The Indian Consulate in Bali has opened a help desk at the Ngurah Rai international airport for Indians who have been left stranded.
Indonesian authorities announced that the Ngurah Rai international airport on the resort island of Bali would be closed for a third day on Wednesday after an erupting volcano spewed ash more than 7 km high, AP reported.
Indonesia has ordered the evacuation of 1,00,000 people living near Mount Agung after it began spewing ash and dark smoke. Almost 30,000 people have already left the area since Mount Agung began erupting on Saturday.
The airport is expected to be closed until Thursday morning.
More than 440 flights were cancelled on Tuesday, airport spokesperson Ari Ahsanurrohim said. Nearly 1,20,000 passengers are stranded at the airport. Stranded tourists have to travel for hours on land or take a boat to another island.
The volcanic ash has not yet been detected at the airport, but observations from the Darwin Volcanic Ash Advisory Center show the ash was being blown toward the site, Ahsanurrohim said.
The Indian Consulate in Bali has opened a help desk at the Ngurah Rai international airport for Indians who have been left stranded on the resort island. Minister of External Affairs Sushma Swaraj had said on Twitter that she was in touch with Pradeep Rawat, the country’s ambassador to Indonesia, and the consulate in Bali.
Mount Agung had erupted last in 1963, killing 1,600 people. The volcano started spewing ash again in September, forcing authorities to raise the alert to the highest level and 1,40,000 people living nearby to evacuate. By the end of October, the volcanic activity reduced, people returned to their homes and the alert was lowered to the second-highest level.
On November 21, Mount Agung rumbled again, forcing 25,000 people to seek shelter, but authorities did not raise the alert level till Monday morning, after the volcano started emitting “continuous ash puffs”, the disaster management agency said in a statement on its Facebook page. “The rays of fire are increasingly observed at night. This indicates the potential for a larger eruption is imminent.”
The eruptions could either be large and disastrous, or be relatively minor over time.
Having come of age in the Age of the Internet, millennials had a rocky start to self-expression. Indeed, the internet allowed us to personalise things in unprecedented fashion and we really rose to the occasion. The learning curve to a straightforward firstname.surname@___mail.com email address was a long one, routed through cringeworthy e-mail ids like coolgal1234@hotmail.com. You know you had one – making a personalised e-mail id was a rite of passage for millennials after all.
Declaring yourself to be cool, a star, a princess or a hunk boy was a given (for how else would the world know?!). Those with eclectic tastes (read: juvenile groupies) would flaunt their artistic preferences with an elitist flair. You could take for granted that bitbybeatlemania@hotmail.com and hpfan@yahoo.com would listen to Bollywood music or read Archie comics only in private. The emo kids, meanwhile, had to learn the hard way that employers probably don’t trust candidates with e-mail ids such as depressingdystopian@gmail.com.
And with chat rooms, early millennials had found a way to communicate, with…interesting results. The oldest crop of millennials (30+ year olds) learnt to deal with the realities of adolescent life hunched behind anonymous accounts, spewing their teenage hormone-laden angst, passion and idealism to other anonymous accounts. Skater_chick could hide her ineptitude for skating behind a convincing username and a skateboard-peddling red-haired avatar, and you could declare your fantasies of world domination, armed with the assurance that no one would take you seriously.
With the rise of blogging, millennial individualism found a way to express itself to millions of people across the world. The verbosity of ‘intellectual’ millennials even shone through in their blog URLs and names. GirlWhoTravels could now opine on her adventures on the road to those who actually cared about such things. The blogger behind scentofpetunia.blogspot.com could choose to totally ignore petunias and no one would question why. It’s a tradition still being staunchly upheld on Tumblr. You’re not really a Tumblr(er?) if you haven’t been inspired to test your creative limits while crafting your blog URL. Fantasy literature and anime fandoms to pop-culture fanatics and pizza lovers- it’s where people of all leanings go to let their alter ego thrive.
Then of course social media became the new front of self-expression on the Internet. Back when social media was too much of a millennial thing for anyone to meddle with, avatars and usernames were a window into your personality and fantasies. Suddenly, it was cool to post emo quotes of Meredith Grey on Facebook and update the world on the picturesque breakfast you had (or not). Twitter upped the pressure by limiting expression to 140 characters (now 280-have you heard?) and the brevity translated to the Twitter handles as well. The trend of sarcasm-and-wit-laden handles is still alive well and has only gotten more sophisticated with time. The blogging platform Medium makes the best of Twitter intellect in longform. It’s here that even businesses have cool account names!
Self-expression on the Internet and the millennials’ love for the personalised and customised has indeed seen an interesting trajectory. Most millennial adolescents of yore though are now grownups, navigating an adulting crisis of mammoth proportions. How to wake up in time for classes, how to keep the boss happy, how to keep from going broke every month, how to deal with the new F-word – Finances! Don’t judge, finances can be stressful at the beginning of a career. Forget investments, loans and debts, even matters of simple money transactions are riddled with scary terms like beneficiaries, NEFT, IMPS, RTGS and more. Then there’s the quadruple checking to make sure you input the correct card, IFSC or account number. If this wasn’t stressful enough, there’s the long wait while the cheque is cleared or the fund transfer is credited. Doesn’t it make you wish there was a simpler way to deal with it all? If life could just be like…
Lo and behold, millennial prayers have been heard! Airtel Payments Bank, India’s first, has now integrated UPI on its digital platform, making banking over the phone easier than ever. Airtel Payments Bank UPI, or Unified Payment Interface, allows you to transfer funds and shop and pay bills instantly to anyone any time without the hassles of inputting any bank details – all through a unique Virtual Payment Address.
