Plot twist: Can the monsoon become urban India’s hero again?
Our annual rains were once heroic—a relief for millions, an inspiration for poetry and a wellspring of growth for the economy. It’s still central to the plot, but as a villain—exposing our negligence of nature, laxity in urban planning and worse.
It had been a week of bad news—of water filling homes, streets, even a presciently named Aqua Line metro station. The early monsoon brought little more than grim headlines of flooding and landslides, like a livestream of the effects of unplanned construction, deforestation and pure apathy. Until I found myself on the Ooty-Mettupalayam road in Tamil Nadu, following a motorcycle down to the plains.
She rode sidesaddle, like so many women in India, a pillion rider with a baby in one arm and an overstuffed bag on the other shoulder. A light drizzle began to fall; she turned her face up and stuck her tongue out to taste the raindrops. In that moment of abandon and sly pleasure, she wasn’t wife or mother or daughter or daughter-in-law, but a person enjoying the sensation of rain.
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Summer in India has many moods. There’s the oppressive, enveloping humidity of the coastal states, the exhausting and angry heat of north India’s plains and the calming, cheery sunshine of the hills. No matter what kind of summer it’s been, the rain brings its own shift in mood and a sense of languid serenity and hope. We settle in with spiced chai and warm snacks, sniff the moisture in the air, smile at the touch of cool breeze against the skin, and marvel at a sky that’s suddenly lost the sharp brightness that made our eyes throb.
As children, we were encouraged to dash out into the first shower of the season, to feel the drops on our faces and hands. Long before we discovered the word ‘petrichor,’ we were romancing the rain; there’s poetry in the clouds that gather, in the heat released from the earth as the water falls from the sky, in the parched leaves that transform from an insipid shade of dust to a healthy green.
Kalidasa wrote more than a hundred verses in classical Sanskrit to rain-bearing clouds, exhorting them to carry messages to a distant love, in Meghaduta. We have classical music raagas, from Megh and Malhar in Hindustani to Amritavarshini in Carnatic, that evoke the wonder we feel at the sound of thunder. ‘Rain scenes’ were a staple of many yesteryear films, when downpours seemed to wash away inhibitions too.
Festivals countrywide celebrate the onset of monsoon rains, and each language has a raft of words to describe the many kinds of rain specific to the region. Hyperlocal cuisines make the best of the edible greens, veggies and fungi, such as thunder mushrooms and shevala or dragon stalk yam, that pop up with the first showers.
We had eco-aesthetics, or the cultural appreciation of the natural world as an element of beauty, centuries before it became recognized as a distinct sub-genre of Western philosophy. For us, the monsoon held joy and a promise for the future.
Until now, that is.
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Despite the monsoon’s critical role in India’s economy and patterns of life, the relief its onset brings quickly gives way to worry as the reality of living with rain kicks in. Cut off from nature’s rhythms and entirely dependent on abysmal urban infrastructure, we now look at the sky with trepidation.
It takes just a couple of hours of rain to short-circuit the wiring of our fair-weather cities. Concrete has filled what were once lakes and parks, hillsides have been lacerated for wider roads, and the natural geography that aided the flow and absorption of water has been altered beyond recognition and good sense. Rain water that used to be absorbed by the earth now rises rapidly on streets which turn into mini-dams and hold water as well as traffic.
For many, living in inadequate housing, rain drips onto belongings and destroys peace of mind as well as precious possessions. In the hills, which we’ve worked hard to cover with holiday homes and resorts that pay little heed to the local ecology, landslides and flashfloods are the danger during this season.
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Climate change, too, has made the monsoon a moody beast that dumps within a few hours rain which was once rationed over weeks. This year, the monsoon arrived early, breaking over Kerala on 24 May—the earliest since 2009—to disrupt predictions and schedules, causing worries about whether it will stay the course over its usual four months. In recent years, while the volume of rainfall has been ‘normal,’ its distribution across the Indian landmass has been erratic, with extreme events causing irreversible damage to lives and livelihoods with greater frequency. The monsoon is an annual visitor, yet urban planners seem to treat it as an unwelcome surprise.
We have turned the monsoon, once a muse and a wellspring for meditative ideas, into a destructive, unpredictable force. But maybe the rains just have a different role now. The monsoon is still central to the plot—as a villain exposing the rot that goes unseen on a sunny day. Just as it washes away the accumulated grime on trees and shrubs, the rains show up our sheer negligence of nature, our criminal laxity in urban planning and our disregard for the value of human life.
Like any textbook villain, the monsoon exposes the conflict and chaos that we ourselves are responsible for—because we chose apathy over care.
The author is editor of Mint Lounge.
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