Summer of 2022

This summer – almost all over India, I hear – is turning out to be one of the longest and worst in living memory. The last nasty one was 2016: it was definitely hotter, I remember, but it started late, and we were not sweating from every pore night and day for weeks on end. My daughter confirms that it is right now warm to hot in and around Shimla, Delhi is again under a ‘yellow alert’, and here, though it has been raining intermittently all through the last month, every three rainless days makes life unbearable. The weather app routinely says that while the temperature in the shade may be only 38-39 degrees, it ‘feels like’ 50, whichever way they figure it out, and I have confirmed it with hundreds of people that there is nothing particularly wrong with me: everybody’s feeling half dead and murderous at the same time. Heaven knows when the real monsoon will set in. This is the time I start cursing my ancestors for having migrated to this horrible land and breeding like rats over millennia … assuming that the migration theory is true at all. Only North Bengal has been having almost daily showers, damn their luck!

Our Chief Minister has again prolonged the summer vacation for schools by a fortnight, and this time round it seems the government is forcing even private schools to stay closed, though even opposition leaders have started grumbling ‘have we never had hot summers before?’ I wonder what exactly is going on: is there some plan afoot gradually to do away with schools altogether? Online examinations have already put paid to the meaningfulness of examinations for several successive batches of students at all levels; now do they want to axe traditional organized education itself? Have they thought up real, workable alternatives?

A reminder – I have to write this sort of thing again and again because new readers rarely know how to navigate this blog. It is best to read it on your computer; but if you must use your phone, scroll down to the bottom of the home page and click on ‘view web version’ – that is the only way you will be able to see everything that is there, including all the tabs along the right hand margin and links to old post, comments and so on. I would very strongly urge anybody who has become an interested reader to visit old posts: there are hundreds of them, on scores of different subjects, and I am sure many of you will be surprised to see that I have written so much. That would save me endless needless effort repeating many things over and over, whether it is about religion or economics, poetry or aeroplanes, Harry Potter or the Mahabharata, the state of education or the prospects for India. This is especially meant for new, young readers: I am glad that they visit, but sad that they look at only the tip of the iceberg instead of exploring the vast collection of essays that has accumulated over sixteen years…

P.S.: It gets on my nerves to see grown up people who should know better insisting that shopkeepers give them single use plastic bags to carry purchases home. It is as if all the dire warnings being constantly issued by environmentalists do not reach them at all, or they simply don’t care. In any case, how long will the government keep playing this shameful double game? If they were serious about banning plastic pollution, they would simply ban their production, wouldn’t they? Do they seriously think that merely ‘requesting’ people to stop polluting would teach anybody any lessons, at least in this country?