Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Come soon Monsoon !

Today is the 27th day of June 2012. The monsoon has not yet arrived.
In olden days the first monsoon shower came down dancing with all vigour and grace on the day schools reopened after the summer vacation. It was not on June 1st, 2nd or 3rd. Amazingly it was on the school reopening day ! Elders back home were a worried lot as they knew that the children exposed to the first rain were sure to catch cold or fever. But the children were only too happy to reach the school drenched. Those days all students walked to the school even if the school was a few kilometers away. All along it was fun, fighting and friendship regained as quickly as it was lost. During the rains small shallow "pools" used to appear in the school ground. Children used to jump into them one-legged and the splashed water was "foot balled" with the other producing the sound of a diwali cracker. It required great skill, concentration and synchronization of acts to produce maximum sound. I was one who had mastered this native art. This, like many other "art forms" are now extinct. Who will try "foot-balling" splashed water when you can .....,for instance, roller-skate? Those were the days when the Rain Gods reigned. Into the second or third week of monsoon small yet powerful streams would have developed all over. I used to make dozens of wheels using fronds of coconut tree. The axis of the wheels rested on two poles fixed within these briskly flowing streams. Those days nothing thrilled me more than these rotating wheels, powered by the flowing rain water. With incessant rains these wheels went on and on and on and I kept watching them for hours together. Who will do this today when one can watch myriads of  TV programmes sitting in the comfort of the drawing room?
I cannot but think of those rainy days when somebody tells me that water in the Idukki arch dam is only knee deep. Wells have dried up. Village ponds have disappeared (with indiscriminate land filling) leaving no trace of their existence for a future romantic to say "once upon a time......"
The climate is changing. NO, it has changed.
With monsoon still shy to come dancing, I pray to the Rain Gods to show mercy, forgiving us for our brutality towards nature and give us back those beautiful days of bountiful rains.
Now it is half an hour past midnight. I am into the 28th day of June 2012. With no rains yet, the silence is frightening. Do I hear this film song from the thick dark?......"lauta de jannath meri....."

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