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.