Here we were, smug; thrilled to be out of the heat and dust and the soul-sapping humidity of a Delhi summer. Sitting in a leafy suburb of Washington DC, in a centrally air-conditioned home with gorgeous French bay windows framing tall pine trees, the traffic snarls back home in a dug-up Delhi (courtesy the warlike preparations for the Commonwealth Games and the monsoon) seemed, thankfully, a planet away.
Or so I thought. Suddenly, the sky darkened ominously. The lights began to flicker. Thunder roared and the branches of the trees began to shake. The wind seemed to be hammering it’s head on those lovely white bay windows.
Nature’s fury that evening did not last more that fifteen minutes or so. It wasn’t even a tornado: the winds were between 60-75 miles. But the lights went out in nearly 300,000 homes in DC and in the neighbouring states of Maryland and Virginia last Sunday. A quarter of a million people, it seems, were affected.
And, as I write four days later, the lights are still out. The traffic lights in many areas still don’t work. A few post-offices have been shut and many gas stations in the affected areas abandoned.
Life seems to have been put, however briefly, in emergency mode.
Food is rotting in refrigerators. A few schools have become shelters for those suffering from the heat: the mercury this week has flirted with 100 degrees (Fahrenheit). Bookshops and movie theatres have been inundated by those trying to escape the heat.
A desi-American friend, an economist, often jokes about the US turning into a developing nation — “a third world country” as he puts it. And it’s not just the increasingly capricious climate. Obviously, it is the big R word, recession, adding to the already rising figure of unemployment and the number of the homeless that has, according to him brought down this superpower from its pedestal.
During the “snowmageddon” (as some witty journalist christened those eerie few days) when quite large chunks of America came to a standstill, you even had the smart ones bury food in the snow to keep food from rotting.
In this land, where the notion of manifest destiny (first coined in the 19th century to enable and justify territorial expansion westwards) is deeply ingrained, many believe that man in cahoots with technology can tame and control nature — however “red, in tooth and claw”— to serve his purpose.
Well, nature’s claws are obviously getting sharper, whether it is Hurricane Katrina or other such visitations of an angered or abused environment. People are increasingly being forced to look to the skies to see if it augurs good or ill for them.
It is getting to be a wee bit more like what happens on our shores. Too much rain and even metropolises like Mumbai and Delhi come to a standstill. Too little rain and there’s drought, and people starve. Global warming may, in the end, be the great equaliser.
This week I certainly felt more at home, with so many traffic lights on the blink, and houses plunged in darkness. The smart ones — those who can afford it actually — have installed generators.
But there is one big difference between them and us. When the traffic signals are not working people calmly wait and give way to others. In Delhi the descent into chaos is almost-instant, and the choices of gaalis fill the air.
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