Rain: Relief for some, and for some, pain

You can’t live with it, you can’t live without it. Only last week when we were all a week younger and cussing at the rain gods for leaving us in the lurch, monsoon predictions were dire. It’s not kosher to just complain about the heat, so we couched our whinings with a concern for farmers, India’s agricultural output and a scorched earth landscape. Now, with the southwest monsoon bearing down on parts of central and northwest India, we don’t like it. That is, we city-slickers don’t like it.

A downpour in our urban conglomerates means traffic snarls, drenched clothes, not to mention general symptoms of dampness that includes headaches, body pain and fever. Our urban economy seems too easily disrupted by showers. So, is there a solution? If the government can formulate a policy by which rural India receives monsoon rains and urban India skips most of it, then not only will farmers be able to happily sow bumper summer crops, but the rest of us will also be spared waterlogging et al without getting parched.

If the government is serious, it should read Stephen King’s 2009 novel Under the Dome, in which a town’s inhabitants decide to live inside an invisible barrier that stops rain and cuts them off from the world outside. Happily Drenched India and Happily Dry India could then live happily ever after.