'Pause before you punch:' Anand Mahindra responds to Sanjiv Kapoor's 'incorrect analogy' on Dubai floods

‘Pause before you punch:’ Anand Mahindra responds to Sanjiv Kapoor’s ‘incorrect analogy’ on Dubai floods

Anand Mahindra took to X to react a day after Jet Airways CEO-designate Sanjiv Kapoor responded to the Mahindra Group Chairman’s post on Dubai floods. On Wednesday, the billionaire industrialist had shared a video of a waterlogged road in Dubai and had written, “Nope. Not Mumbai. Dubai.” Kapoor retweeted the post and called it an “incorrect analogy”.

On Thursday, however, Mahindra reacted to Kapoor’s comment and wrote, “I’m glad you subsequently retracted your comment implying that I was mocking Dubai, Sanjiv.”

“In fact, the only purpose of my post was to highlight how atypical this weather was for Dubai. For example — to use your own analogy — if it had ever snowed in Mumbai, I might well have said: Nope, not Oslo Mumbai. For the very same purpose of highlighting how atypical this weather was for Mumbai; Not to mock Mumbai,” Mahindra further added.

He also recommended Kapoor to pause before punching and reflect before reacting while concluding the post.

For the unversed, Kapoor had called out Mahindra for his “incorrect analogy” while talking about the floods in Dubai. “Dubai was not built for such heavy rains – rains that would flood most cities. A better analogy would be if it suddenly snowed heavily in Bombay, which was obviously not built to handle snow at all. Would people in snowy Oslo mock Bombay?” he had written.

However, in a separate tweet, he clarified his stance. “Ok, upon re-reading the post, maybe it is not mocking Dubai. However, the point remains Dubai was not built for heavy rains, no matter what the source of the rain (seeding etc). It would be impractical to build cities to handle any extreme weather scenario, however unlikely.”

Meanwhile, Dubai has been hit with a torrential downpour resulting in disruption of day-to-day activities. Amid heavy rain in the desert city, a string of flights has been cancelled or delayed, affecting several people.

On Tuesday, heavy rainfall lashed several parts of the city resulting in flooding of major highways, roads and the subway. A storm in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) dumped a year-and-a-half worth’s rainfall in Dubai in just a few hours.

The state-run WAM news agency called the rain on Tuesday “a historic weather event” that surpassed “anything documented since the start of data collection in 1949.”