rains

Delhi January 29 7 pm

its raining!!the first showers from the cyclonic system originating in west Asia , the western disturbances.besides blocking city, streets it serves other, useful purposes.
the winter or the "Rabi" crops in the green revolution heartland of Punjab and Haryana crucially depend on this phenomenon.so, the next time you reach for a roti or bread thank rains.

but yesterday's rain was slightly surprising from a weatherman's viewpoint.
their was no associated chill, a norm for north west India January rainfalls. i won't get enmeshed in a spirited discussion of global warming but we know where all this will lead to.

i am a confirmed rain lover.

every rainfall brings to mind multiple images and a junction full of memory trains whistling past white cotton ball clouds.

i think of cherapunji, of the people forever tuned in to the fine music of falling raindrops on a tin roof. it reminds me of a green equatorial rain forest with the constant rhythm of rains embellished with bird chirps and animal grunts. some other images are coffee plantations and sea coasts.

rains are also a city life special.
there are few things in the world as beautiful as an urban winter evening rainfall specially if you are travelling on a Delhi flyover. the dark of the world broke up by columns of droplet diffused light from automobile headlights. its a time to think, to enjoy...to fall in love.

that's my picture for pure, unadulterated romance.
two people in a dark,urban isolation with nothing to do and everything to know.
if the phones stop working all the more perfect..there's something about silence in a city, you have more of it in a smaller place..but in a city you learn the price or rather the pricelessness of solitude.

and then there are those other times, when relationships turn sour. the smell of fresh earth mingles and loses itself in the taste of unrequited love creating a inter modal emotional nightmare.

rains are so much like our lives. the interplay of the dark and the light, the good and the evil, love and longing,fickle and sure.

i once read a book called "chasing the monsoons".(set in 1987)
the author catches the rains on their first landfall on the southern tip of the peninsula and follows it upcountry to the "abode of clouds" before continuing it across the Hindi heartland ad reaching Delhi.

that's a journey I'll do sooner than later.
i am sure many more of you will be interested.
follow your heart, do it. your life will never be the same again.