The young pilot of the Enola Gay had been entrusted, on that odd and fateful August day, with the most murderous of missions. From the cockpit of the B-29 Superfortress bomber, which he had named after his mother, he was to drop the brainchild of the Manhattan Project, namely an atom bomb, on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. A few seconds after he released his deadly cargo, thousands of people were dead and a city annihilated. The same nightmare was to be unleashed on Nagasaki three days later. The nuclear age had arrived and the world would never be the same?

Just like the Americans used a terrible weapon to put an end to the folly that was World War 2, the natural world chose last week to grate its tectonic plates and blow swathes of entire countries away. If humankind continues on its hubristic course of tampering with the earth?s natural settings by polluting and exploiting it, such extreme weather events may become more commonplace. There is no such thing as free lunch and we have been plundering our environment with such orgiastic greed for centuries now that the blue planet may decide to live up to its name.

The human race has waged war on almost everything, including religions, races, ideologies, terrorism, war itself and even poverty. It would be proper for us to pause and think once in a while that the weather is in possession of unrivalled powers of devastation. It doesn?t have an agenda, just an allergy to all the rubbish we?ve been pouring into its land, seas and atmosphere. By not ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, George W. Bush declared war on a far more potent force than all the terrorist groups of the world put together.

Not since the West spat its radioactive wrath on Hiroshima and Nagasaki have so many people perished so anonymously and instantaneously. The death toll, which already beggars belief, will continue to rise steadily as typhoid, cholera, diarrhea, dengue, malnutrition, malaria add their contribution to the cataclysm of the century.

As tidal waves pounded mercilessly down on villages and towns across the Indian Ocean basin, Mauritians were having fun frolicking in the pregnant surf. The tsunami came and went and we were spared the death, destruction and disease that our neighbours have, in the space of a week, become all too familiar with. Let this be proof that, after all the gloom and doom the country has been putting itself through, Mauritius is still a great place to live in.

We will, moreover, soon be hosting the United Nations International Meeting on Small Island Developing States where the subjects of natural catastrophes and climate change will occupy pride of place. Mauritius and other nations of its ilk will attempt to stress the particularity of our vulnerabilities and the necessity for us to be treated accordingly.

The inappropriateness of the leader of the opposition?s mumbling and grumbling about the cost incurred for such an event was painfully highlighted by photographs of the south east Asian apocalypse. Such shortsightedness will be an obstacle to the development of an early warning system for the region. Just like hosting an UN meeting, the creation of such a tool will demand international cooperation and considerable investment. If we don?t learn to change our habits, tsunami won?t be the only Japanese word we learn the hard way. Sayonara, or goodbye, might be next?