…Yesterday, we had some fantastic thunderstorms in Chennai…what is supposed to be the end of the monsoon season is only beginning, thanks to the tsunami they had a few years ago…
It started in the afternoon and with intermittent breaks, continued the rest of the day and part of the night. Do you remember when it rains in the US, how all the streets look so washed and clean, the trees look green again and all the cookie-cutter houses look like clean, scrubbed soldiers all lined up for inspection??? Well, in India – not so much!!!
In India, when it rains, at first you cannot detect that it has rained if you look at the earth…it looks bone dry for a little bit as the rain water gets soaked right up due to the stifling heat which makes it very dry. After several minutes of a downpour – you start to notice strange things….
…the most creative raincoats made from plastic bags, jute sacks, saris, handkerchiefs, etc…
…what is supposed to look washed and clean, suddenly after receiving heavy rainfall looks old and streaked with dirt and dust like buildings caked with dust from everyday traffic, when it rains, gets washed alright but it shows the real color or lack of color of the building and emphasizes its flaws…
…the concept of proper drainage is only now starting to hit the Indian government, although the Aryans had created an entire town with all this drawn into the plan ages ago…this lack of proper drainage leads to main roads being flooded with nasty-looking water and if you dare to breathe, nasty-smelling too…
…which leads to the other side effect to rains in India – it intensifies the smells to a level that you wish you had an oxygen tank hooked to you permanently and didn’t have to breathe in anything from the environment…garbage, rotted vegetables, slums, dirty rivers that flow through the city, dirty clothes being washed on the sidewalk of a very busy main road, cows and buffaloes and their excretion also residing on the same sidewalk just a few yards away from the women washing the clothes, wet stray dogs, the piles of open garbage, sweat-filled buses…
…rains in India cannot wash away anything due to the solidifying of dirt and dust over long periods of time, that when it rains, it allows the new dust and dirt to stick to the old block and just keep increasing in size. Even if it were to wash it out, where would it all go????
…in the later part of the evening, some parts of Chennai actually saw hailstones fall out of the sky…they were not like the ones we are used to seeing..the ones that stay on the ground..these ones melted as soon as they touched the ground…several people on motorcycles said that the sound of hailstones on their helmets was thunderous….
…thanks to global warming and tsunamis, unexpected weather conditions are to be expected…we are in the months of September and November and it is usually not so hot but we are experiencing heat like the summer months some days…
..and the rains keep coming…
