WHEN CLIMATE CHANGE HITS HOME and then we forget, yet again!!!

Many of us woke up abruptly several times in the past few years. Not for an evening snack, but to save that hard-earned TV and also the Bentley. Sometimes to fill up the brand new bucket as city after city break heat records.  

While for many, sudden climate extremes hitting their childhood colony is a difficult reality to digest. Indeed when sudden apocalypse occur, it is highly likely that people slowest to adapt will be the first to get severely impacted.

Walking through the muddy sludge, the blue tent settlements that had been set up in the command area of the HN Halli lake had gone, vanished overnight and the reasons were obvious. While many of us struggled to save our cars, there were untold members of the human and animal race who finally gave up that night. We will never find out if the families living under tents went back to Northern Karnataka or if they shifted to a higher ground that seems to be in short supply this year.

It was finally an overnight shower and our illusion of being safe in a building that many middle-class dreams were shattered forever. And along with any illusion that we are going to have a better time next year than we are having this year. Without claiming to be a soothsayer or a scientist, our local tea angdi uncle suggested to all those listened, the end of days is progressively set to get worse.

Our carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is not fading away, neither is our endless appetite for fossil fuels. This year, even before this erratic monsoon mayhem has been a year of previously unseen weather patterns. Silchar remained under water for weeks while we went under in a couple of showers. The annual Bihar floods will soon be around in the headlines, atleast for a few days and rains everywhere are breaking records.

Lamenting over our society’s apparent disregard for warnings, the uncle suggested that the world has been running on steroids for some time now. He even placed a date. For him, it began when we began replacing our buffalo carts with a car’s chassis resulting in drastic transformation. But when the second tsunami of mobile phones reached our shores, Uncle asserted that the real beginning of the currently underway erratic weather began around 2002.