...are slowly fading. I borrow from Pearl Jam's "Elderly woman behind the counter in a small town" to start my post.
It has just begun to rain in Delhi. For someone who refused to share the same physical space as the Sun for almost a month, whilst contending with a general feeling of uselessness and ennui, I can't begin to describe how much of a relief the arrival of the monsoon is.
For the last few days, I have tried to avoid the news as much as possible. And I will give you no reason for it other than the fact that it scares me to death. Aside from all the regular bad news one seems to be getting these days, I tend to amplify it manifold by somehow finding a domino-toppling connection to my being able to fund my graduate study next year. What was particularly worrying in the last week of June especially, was the extreme power and water shortage that was plaguing more than half the country because of imminent failure of monsoon. Water levels at three of our major reservoirs were running dangerously low. The city of Pune would lose its water supply if it didn't rain in the next 48 hours. Then, almost miraculously, the monsoon revived and advanced. We had a narrow miss, and not many of us realized, especially those of us who stayed hidden behind our green curtains in rooms cooled by generator driven ACs.
As happy as I am that the monsoon has arrived, I also begin to muse on the nature of human memory. We might have a near normal monsoon, maybe a deficient one. Then there will come a winter, where the demand for power and water will be lower and it is quite likely a large number of us will not face a severe shortage. Somewhere in the course of this winter that intervenes between two summers, we tend to forget the mistakes we made in summers past. Each summer gets progressively worse, and each winter makes us forget the previous one. The whole process, as a result gives us this illusion of being very gradual. We adapt every summer, and are oblivious every winter. To make a rather gratuitous generalization, this sort of behaviour extends to a very large part of our lives. I had written after the Mumbai terror attacks that things tend to get time-averaged. In fact, most of the times we are on a crest, we forget the lessons learned we should have ideally retained from the last trough. As a result, the highs keep getting lower, and the lows keep getting deeper.
I find myself in a dilemma. I don't know whether to applaud the ability of human beings to shut their eyes and adapt, or to be incensed at the extreme sense of callousness which seems to drive that ability most of the time.
It has just begun to rain in Delhi. For someone who refused to share the same physical space as the Sun for almost a month, whilst contending with a general feeling of uselessness and ennui, I can't begin to describe how much of a relief the arrival of the monsoon is.
For the last few days, I have tried to avoid the news as much as possible. And I will give you no reason for it other than the fact that it scares me to death. Aside from all the regular bad news one seems to be getting these days, I tend to amplify it manifold by somehow finding a domino-toppling connection to my being able to fund my graduate study next year. What was particularly worrying in the last week of June especially, was the extreme power and water shortage that was plaguing more than half the country because of imminent failure of monsoon. Water levels at three of our major reservoirs were running dangerously low. The city of Pune would lose its water supply if it didn't rain in the next 48 hours. Then, almost miraculously, the monsoon revived and advanced. We had a narrow miss, and not many of us realized, especially those of us who stayed hidden behind our green curtains in rooms cooled by generator driven ACs.
As happy as I am that the monsoon has arrived, I also begin to muse on the nature of human memory. We might have a near normal monsoon, maybe a deficient one. Then there will come a winter, where the demand for power and water will be lower and it is quite likely a large number of us will not face a severe shortage. Somewhere in the course of this winter that intervenes between two summers, we tend to forget the mistakes we made in summers past. Each summer gets progressively worse, and each winter makes us forget the previous one. The whole process, as a result gives us this illusion of being very gradual. We adapt every summer, and are oblivious every winter. To make a rather gratuitous generalization, this sort of behaviour extends to a very large part of our lives. I had written after the Mumbai terror attacks that things tend to get time-averaged. In fact, most of the times we are on a crest, we forget the lessons learned we should have ideally retained from the last trough. As a result, the highs keep getting lower, and the lows keep getting deeper.
I find myself in a dilemma. I don't know whether to applaud the ability of human beings to shut their eyes and adapt, or to be incensed at the extreme sense of callousness which seems to drive that ability most of the time.
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