Metro Plus
Chennai
Hyderabad
Beating the heat
|
The soaring mercury makes the Chennai summer unbearable and leads to frayed tempers. But there are some ingenious ways to stay cool, says GEETA PADMANABHAN.
|
CHENNAI IS boiling. The mercury is shooting up trying to break all climbing records. Faster, further, higher... the heat goes, but to register a new high it would have to cross 44 degrees C at Nungambakkam and 44.2 degrees C at Meenambakkam, recorded in the 1990s. It might. Unless the friendly Bay, depressed by the thought, sends in clouds as it did in 1995 to lash the city with 12 cm of rain. Or, meets the all-time record of 24 cm that came down on May 22, 1952. Ha! That is a cooling thought! But, for now, the temperatures are rising. Not just in the air and the recording instruments alone.
Intense warmth seems to ignite passions among Chennai-ites. Watch the traffic jam in the street. The gentleman with whom you will not associate unparliamentary language surprises the crowd with his vocabulary. The automan who is blocking his `rightful' path is stunned. He shakes his head and moves on. Elderly walkers defiantly choose the middle of the road for ambulating. Earlier, they patiently circled the repair shops, mobile food vendors, instant temples, parked vehicles, construction debris, fruit displays, fish market... on the footpaths. Bus drivers are preparing for another strike and the Government for another ban. Deprived of air horns, water tank drivers vent their exasperation by leaving their vehicles in the middle of the road. Home makers get so forgetful that they need to go to department stores everyday.
The sun must have something to do with all this. The tender coconut vendor pours contempt with his stare if you as much as murmur `The price is exorbitant.' Clerks, receptionists, front officers in public offices, whose politeness is legendary find it hard to hide their irritation when you ask for a clarification. Mobike riders attribute their traffic violations to the exposed nature of their transport. Elephants flap their ears, dogs put out their tongue and two-wheeler riders zoom from lane to lane between moving vehicles to dissipate the heat. Others in three, three-and-a-half or four-wheelers just wind down the glass and expel it straight from the guts. We no longer shout above noise. We scream above the heat. Even characters in TV serials raise their decibel levels when talking to someone within six inches.
Why is it so hot? "Because of the presence of strong westerlies-north westerlies," say weathermen. "Because of the enormous increase in sin," threaten astrologers. "Global warming due to exhaust fumes and CFCs," warn ecologists. "Stop felling trees. The warming is due to loss of forest cover," wail environmentalists.
Ask the common man and he mutters darkly, "This is the politicians' doing. Many of them own water packing businesses," and rolls over to sleep. Not everyone is complaining. Cool drink sellers see their profits rising with the heat. So do AC, fan and fridge sellers. AC theatres are happy at the sudden spurt in the ticket sales. Star fans, of course, put it down to... well, the hero's performance.
The EB must be happy too with incomes jumping without having to think of another cagey way to cover the loss. This summer water or the lack of it is not front-page news. This may be because it rained enough last season and people have enough of it under their piece of ground. Or, maybe everyone has been harvesting rainwater so successfully that the water table is just a few feet down. Or, half the population of Chennai has gone abroad (mainly to the U.S.) to beat the 30-day-stay-only bill before it becomes law. Or, Chennaivasis are so used to budgeting for water that their earnings have reached a comfortable level to meet them.
Still, one believes what goes up must come down and those who are busy digging the city roads might hit a heat sink (something into which unwanted heat can be shot). Till then, keep the heat-spots protected.
How do you do that? How does one survive the onslaught?
Seventy-five-year-old Hemavathi Ramanathan, who has never missed a Chennai summer but manages to stay cool, shares her secrets. "There are cheap, hygienic, eco-friendly ways to stay healthy," she says. "And this is what I do. On Tamil New Year's Day, I buy a mud pot and a mud bowl. After curing them, I buy a bunch of nannari roots, clean them, tie them up in a cloth and put them in the pot filled with water. This is my drinking water for the rest of the season. On the days I clean the pot, I have boiled and cooled water with a pinch of jeera (cumin, roasted and ground) powder in it. I don't throw away the soft middle portion of ash gourd and cucumber. I wash it, run it in the mixie, strain the water and drink it. I add six glasses of water to one glass of buttermilk, add a pinch of salt, crushed curry leaves and a tiny rhizome of ginger in it. I drink at least a glass of this a day. I take lemon juice with salt. I boil a raw mango, take out the pulp, blend it in the mixie with mint leaves, jeera and rock salt and this is another drink I have. I grind jeera and fresh curry leaves, add a portion of it to the rasam I make. Once in a while I drink tender coconut water. I am not fond of watermelons but when it is being cut for the family I reserve the water to drink. The food I eat is less spicy, but you will find a lot of maniththakkali (tiny tomato) leaves in my diet. The dog days of summer do not bite me."
She prefers to sleep in an air-conditioned room but that's another story.
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Metro Plus
Chennai
Hyderabad
|
