How are you, really?

Today is the 3rd day since Mohanty Babu passed away from a sudden cardiac arrest. A midlevel executive in a government department, he was to retire in May. These days when we see young people in their thirties, fit and fine with no medical history to worry about dropping dead without notice; the death of an almost senior citizen should not raise any eyebrow.

It was just one of those events which happened every day.

 

It was quite a shock for his wife as she had never spotted any signs of illness or stress which could be possibly corroding him from within; ditto his colleagues and relatives. His family stand devastated and distraught.

 

More information emerged about him after the usual chaos and hurly-burly of cremation got over.

 

Mohanty Babu married late because he had to settle his brothers and sisters. Now all of them are settled outside the state, he continued to be the sole bridge of his joint family taking the load of every small and big social and financial issue. He was the local face of his big joint family. He has not been able to build a house for himself and his daughter has just passed +2. His close relatives were naturally concerned. It was obvious that he must have been under a lot of stress and was possibly staring worryingly at the post-retirement life and the liabilities he was saddled with. His calm demeanour and routine lifestyle have successfully camouflaged the fire inside.

 

Are we going through similar worries that are choking us? Have we shared it with anyone close?

Was he alone or many are going through the same phase? Have we tried to spot them and tried to know?

 

When someone says "Hi, how are you?", it is typically a friendly greeting and a way for the person to show that they are interested in your well-being. It is a common greeting in English, but it can be a great way to start a conversation. It shows that you are interested in the other person and that you care about how they are doing. It's a way of asking someone how they are doing, both physically and emotionally. It can be used in both formal and informal settings, but it's more common in informal settings.

 

There are many different ways to respond to "How are you?". Some common responses include "I'm fine, thank you.", "I'm doing well.", "I'm good.", "I'm not too bad.".

The way we are expected to respond will depend on how we are actually doing and how well we know the person we are talking to.

 

If you are close friends with someone, you might be more likely to share more personal information about how you are doing. If you are talking to someone you don't know very well, you might be more likely to give a more general response.

 

A person can ask "Hi, how are you?" as a form of greeting while not being interested in the answer. In some cases, this could be due to habit, social convention, or a lack of genuine interest. In these situations, it's common for people to provide a standard response, even if it is not an accurate reflection of their true feelings.

 

Let’s try to recollect when was the last time we responded by saying "I'm hanging in there.", "I could be better." Or "I'm terrible."? Perhaps never.

 

In the era of social media, we have become accustomed to raving and ranting about the state and projecting a filtered successful and happy picture of ourselves. In this pervasive culture have we turned secretive ourselves or feel that our worries are not anyone’s concern? Or, we have turned passive to others’ worries in the name of not being too inquisitive or respectful of their wishes and privacy?

 

This shows how as individuals we have learnt not to share our worries with others and collectively as a community, we have stopped paying attention to other’s worries. 

 

Men are the biggest victims of this. From their childhood days are taught to be tough. They are socially conditioned not to complain about their pain both physical and emotional, people in their lives, their personal and professional situations and if they do, they are seen as weak, a loser, feminine and a whiner. When he grows up, he learns to accept the situation without complaint and fight it out and to protect the ones he is responsible for like his immediate family by not sharing the details of his problems. He does not want them to get affected by his worries. Somewhere there is that confidence that he can solve it with time, alone.

 

He unknowingly subscribes to the saying – Mard ko kabhi dard nahin hota. In the bargain, he lives like a living pressure cooker ready to explode anytime.

 

The solution lies not in the final resolution of what is causing his worries but in learning to destress himself by sharing his worries with a close confidant or sharing them with the people he wants to protect from these worries.

 

What are we doing to inquire about others' worries with the tone and intention to offer a solution or do our bit to alleviate his fears?

 

The answer to that lies in establishing a close relationship with your near ones where you can spot is worries from a distance and ask, “How are you, really?”

 

Which in no uncertain terms means “Cut the crap! And tell me what's wrong?”, “Dude, you done being so formal? Now tell me what's going on.”, “I know you lied that you're fine. I care for you, tell me what's bothering you.”, “Oh you depressed? You look pretty happy in your pictures. Now please clear the confusion & tell me how you are.”. 

 

Kaifi Azmi captured the same emotions when he wrote his famous song – Tum Itna Kyon muskura rahe ho, kya ghum hai jisko chupa rahe ho.

 

Do we have such a friend in our life who can see the pain behind our smiles and ask us “How are you, really”, and do we have the ability and attitude to say “How are you, really” to a friend who possibly is grappling with pain behind his projected happy façade?

 

Our empathy and sincerity in participating in somebody’s problems will develop a culture that will save dozens of lives around us, including our own.

 

*

What Do You Do?

It was still fifteen minutes to daybreak.

Usually, in the winter season, you don’t expect many people in this part of the park unless they are serious morning walkers. And I was preparing myself for a solitary walk in the misty dark morning.

But I was not alone; there was another walker ahead of me - I had company.

I, with my longer strides, chose to overtake the person who had made it to the park ahead of me. I came close and realized that though his strides are small, he is equally fast. After walking alongside for a few strides and making eye contact with him, I realized that I knew him. Here not wishing him was not an option. We met during some official event maybe a year back.

I wished him by nodding my head and with a smile and he reciprocated, I chose to walk at his pace as it suited me too. And we got talking about things in general. A lot of our interest areas were common. And as is my wont, I was quite candid about putting my tuppence in about things without bothering to know what he thought about it. He voiced his own opinions and agreed with most of mine either by voicing a laugh or by adding his to it and to the ones he didn’t agree with, he remained silent.

Amidst our discussion, he asked me – What do I do?

That’s the Indian way of asking for your professional position. I gave mine. And told him where we met last. I realized that he didn’t recollect our encounter.

I continued with my conversation.

After about ten minutes I realized some change and when I looked at him a little surprised by his reticence, I saw a mask of absolute disinterest in his face. While we were in an animated conversation a few minutes back, it had turned into a monologue. While he agreed with most of my points then, now he is dismissing it with an air of finality to end that topic.

He chose to pause without giving a reason. Almost asking me to go ahead with my walk.

The reason for his changed behaviour did not escape my eyes.

Another incident a few weeks later in the same park.

I saw this man in his late forties, with a typical successful businessman look coming towards me from the opposite side. We got close and he wished me with a Namaskar, and I reciprocated by doing the same. I didn’t know him and was quite touched by his gesture early in the morning. While exiting the park some thirty minutes later, I saw him standing near the gate with a few community members – I knew some of them. The next day almost at the same spot I saw him coming, and as I was gearing up to smile and wish him, he didn’t react. We breezed past each other as two unknown people.

The reason for his changed behaviour didn’t escape my eyes.

Neither of them knew me and was possibly misled by my important-looking appearance. It misleads many. The former, upon knowing my profession (What I do) realized that I don’t belong to his power hierarchy or social league and by mistake he had given me more time and ear to my conversation and chose to detach himself from it as I was not his equal; the latter, upon knowing from my acquaintances about what I do, realized that I am of no immediate value as his contact.

I introspected and realized that I am of no immediate value to most of the people in our community. I live in a community where I am not equal to many in terms of material wealth, power, and position and to those I am superior, I pose no threat to their interest or don’t offer any potential benefit – directly or indirectly. To both segments of people, I am not a potential contact they would like to nurture.

I was worthless to both.

This realization of worthlessness can be devastating to one’s self-worth and ego, especially to those unfamiliar with how Indians operate. Your identity as a person having other talents, capabilities, knowledge, and wisdom pales when put to test in this Risk-Benefit model.

Can you affect their interest negatively because of your position or positively by providing beneficial opportunities that determine your relevance in the community and the related interest to socialize with you or befriend you?

Is this a general behaviour?

While travelling in public transportation like a bus, train or flight, if you strike up a conversation with someone; the fourth or fifth sentence would be a question – What do you do? Don’t read it literally and answer. By that they don’t want to know about what you do at your work, they want to know a lot more. The sector you work in; private or public. The rank and position you hold. The country or city you work in.

Your answer will help him know your ‘Auqat’ – your worth, your value for him, which will make him treat you like God or Dog. The position that will give you an unbridled opportunity to abuse the power with zero accountability is hilariously called ‘Service’. Indians love that trophy behind that service and worship the one who sits there. No wonder we Indians are so obsessed with a few jobs. Either you make it to those positions or at least develop contact with them so that you can enjoy some of the largesse that can come your way.

In the book, Being Indian, Pavan K. Verma surgically bares open this typical trait in the Indians. He deals with this matter in the chapter – Power and how your worth is evaluated by your fellow community members.

Beneath the veneer of modernity and development we project, we are a deeply divided lot - Insular and class-conscious. We are ready to genuflect before the one who wields power to harm us or benefit us and not bat an eyelid to destroy or misbehave with someone less powerful or below us.

Some positions can be described in just three abbreviations which can make the person in front of you change his body language; take his hands above his ears bend his spine and give that smile that a small male monkey does when he meets a baboon bigger than him, and there are ranks which will make him see through you and dismiss your existence as some doormat.

Why are such achievements so aspirational?

Is it because of our background of being ruled by the erstwhile kings in a feudal set-up? Why do we want to give a substantial part of our life to catapult ourselves to a position that will make our fellow beings treat us as their rulers and we can treat them as our servants? It’s quite normal if they expect to be treated as royalty and you to behave subservient to them. Society neither resents it nor tries to change it. Why is it that despite being one of the largest democracies, we want a leader who doesn’t look like one of us but like someone sent from above? If he is one of us or from ranks below us, we will only respect him if he stands to cause harm to our interests and help us in achieving our aspirations.

Will this behaviour ever change? The answer lies in the question - will we change?

Not so Jawan Anymore

She refused to buy tickets for the movie Jawan for the 7th time today.

The movie Jawan was released on the 7th of this month and by today the global collection stands to cross 750 Cr. Each time its collection crossed a 100 Cr mark, I would get curious to see what was attracting people in hordes and would goad her to buy tickets. “My friends in Hyderabad have seen the movie and I know you and your taste; you will fret and fume and leave the hall halfway dragging all of us out with you. I don’t want to spoil my evening” was her reply. She was clear and firm on her stand this time too.

 

With my sole online booking agent refusing to comply, I am left with the only option of counting the box office collection without contributing a rupee to it. Both my taste, and opinion, and not buying its ticket are irrelevant to the success of the movie.

 

Our exposure to the world of cinema started in the early 80s when we had an array of movies to choose from. If the kitschy deluge of southern productions led by Sridevi and Jayaprada made us whistle and hoot; the best of parallel cinema by Ray, Mrinal Sen, Gautam Ghose, and Shyam Benegal made us think and Sai Paranjpe, Kundan Shah brand of humour made us smile and yearn for more. We always identified ourselves as what Ray would have termed as that sophisticated movie viewer who had the class and intellect to understand certain types of movies his ilk made.

 

To the current industry neither his review matters nor his contribution to the till. He is as irrelevant as the Khan Market intellectuals in the glitzy and noisy market of joy and celebration of India.

 

A few months back Nattu Nattu from the movie RRR won not only the Golden Globe under the best original song category but stunned all of us by winning the 95th Oscar. 

 

Deepika Padukone in the award ceremony stunned the audience with her looks, presence, and her electrifying smiles and spoke in her Indian accent, social media was abuzz with heaps of appreciation for her. Her speech to introduce the story of RRR was interrupted by intermittent cheers when she introduced the song Nattu Nattu as a Banger. The audience had not seen anything like this earlier. A team enacted the song on the stage and so riotous and energy-filled was the performance that the presenter Jimmy Kimmel was almost driven away by the dancers who performed on stage. Jimmy said, “This year we are not gonna play you off stage instead we have a group of performers from the movie RRR who are going to dance you offstage”.

 

Remember, a few years back the same Western movie world looked quizzically at the song and dance sequence of our typical movie. The characters breaking into a sudden song or a dance at every situation be it comic or tragic was something the Westerners couldn’t understand. 

But undaunted we kept producing such content because we loved it. 

 

The best of our directors and parallel cinema never got the attention of the Western movie industry barring a copy of Ray by Spielberg and a fan note by Scorsese. Now many like Priyanka Chopra have established themselves as mainstream actors doing a variety of roles and not playing the typical Asian immigrant anymore.  

 

The Bollywood songs and steps and Bhangra Punjabi beats are now an international culture to reckon with and the inspiration behind millions of views of reels, and shorts in the social media. The ones who have joined the bandwagon are just not Indians but people from the world over. 

 

A person with a rational mind and sophisticated taste can never sit through the antics and actions of a Rajnikant movie but the fact that he has more than 50,000 registered fan clubs and millions of fans in India and across the world is a tide big enough to throw these sophistication and sensible minds to the roadside.

 

Today no movie is running in parallel for that sophisticated viewer and no political party is ready to accommodate the Khan Market liberal narrative of the current situation. Those viewers with fine taste and sensibility are seen secretly wishing to see SRK and Nayanthara dishing out outrageous acts from the widescreen along with the masses and those ivory tower liberals are making rounds of the temples aligning themselves with the majoritarian. 

 

The kitsch and subaltern have arrived and are here to stay.

The lower segment of both social and cultural classes of society has crashed into the upper segment of higher consumption. And the market like a prostitute is too flexible just not to accommodate them but to bend itself to their liking. Sad but that's how cultures get formed and evolved. Market forces and popular politics are not the best ways to determine the right economics and politics for a country. At times I agree with Plato when he said not everyone should be given the power to vote.

If movies like Jawan, Pathan, and Gaddar 2 eat up 100% of the market. I don't hope to see a movie like Lunch Box will be ever made. It's a great loss to our cultural landscape. If everyone in the country becomes a fanboy of one person it will be a great loss to our democracy. 

 

The message of India is clear, love us, hate us, ridicule us, or ignore us but we are what we are. We don’t need your approval. We are mast in our world and your fine taste be damned. 

 

We are a world!

Science and Superstition

ISRO successfully launched Chandrayan 3's third lunar exploration mission on 14^th July 2023. It is expected to make a soft landing on the southern lunar pole after a month-long journey on 23^rd August. When the GSLV Mark 3 (LVM 3) heavy-lift launch vehicle lifted off successfully from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Andhra Pradesh’s Sriharikota as per the scheduled launch time at 2.35 PM, the roar of the engines symbolically matched just not the joy of the people behind it, but the euphoria of the whole nation who celebrated the achievement. India stands to become the 99^th country that has such technological capabilities. The picture of ISRO scientists carrying a rocket on a bicycle to this launch of the 14^th describes the story of India which in just 75 years emerged from its struggle with poverty, malnutrition, disease, and early mortality to assert its position as a global political, economic and knowledge power to reckon with.

Basic knowledge empowers us and can make us arrogant but higher knowledge and wisdom make us aware of the limitation of our knowledge and our powerlessness.

When a neuro or a cardiothoracic surgeon bows before his God, before attempting a complex surgery to save his patient, his act demonstrates that he is nervous and aware of his limitations and the large number of exogenous factors which can affect his best-laid plans and efforts negatively. He is aware of the hopes of the patient and his relatives who think that he only can pull off a miracle after God himself. He is in the same situation as a gladiator who is expected to slay the lion by hundreds of onlookers in the gallery. He just prays for those uncertainties, and unknown and hostile forces not to act here. The doctor and the scientists are not allowed to philosophize about failures.

It's difficult for a rationalist with primary school-level knowledge of science to understand that the doctors and scientists at ISRO are not superstitious - they are humble, sincere, and wise; they want their efforts to succeed.

When Oppenheimer quoted Bhagawat Geeta after the first nuclear test, he didn't speak as a Hindu fanatic but as a wise man who knew how that act stands to destroy and change the world forever.

Time to grow out of the ego state empowered by the mechanistic and reductionist interpretation of the science we know so far and bow before those limitless powers of which we are not even aware. The scientists of the Western world who propounded and popularised those models are realizing their own folly after bringing the world to the throes of destruction in the name of industrialization and economic development.

Many treat those unknown powerful forces as Gods and not everyone who bows before those forces are religious and superstitious.

The Weed and our losing battle with it

Hold your horses. I am not going to discuss the kind of plant whose parts make some people get high and happy. The title is a bit misleading. This piece is about any plant growing where it is not wanted and our losing fight with it. The story of our fight with weeds is just not limited to the state excise department burning them deep inside some forest or apprehending the contraband in baleful during transit. 

It is as old as the fight of humanity with hunger.

Perhaps humans dealt the first dent on nature by altering it, when they identified the plants they need for their food and shelter, and they understood how and where the plants grow the best. And then he chose to be a settled agriculturist from the hunter-gatherer life of his earlier generations.

Human civilization blossomed when humans were assured of their basic requirements of food, clothing, and shelter. His engagement with agriculture provided those basics. He kept on improving that craft and his skill to deal with agriculture. That craft made him alter the contour of the land, change the quality of the soil, and regulate the quantity of water that is required for the plant to yield its best. And obviously, he didn’t want to share these carefully and painfully curated resources with anyone else. He built borders to lay his claim over the land, built fences to prevent wild animals and other humans from eating and destroying his crop, and developed various poisons of a special kind to keep the weeds, microorganisms, and animals trying to live off the same soil by consuming its nutrients.

If June made us rejoice with the arrival of monsoon, by August we are seen suffering its excess. Flood, vector-borne diseases like malaria and dengue, and water-borne diseases like typhoid, cholera, and dysentery become commonplace. Not to mention cold and cough which visit every household. The rainy season in our kind of semi-tropical climate is known as the disease season. The abundance of water and sunshine make plants of every kind grow much faster. Man, while struggling with excess water, has also to deal with diseases and overgrown trees, and shrubs everywhere. On the roof, at the shades of windows, driveway, garden, under the trees, and is well-curated lawn. Knowing that any effort to take them out is pointless, he patiently waits for the rains to stop before he does a major de-weeding.

This battle of man to banish the weed and the millions of known and unknown microorganisms which naturally lived on the land he has staked his claim recently is an interesting one.

The size of the academic institutions and research laboratories and the industries which collectively supply him with the knowledge, technology, tools, tackles, equipment, and chemicals are of staggering size. Man’s struggle with the weeds is routine and perpetual. It’s like the fight between Tom and Jerry of the Walt Disney animation series.

And both parties are stubborn not to give up.

So sure is the man about his confidence in eliminating anything and everything that he doesn’t want or is of no use to him, that he has forgotten that such pursuits have rendered the air he breaths, the water he drinks, and the soil he grows his food poisonous because of the novel chemicals he is mindlessly pumping to control the living beings which are not to his liking.

A documentary by David Attenborough on such plants comes to mind.

There he throws a different light on these plants. He showed how these resilient species strike their roots in the most inhospitable places like cemented courtyards, stone walls, cobblestone paved sidewalks, and a small hole in the drainpipe system to strike their roots and grow. Not only do they strike their roots for a short period, but they allow similar species to colonize their surrounding areas. It’s said if humans vacate their modern habitations and dwelling structures, nature will reclaim these properties in just a few years and these weeds will be at the forefront of such reclamation. The stone structures will last hundreds of years but steel and glass won’t last more than a few decades. Trees will certainly dominate the landscape within just a few years.

Natural processes continue in and around even occupied cities. One could reasonably argue that once cities are abandoned and human influence is removed, it is immediately reclaimed by nature because all that’s left are wild animals, plants, fungi, and bacteria. In the case of Chernobyl, a 1,000-square-mile exclusion zone was abandoned 31 years ago because of a nuclear power plant accident. It has been reclaimed by plants and wildlife that appear to be able to live and reproduce despite the radioactivity.

The hubris of humans to de-weed the world is rightly matched by the nemesis of nature which threaten to recolonize their lost land anytime. These weeds are lurking all around us waiting to find a small crack, a crevice to find a toehold just enough for its seed or spore invisible to us. They need only time and our absence.

We should be happy about just this one thing. 

That if the human species is wiped out from the face of Earth for its follies or due to some dramatic natural calamity caused by any extra-terrestrial events, there is still hope for this blue planet to regenerate to its past glory.

What is friendship to you?

The day before yesterday when I was about to finish a quiet dinner with a friend of mine at a corner table in a not-so-crowded restaurant, a new-age reporter with a camera in one hand and a Rode wireless microphone in another rattled me by asking this question. They were creating content for the hotel which is organising an event for Friendship Day.

I was unprepared.

Not because I didn't know what it was to me, but because I was at a loss how to capture this enormous multi-dimensional variegated feeling that we all have been living with since our adolescent days in a few casual sentences. I chose to dodge.

But it kept haunting me.

There are friends and there are experiences with friends - two different things. My analytical mind dissected the players and the experience which emanates from their interactions.

We all have the experience of having friends.

If there was one best friend during our school days, we would have lost touch with him after we got transferred. Met new people and made new friends. Some of them would have become our best friends with whom we would have liked to spend most of our available time with. Few of them would have chosen to walk away, and a few we would have liked to drop for whatever reason best known to us. We would have let a few down, and a few would have let us down - bored us, frustrated us, betrayed us, hurt us, disappointed us. In our lives, we see dozens of best friends. So, one can quickly identify who is the current best friend but can't describe all the best friends by giving one overarching definition for all of them.

So, friends are just another relationship - strong, fragile, temporary, and temporal.

If it’s challenging to define friends, it's equally difficult to determine the gamut of feelings a deep friendship offers in one umbrella definition.

We border on the danger of using the words which describe our expectations from a friend as the feelings of friendship. Words like, trust, transaction, dependency, joy, and so many are the human expectations of a relationship - not the feelings of friendship.

But then what are the feelings of friendship?

The answer to this can be found by observing the feelings that we experience with the friends we are currently engaged with?

To me, it's some kind of intimacy that attracts us to spend time with each other in either a physical or virtual way. We are attracted to share and interact on issues that are personal, social, intellectual, recreational, spiritual, of shared interest, or which are our common goals. It's gender, age, and status neutral. It can be between two lovers, between a husband and wife, a mother and her daughter, and two different unrelated people who would have met just a few days ago.

It's that state when you connect a dozen times a day, and keep each other informed about the mundane things happening at that moment. You laugh and giggle forgetting the worries around you.

It's about finding a universe of joy in that moment.

How can there be any relationship if two people don't enjoy being with each other? How pleasant was the experience? That's the beginning of every human relationship smaller or bigger.

What is yours?

Ode to Monsoon

By the beginning of June after enduring the harshness of the hot and humid Indian summer season from March, the nation starts looking skyward for the rain clouds to appear. The parched earth and roasted humans in utter despair go to their Gods, weathermen, and astrologers to hear the good news of the arrival of monsoon.

Their huge errors in predictions in the past don’t stop the hapless populace from dabbling with the discussion over rains even if it’s just in the discussion. The pain and hope behind this trepidation are like the hopes of one of the lovers in a broken relationship for the other to return.

The arrival of the monsoon on the Kerala coast is the most awaited event in the month of June.

Why not, when most of our rivers are rain-fed and agriculture is mostly dependent on timely and adequate rains and most of our festivals follow the agrarian calendar? Government and economists prepare themselves for the consequences if it doesn’t rain. Our lives directly or indirectly are dependent on monsoons. In certain years it's timely and adequate and in some it's scarce and so more that it calls for national emergency response. This annual climatic event does something so magical to everything living and non-living who dwell on this vast sub-continent so routinely that all have learned to dance to the tune of it.

I am not the first one who has chosen to write about it nor will be the last one to do so.

With the first monsoon rain humanity erupts into joy. The postings of pictures, videos, reels, and songs on social media by the citizens indicate the magnitude of joy that they are experiencing. Tomes of literature have been written on the monsoon. In the movies, rain is used as a metaphor for ecstasy, blessings, and love. Not only the peacocks are seen serenading their potential mates, but heroines also break into song and dance to celebrate the spirit of the season. 

In the novel Train to Pakistan, Khuswant Singh while describing the most violent episode of the subcontinent’s history couldn’t stop himself from pausing the narrative to describe the first rain of monsoon. He uses three pages to describe it and I am sure he would have held out to the editor’s request or pressure to truncate it. It’s the best description of monsoon I have ever read. Go through the best three paragraphs of his narrative.

“The dust hanging in the air settles on your books, furniture, and food; it gets in your eyes and ears and throat and nose.

This happens over and over again until the people have lost all hope. They are disillusioned, dejected, thirsty, and sweating. The prickly heat on the back of their necks is like emery paper. There is another lull. A hot petrified silence prevails. Then comes the shrill, strange call of a bird. Why has it left its cool bosky shade and come out in the sun? People look up wearily at the lifeless sky. Yes, there it is with its mate! They are like large black-and-white bulbuls with perky crests and long tails. They are pied-crusted cuckoos who have flown all the way from Africa ahead of the monsoon. Isn’t there a gentle breeze blowing? And hasn’t it a damp smell? And wasn’t the rumble which drowned the birds’ anguished cry the sound of thunder? The people hurry to the roofs to see. The same ebony wall is coming up from the east. A flock of herons fly across. There is a flash of lightning which outshines the daylight. The wind fills the black sails of the clouds, and they billow out across the sun. A profound shadow falls on the earth. There is another clap of thunder. Big drops of rain fall and dry up in the dust: A fragrant smell rises from the earth. Another flash of lightning and another crack of thunder like the roar of a hungry tiger. It has come! Sheets of water, wave after wave. The people lift their faces to the clouds and let the abundance of water cover them. Schools and offices close. All work stops. Men, women and children run madly about the streets, waving their arms and shouting “Ho, Ho,”- hosannas to the miracles of the monsoon.

The monsoon is not like ordinary rain which comes and goes. Once it is on, it stays for two months or more. Its advent is greeted with joy. Parties set out for picnics and litter the countryside with the skins and stones of mangoes. Women and children make swings on branches of trees and spend the day in sport and song. Peacocks spread their tails and strut about with their mates; the woods echo with their shrill cries.”

When David Attenborough in one of his documentaries describes the Himalayas and Monsoon in his calming, soothing voice …“. Warm winds from India filled with moisture are forced upwards by the Himalayas to cool which causes clouds to form thus monsoon is born…” the background music and the dramatic time-lapse video beautifully captures the drama and the magic this phenomenon creates over this vast geography.

It almost seems as if God is manifesting himself before humankind.

Early humans realized early how closely nature is intertwined with its existence and chose to respect and worship nature. No wonder very early humans conceptualized God in his role as the creator, nourisher, nurturer, and destroyer by looking at the same aspects in various natural phenomena. It’s only a few hundred years back from the present era, humans as a departure from their earlier convictions saw mother earth as a resource to be exploited for its insatiable greed triggering what we now know as Global Warming and Climate Change.

We are witness to the changing patterns of rain.

Rains have become erratic. Slow drizzle over weeks which was good for farming and absorption into the soil has become non-existent now and what we witness is a cloud burst-like situation over a limited area for a few days which erodes the most precious commodity of the nation - top soil and causes flash floods and immense human misery.

If the rich soils and monsoon rains have been instrumental in developing us from our settled agriculturist days into a civilization of 140 cr to recon with because of our literature, and wisdom; how a changed monsoon pattern triggered by climate change stands to change us is a matter of grave national concern.