The monsoon isn’t here yet.
A strange conversation suddenly pops in my head. This was during the Cricket World Cup (2003) when that infamous match, was briefly interrupted by a shower. We must have been about 20 people in that room. A man suddenly shouted … I don’t care if it doesn’t rain in India through the whole year, so long as it continues raining today, so the match is cancelled and we can begin from scratch!!!
A lot of us glared at him.
But two years later, I am well aware that most of upper and middle class India that is no longer economically or emotinally dependent on agriculture (read primary agricultural produce from rural market) unless it means inflation after a few months, and a scarcity of food, do not seem to care much about Monsoon. A stray concern is if our water taps will run dry, or if dams will cease to produce electricity. But we live relatively secure that we have the money to *buy* water anyway!
Water. Rain. Catching it where it falls. Watching it fill the dry cracks of caked mud. Seeing it fill into trenches in a water shed, and dipping one’s hand in the clay of wet mud, dangling a few earthworms in between, and the promise of harvest, even if seven months away.
I am not even going to get to the economic cycle that links monsoon to everything, from the price of pickles to BPOs to the subsequent subsidies. But is it that our Education system has neatly divided us into compartments and taught us that agriculture is not really respectable anyway, and not worth our concern. Is it that we don’t know about rivers and micro eco-systems, or is it that as a country we were never homogenous enough anyway to have similar concerns?
They say the rains haven’t reached Telangana yet. I am haunted by images of Andhra Pradesh even as I write this.
Water.
May it flow unbridled or sometimes otherwise in our rivers.
