By Anish Dayal
There’s nothing like a sweltering summer afternoon in Delhi to fully experience the sheer inabilities of a perfectly able human body! Even though a lot of us lucky ones spend our summers diving from one air conditioned environment to the other, there are those brief moments when you are full frontal with the Great God Celsuis who is celebrating his annual moment with aplomb and full vigour. When the world feels like the rear of an air-conditioner, choices are few.
For all those brought up in the great scalding plains of the north, summers meant long holidays from school, languorous afternoons spent staring inconsequentially at the ceiling fan completing one blur after the other, waking up to dip your face in watermelons and mangoes, waiting for the 7 o clock sunset to go out and play and then retiring back for the night to watch the local power supply play hide and seek with your desire for uninterrupted somnolence.
Now many years hence when one has the ability, education and the gravity to be oh so serious and employed, summers in essence have not changed. Somnolence will still grip you in the middle of a boring lunch work meeting or while driving through the sun swept streets of Delhi or when lingering with a book in a Khan market cafe. Even the newspapers seem to be out of juice. Anna-isms seems stale and insipid and most of the establishment is out partying in London at any event. The Supreme Court – harbinger of the good and the bad, the impactful and the relevant also retreats into it’s summer cave. Minor attempts by some sun –worshippers to put up music, dance and book launch events must be applauded for their bravura. The rest of the nation is simply happy to slip, slide and sleep away these gorgeous months when God gives us enough reasons to realize why nothing is really too important or too urgent and why all human activity is really a delusion of self- manufactured grandeur and why there is unmitigated pleasure in discovering and savouring the interstices of time.
