Inside the Rajiv Gandhi Indoor Stadium in the heart of Kochi, close to a thousand volunteers, most of them in their 20s, are hard at work collecting a variety of food and essential supplies, making lists, packing them into huge cardboard boxes and stacking them at the backs of trucks and pickup vans.
These young men and women form the backbone of ‘Anbodu Kochi’ (with love, Kochi), an initiative by the Ernakulam district administration to coordinate and channelise the food and relief supplies towards a large number of shelter camps on the outskirts of the city housing thousands of people whose homes have been ravaged by violent floods. The same team, consisting of several Malayalam actors and actresses, had worked wonders in sending a large number of relief supplies to Chennai when it faced devastating floods in December, 2015.