An Indian Summer

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Search Google for Indian Summer, and you will find yourself taken to an array of links of beautiful scenery or to a movie database. Search results will be provided from the data collected using your past web record. In this case, either you could be a leave everything behind nature lover or a nothing to do-watch movies bored engineer .
An Indian Summer
Technically, an Indian summer is a weather/natural phenomenon occurring in the US sometime around September and October.It is beautiful and vivid. But I wasn't looking for these things. What I was searching for, was the temperature graphs about the Indian summer season, sometime around April (read February) till June which dehydrates the cytoplasm out of every cell in your body, every year in (East) India. Yup, the very same country where ladies from Europe used to come with their fancy umbrellas, protecting them from skin darkening.


I write dark here, because that was more than 70 years ago. Now if I have to write about our times, burn would be a correct word. To be as banal as the days are, it is hot as hell. You could see yourself evaporate if you stand too long along with the dambar road. The temperature has become unbearable, and it takes some looking to find a up-house or a showroom without an AC (beware : few water drops can fall any time from the pipes of the conditioners; don't think that they are rain droplets and start doing ghanan ghanan. )

It wasn't always as it is now. Summers used be hot, yes, but they didn't suck your life. I remember the summer vacations were always a good time, specially when I could wear nickers and no one would laugh at me.  I have fond memories of it. People visiting their relatives, while I would long to play cricket and Sega video games. Flying kites and playing games with friends of my sister.  And it used to go around the clock, and we didn't care for the fusion taking light years away.
Or was it always this hot? Historical records don't show much variation in the temperature, 2-3 degrees added on the scale. But mom always urged us to play inside and sometime even asked not to go in the evening as well because she could still feel the loo.

I thought about the reasons for this (searching the internet). It might be down to global warming, but I will take a republican stand because the duration is short (10 years) . It has definitely something to do with growing up. The Frooty ad asks you "why grow up?" and I did say to them, "because your drink doesn't taste the same".

An Indian Summer
 Yes, the soft cold drinks aren't the same. Rooh Afza doesn't provide you to coolness it used to, and ice creams are a luxury. And so is an air conditioner, beer, electricity and just about everything that is "cool". The king of fruits and the fruit for the summer, Mango, is not for the aam people anymore ( I would have loved to used aadmi but much like everything else, it isn't "cool" ). While I write this, I am sitting in a room with a fan cursing the heat as I try binding the curtains to prevent hot polluted, air coming in. It is not hard, it is impossible to imagine what it is like for the millions who can't afford a even a table fan.An occasional tree with a shade is hard to find without inhaling some smoke from the chai sutta shops beneath them.

I do wonder at times, if the apocalypse believed by the Semitic sects would come in the form of dry heat being showered from the sky, burning everything. 1500 F would be required to burn the bones. It seems apocryphal but doesn't it derive from itself from apocalypse. Anyway, the day ends at 19:45 here in Gujarat and I just hope there aren't 500 days of Summer.



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