Indians, especially those living along the coasts, live by a new folklore - tsunami. It is the proverbial Goliath waiting to annihilate all who dare to come on its path as it did extinguishing more than 200,000 lives.

Small wonder, the fear is here to stay. Soon after the December 26 disaster, there have being news reports that another one is in the offing.

The earthquake off the north western coast of Sumatra had a magnitude of 9.3, making it the second most powerful earthquake ever recorded, surpassed only by a 9.5 monster in Chile in 1960.

The quake wrenched up the sea floor along a 1,200-kilometre line, unleashing waves that towered up to 15 metres (49 feet) and scoured the coastlines of the northern Indian Ocean.

But was this a one-time affair? Earthquake experts hate to predict but in this case they seem certain it will occur in the near future and will repeat itself at the same spot.

"All the warning lights are flashing bright red," says Paul Tapponnier, a researcher at the Paris Institute for Planetary Physics (IPGP).

"It's like a shirt which rips open. When one button pops, all the others are placed under greater pressure," Tapponier says.

With such predictions it was natural that Indians, many of whom are intrinsically associated with nature, had a reason to fear.

An instance of it was seen when soon after the Mumbai deluge (July 26 rains), a false rumour spread. On the night of July 28, rumours started spreading that a tsunami warning had been issued in Mumbai. Some 16 people, eight of them children, were killed in a stampede in Nehru Nagar.