Monsoon fury

Saturday, the eighth of July it was when, nursing a sly chuckle, I posted my last blog: a little fanciful euphoria of a jubilant heart to welcome the first showers of monsoon. After all, who doesn’t get entranced by its magic spell? But my romantic mood was not to last long. To displace it, a vague, creeping sense of guilt and horror began to grow eventually. For, in the hours and days that followed, it had been raining, and raining mad. The monsoon from being a benign, amorous Indradev had in no time turned into a furious, vengeful monster. And a day or two later the news had started flooding in: deaths and destruction galore in most parts of north India. Videos began doing the rounds and the TV screens - generally obsessed with screaming out lop-sided propaganda of the murky world of politics - had evocative visuals sending shivers of horror down our spines.

Several rivers have breached their boundaries. Many roads and highways have become rivers and lakes of misery. Vehicles have been washed away. Buildings and bridges have crumbled like puny plastic toys. Several people have met watery graves and many rendered homeless; even the national capital has become “jheelon ka shehar”. Earlier, my favourite state Kerala – ‘God’s own country’ of lovely and loveable Malayalis –  had been lashed similarly by the rain gods-turned-devils.  Such is the fury of Nature. It can wreak enormous havoc to make us humans look mere playthings before it, and make our mansions and towers symbolising human hubris, fall like a ‘house of cards’ when buffeted by its tongues of wrath.

But why, pray, was monsoon at its angriest in my (greying)-‘green’ state Himachal, I ask myself? Why did it dance such a macabre tandav of death and destruction? Why our rivers and mountains that sustain our lives became angry WMDs propelled by the fury of monsoon?

Isn't it the same old damn story repeated ad infinitum?

We have treated the bounties of Nature with callous disdain. Be it the Congress, the BJP, or the not-so-aapki AAP, no party, no leader, no CM has cared a farthing for protecting the greens. And we, the people, sitting smug in our gated homes have been complicit in this brazen crime against Nature; crime against the generations to follow, because of our stark silence. Shimla is a power peg, we know.  Horror of horrors, the new Sukhu government, that made us ecstatic and started off well, seems to have gone off-track. Once again, the 20,000-odd illegal constructions are being regularized by a new political manoeuvre. The Mandi airport – a monumental insanity –  both environment-wise and economy-wise – is again making headlines. “Bigger the project, higher the commissions, more the lucre to fill political coffers?” Is that the driving mantra of all policymakers?

My own hometown Palampur too is hurtling fast towards this environmental catastrophe. It is as if there is a mad scramble to plunder and destroy all that is aesthetic and green sans check or shame. Senseless, ill-planned monstrosities in concrete are usurping our pristine spaces. Environment? Law?  “Fuck.” “My foot!” is the silent chant of the unholy ‘nexus’. And we have become towers of deafening silence, smug in our status-quoist, devil-may-care innocence. Unless we shed our cloaks, stop being drugged by the lawmakers’ highfalutin rhetoric, begin to see through their fake, saintly demeanours, tweak their ears with hard questions, and act as our own watchdogs of environment, we are doomed:  future generations even more so.

The Armageddon of Climate change is upon the world. Need we any nuclear stockpiles when ‘man’ has himself become his own WMD?

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