Here Comes the Sun

Here comes the sun. Here comes the sun

And I say, it's alright

Little darling, 

it's been a long, cold lonely winter. 

Little darling. 
It feels like years since it's been here. 
Here comes the sun,
Here comes the sun,
and I say, it's alright. 

As I listened to George Harrison's pleasant and melodious voice sing these words to a nice slow beat, it conjured images of the warm rays of the sun dispelling fog, snow-melt trickling into the gushing brook, greenery, falling dew and most things nice. You could argue that proclaiming everything to be alright simply because winter has ended is a tad overly optimistic, but you get what The Beatles wanted to make the listeners feel.

Of course, having read only English literature through my life (unless you count Hindi textbooks as "literature"), the aforementioned images were conjured easily, as the Americans and Britishers of the temperate regions repeatedly allude to cold, snow and beauty of Spring.

I, however, found the images a little harder to connect to. Being a pure-bred son of the Tropics, sun rays do not represent warmth to be bathed in, but a blaze to be sheltered from. The sun is a necessary evil, not the sweet messiah it is at the temperate latitudes, if generations of British authors, PG Wodehouse and The Beatles are to be believed.

Here in India, it is the monsoon that bring about that natural deliverance from bad weather to good weather, bad times to good times. The parched and cracked ground turning wet and then green, the dust settling after the first drizzle; these are the images that the monsoon brings, as the winds of change sweep in from the Arabian Sea to mark the end of the summer, when the sun is not the sweet radiance but the sharp-edged knife cutting into life.

My association with monsoons though, is more than simply a summer ending, rumbling thunder and downpours that cause the mercury to plummet. Being an avid watcher of wildlife shows on National Geographic and the Discovery Channel in my younger days, the monsoon excited me a lot. These shows knew how to build it up, the young boy that was me shuddered when he saw the majestic lion or tiger panting, exhausted by the sun, too weak to even swat away the mosquitoes that buzzed around them, awaiting the imminent death they probably could sense. The forest or the grassland was brown. The deer were tired too, only saved by the tiredness of predators. They rummaged in vain for green and water. The carrion eaters, those scum of nature, flourished. The harbingers of drought and bad times. Then, the announcer would proclaim with concealed excitement, "There is change in the air". Thunder would rip through the sky and on the next frame, the whole forest is green, the lion is suddenly chasing the flies away and deer is grazing merrily.

This kind of sudden change, obviously for the benefit of gullible and easily awed young folk such as myself, always had me believing in the magic of the monsoon. The agent of change, good change.

The real benefits of the monsoon is tangible, our economy, livelihood and life depends on it. A good monsoon on the whole means a prosperous India. It fills our rivers and fields with water and wipes the sweat from our brow; the sweat of heat and the sweat of worry. Yet, the image that stays with me is still the majestic tiger looking up at a green forest, content and ready to roar again with the downpour. Beautiful stuff. 

What's in a book?

It's been really hard to think about something to write, I'm not sure why. This is perhaps the 12th time I'm starting a post and I'm hoping it isn't unconvincing, disconnected and ultimately incomplete like the previous posts. I have many topics in mind, but the ideas seem reluctant to stick around in my cranium until they are neatly formed and digested enough to be put seamlessly into words and eventually, a nice little blog post which my family and friends will read and tell me all about how well written it was and give me the little ego boost that everyone loves but few admit it. Of course, the cynical and the honest brethren will hand out criticism, which is perfectly fine, if not more reassuring as it shows that they think it is worth critiquing rather than a waste of time that can be put behind with a "yeah it was gooood" and an insincere smile.

Well, let me just go on with what I'm doing in life, in general. It's the vacation and there is a lot of what is termed in Kannada as "beedhi suttadu", colloquial for roaming the streets, usually in the context of someone doing the aforementioned roaming aimlessly or while neglecting responsibilities. Well, I'm shirking no work with my roaming. In fact, I'm able to run several errands for my parents on these little sojourns on my bicycle.

It's my cousin's wedding in a few days, meaning a lot of shopping, getting things ready, planning what is to be worn and lots of things I don't enjoy too much. The flip-side though, is a festive mood and cousins and favourite uncles and aunties in town with a lot of good food. You win some, you lose some.

Other than that, as is with a vacation of significant length, I'm attempting to delve into some books. The Lord of the Rings series I downloaded somehow never kick-started. It's been long since I read properly. I re-read the entire Harry Potter series last month and before that, the last months of 2014 found me completing the five books of "A Song Of Ice and Fire" written so far by George R R Martin, the books that inspired the creation of the show "Game of Thrones". I can't remember which book I read before that, but I'm sure for a whole year I hadn't read anything. Dark times Harry, dark times.

Now though, I've got my hands on a 800 page book, a collection of Science Fiction literature from the 1950s, 60s and 70s, edited by none other than Isaac Asimov himself. Science fiction got me through the last years in school and to finally find a book that I couldn't put down with Asimov's seal of approval was a god-send.

Last night, I was reading the story of an astronaut who left his space station to explore some debris from another satellite when he felt movement within his space-suit. Praying it was a trick of his imagination, his wild mind remembered that an astronaut once died in his space-suit on this same space station and then remembered that damaged space-suits are usually repaired and used again.

As his mind went into overdrive, thinking of the possibility of recurring problems in space-suits and then souls of people trapped in space-suits latching on to living beings, he surely felt something warm tap the back of his neck. At the exact instant I reached this juncture of the story, a towel fell from a table a few yards of me. The story, the lateness of the hour and howling of a dog outside combined to give me the biggest fright I'd ever had in my life. My heart absolutely lurched, I felt like my chest and limbs dissolved in an instant and the book nearly fell down when, as quickly as it came, the fear disappeared. Logic, cool and calm, came to the rescue and I had a hearty laugh at myself two minutes later, when my brain had finally succeeded in coaxing feet to stop shivering.

It left me thinking on the magic of a book. For a second I was in a space-suit. So engrossed was I, that a towel falling from a table, which at any other time I'd have given a quick glance and a quick shrug, scared me out of my wits. I was not on my bed in my room: I was transported into orbit around the earth. Yes, you may say it was all in my head, but just because it happened in my head doesn't mean it's not real, does it? (That's my second Harry Potter reference)

For now though, I just say, from outer space, "Oh gravity, thou art a heartless witch".

PS - The story is "Who's there?", by Arthur C Clarke, in case you're really curious about the ending.