For most people Eyjafjallajokull must now feel like a distant memory...and thank god for that. Frankly everyone's had enough of it! In the interest of brevity I'm going to call it 'The volcano' henceforth and hopefully that will also make it just a little easier to read :-)
Notwithstanding the immense dislocation, inconvenience and pain the volcano had indirectly caused to millions of travellers and businesses, I can't help but smile when I look at the other side of the story...Mother Nature had the final laugh. It's almost as if she wanted to prove a point to us lesser mortals than our reckless and disdainful attitude towards nature and conservation shall not go unpunished, and she has her own way of reminding us that in the larger scheme of things she and she alone calls the shots. Mother Nature in a week had done what greenpeace activists can only dream about. Tens of thousand of planes off the skies for a week...can you imagine how many barrels of oil have been conserved.
Needless to say the Volcano has been a pain in the wrong place for millions of people. Pardon me for the use of such crass language but I feel it truly captures both the sentiments of people and the reality of what happened i.e. several million people stranded in airports across the world sitting on their bottoms for days on end waiting for the winds to change direction...quite literally! Enough has been said about the economic loss resulting from the Icelandic volcano. No one was spared - Airlines who had to ground flights for nearly a week, countless tourists who had to pay exorbitant rates to extend accommodation in some fancy resort (nullifying the money they had 'saved' through deal hunting!), missed business meetings and conferences, and tragically missed funerals and weddings too. The list is endless.
However as they say this "ash" cloud too has a silver lining, quite a few actually. Some businesses surely made a killing. Demand for hotels rooms skyrocketed. Ok..granted that they probably didn't have inbound guests checking in as planned, but hey when existing guests are desperate to get a room to park themselves overnight, charging 'reasonable' rates was the last thing in the hoteliers' minds. Ferries, trains, taxis, and I believe bicycles were in short supply...unbelievable!
What I find more interesting to ruminate on is the legacy that the volcano is bound to leave behind including a huge number of business opportunities for budding entrepreneurs and well established businesses. Almost certainly the likes of GE and Rolls Royce have set up teams to exploit the commercial opportunity that has presented itself from literally from the bowels of the earth (fyi..I'm referring to volcanic magma here!). "Volcanic ash resistant jet engines"..sounds fancy ain't it! Equally likely is the possibility that some financial wiz in Wall Street is developing a fancy insurance product to deal with risks arising from Volcanic ash. It's an altogether different matter than no one including the originator of the product probably has any idea of how this financial instrument will work...who cares anyways. Pardon my cynicism.
The list of beneficiaries is longer. Risk management specialists are probably working on new risk mitigation and disaster recovery strategies. Academicians in B-schools will inevitably come up with case studies on the events gone by. While this might seem extreme politicians in the opposition were probably even plotting on how to bring down the incumbent governments for their inadequate response to the volcanic ash (definitely a possibility in South Asian politics).
All is well that ends well and hopefully all of us will pick up a few good lessons for life from Eyjafjallajokull!
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