at various places around the country as a form of gratitude.
With about 10 million readers in India, making the front page of the Times exposed my name to a huge crowd, even if it was only for a day. Just another crazy day in India!
An open invite to travel around India
It just so happened that Vivien and I were planning to travel the country for a month or so after the job finished. It was a great experience to have connections around the country.
I spent another couple of weeks on-site, each day getting praise from various locals around the town and drinking tea with many that spoke no English. Vivien came over from Australia and our tour of India began.
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Where to stay in the Mangalore Area
If you are thinking of staying around Mangalore, there is a wide range of accommodation options available for various budgets. Whether you want a homestay experience, a modern hotel room, or a beachside villa, Mangalore has different stays available.
