I was off yesterday. Yesterday was Thursday, August 2, 2007. A historic day indeed, as we are told by newspapers, courtesy the weather department. It rained 166.6 millimetres. The highest in 24 hours, we are told, since 1961.
I was sleeping through most of yesterday, courtesy an all-night drinking session at a friend’s place the night before. So I missed out on all the trouble, snag and the maze of mess when the city went “under water”, as the headline in Express Newsline said today.
I got an inkling of the problem early in the morning, though, while being driven back home from the friend’s place. The traffic snarls were huge even at that hour. But I liked the drive from south to east Delhi, through the Ring Road if I may add. It was pleasantly pleasant: overcast sky, a breeze that’s just about right, a constant drizzle at a constantly slowish-medium pace… the kind where you can throw your arm out the car window and see the raindrops take the paper off your just-lit cigarette. And before you eject that what-the-heck curse, you realise you have been had, by the drizzle: why in the name of sanity did you roll down the windowpane, stick out your arm, and who asked you to hold the cigarette in the left hand? You laugh off the three questions; there are no answers. You are, a) half-drunk; b) enjoying the drizzle getting set to throw the city out of gear in another hour or two; and c) not expected to groan and moan when under the spell of either a), or b), or both.
The rain, in want of a better expression, was divine (though I am always a few nautical miles west of religion). It was the kind of rain that in semi-parched Delhi you always seek. To give you a Mumbai or Kolkata feeling in this heartless metropolis.
And what happens after you seek it out? You curse it. Not directly, mind you, but by directing your curses and abuses to every one else. In authority or otherwise. From the municipality, government, sweepers, cleaners and politicians to the auto-wallahs, other car-wallahs, and right down to the non-working traffic lights holding up traffic. Wading through water and getting stuck on road? That’s downright downmarket. No one does that in Delhi. We just like it when Mumbai or Kolkata or Kochi does that -- on prime time TV news.
But let me not veer off track: I liked the rain, even though I do not like rain as such (read an earlier blog somewhere down the line here for more on those lines). I liked it possibly because I had no business to throw my comments around for the simple reason that I was on leave. But I still stick my neck out, and say I liked it.
Getting stuck is one of the reasons we are SUPPOSED to like the rain. And, from the super perch post of my balcony on Thursday evening, I liked it. Almost loved it.
(The picture is taken from PTI. It's by Gurinder Osan)
