T minus 30

 I’m back!! After a hiatus of exactly one day, I have returned with yet more complaints. Today, I’d like to acknowledge my increasing maturity and start acting my age, so to speak. And so I'd like to begin by complaining about the weather. It is only the first day of March, and like clockwork, as though the sun was running on some pre-scheduled timetable, the heat got turned up to like 40 degrees (or at least that's what it felt like). How do I know, you ask? The minute I pulled on my red chiffon kurti this morning and found that I was sweating through it before I could even walk a step in it, that’s how. The weather is officially too hot for chiffon, people. What a dystopian world we live in. And to think I won’t get to wear it to college again because class ends in a month and we all know Chennai heat is too adamant to let up any time before that.

It is not like things are any better back home – my mom calls me every day with increasingly desperate woes about the stifling heat there. It is only the first day of March and I’m already missing February (or any month that came before, for that matter). And you’re telling me it's only going to get hotter and hotter until June at the very least?! Preposterous! To make matters worse, I keep recalling the fact that global warming will worsen with each passing year every time I feel hot. Which is, of course, every time I take a walk from Point A to Point B anywhere under the sun (quite literally). I also can’t help but recall images from last summer when my friends and I would collapse in front of our pedestal fans in the hall, spraying water on our faces to keep our eyes from burning. As you can see, I can’t say I was quite looking forward to this part of the year very much. 

To add to my already overflowing list of grievances, my overactive imagination keeps showing me images of the future when not a single one of us would be able to endure walking out in the open without an air conditioner attached to our clothes somewhere. Already I know friends who cannot bear to spend a minute without their hand-held fans in the summer. Just today, I spent the last five minutes of my walk home picturing the A/c in our room running at full blast. It was the only way I could get myself to climb up three flights of steps at 2.00 in the afternoon, okay? The cumulative effect of all our A/cs on the environment was something that seemed extremely unimportant to me at that moment. Has Ecology class taught me nothing? Oh but it has, and how.

(to be contd)