Dhaka, Nov. 6 -- Nov 12 is the 55th anniversary of the cyclone of 1970, which took the lives of at least 500,000 people of the coastal areas of Bangladesh. In October of that year, there had been a smaller cyclone which cost 300 lives and by Nov 8, 1970, a cyclone was being tracked in the Bay of Bengal and the authorities assumed that people, in anticipation, would move to safer places.

However, nobody expected winds of up to 225kph which occurred at the same time as the highest tides, and the information of the level of destruction took a few days to get to Dhaka and the outside world.

On Nov 13, the Pakistan Observer had a headline: "50 feared lost in coastal cyclone". However, on Nov 15, the Daily Mirror in London received a garbled ...