Monsoon beginning in June; a moment of rejuvenation

Kalidas would have written Meghdoot (The Cloud-Messenger) at this time of the year. For hundreds of years before and after the poet wrote Meghdoot, the advent of the monsoon has symbolised a moment of rejuvenation and a time for beginning afresh as the heat and dust of summer are washed away by the rains. If India lives in her villages, it is the monsoon which provides the climactic moment of the year by reviving the rural economy. And this year, the Indian Meteorological Department has predicted a normal monsoon to the extent of 98%. Which is the percentage students long for in their school final exams whose results are announced at this time of the year. June is when plans are finalised for the coming academic session and when forms are filled for admission into colleges throughout India. If January 1 is when people wish each other a Happy New Year, June is when these wishes could actually be fulfilled.

However, June is not just about careers at a micro-level or the kind of macro-analysis India's meteorological department and Planning Commission indulge in. It is also, as Kalidas reminds us in his epic poem, a moment of poetic inspiration. The protagonist in Meghdoot asks the cloud to convey a message to the loved one from whom he is separated. Kalidas was not the first poet or the last person to be inspired by the monsoon cloud. The latest monsoon could trigger off a burst of creativity among a new generation of children looking out of their classroom windows at dark clouds dissolving into rain to the spectacular sound-and-light effects of thunder and lightening. "Those things are better which are perfected by nature than those which are finished by art," the philosopher Cicero observed in ancient Rome.