HOUSTON — I am sure that by now many of you have seen the heartening pictures of the countless volunteers here in Houston, lining up to help out in the wake of Hurricane Harvey, kayaking to the rescue, opening their homes to strangers, feeding the hungry from their own kitchens. The scenes are even more moving in person, when you see the pickup trucks piled high with plastic bags of donations causing traffic jams around the George R. Brown Convention Center, and still more people coming in on foot, bearing boxes of diapers, dog food, bar soap, pillows, blankets and virtually anything else a human in an emergency could use.

But while I’m more than grateful for the love that locals and outsiders have shown my adopted hometown, it’s just not going to be enough. Gov. Greg Abbott said on Wednesday that the scope of this disaster is far larger than Hurricanes Sandy and Katrina, which cost $50 billion and $120 billion, respectively. For that, it’s going to take strong, active, big government — something Texas famously has a problem with.

When people ask me why I live in a place with a climate like Kolkata’s, traffic rivaling that of Los Angeles and cockroaches the size of baby mice — and they ask me a lot — my answer has always been: the people. The people are just so nice.



I’ve seen countless instances of that spirit this past week. It’s a profoundly Houston crowd, the kind that always amazes those of us who were here before the great economic boom of the late 1970s and early ’80s began turning this place into an international city with global ambitions. Unloading my donations on Tuesday afternoon, I took direction from a Scottish immigrant and watched a tattooed Latino teenager ask a police officer the way to the drop-off. Prosperous matrons from the West University neighborhood, accessorized with blue latex gloves, sorted mountains of clothes.