Although our bodies have not yet agreed to it, we are beginning to understand that there are two seasons in southern India: monsoon season and not monsoon season. Normally, in early June the winds begin to reverse pushing some pre-monsoon mango rains our way. By mid-June the papers are forecasting the monsoon's arrival, with daily updates of the rain's progress from coastal Kerala to inland Karnataka. And by late-June the rains have arrived and are making their way up India until they bottleneck at the Himalayas, patiently waiting their turn at the Hillary Step.
But of course, nothing is normal anymore. The environmental stability that we have for too long taken for granted, a taking for granted that is often a taking advantage of, is no longer. Whether we are talking about melting ice or freezing lakes, fires, droughts, floods or hurricanes, our world is changing. Close to home, this means that Bangalore (a city that, in its mad rush after development and its attempts to attract, well, us, has lost 35 lakes in 20 years) is entering another monsoon season without; maybe not monsoon-less, but at least monsoon-lite, obliging us to prepare for another year of water shortages and power outages. While in the rest of India, the rain will not stop. In just the first two weeks of a monsoon season that hasn't even really begun in earnest yet, India has received three times more rain than normal. The hardest hit areas are in northern India, especially the states of Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradash, and Uttar Pradash, where more than 100 people have already died, thousands are missing, tens-of-thousands are stranded, and entire villages and cities have been destroyed. Today, the destruction seems too big, as the papers and news reports have shied away from trying to quantify the loss.
This, it seems, is our new normal, what now constitutes us as a global community: regardless of our distance or location, our history or our time, within our difference - too often becoming our fears and hatreds, wars and violences - and our sameness - not often enough becoming our beauty, love and life - we all now live an ecological precarity, no longer able to displace or ignore the effects of presuming a stable world given for the satisfaction of our desires. We don't yet know what this ecological precarity might become, neither what we might become nor what the world might become, but from here and now, it doesn't look good. As one survivor of a landslide in Uttarakhand told a reporter, "we saw buildings being swallowed and boulders falling from the hills. It seemed as if we were being chased by death."
But of course, nothing is normal anymore. The environmental stability that we have for too long taken for granted, a taking for granted that is often a taking advantage of, is no longer. Whether we are talking about melting ice or freezing lakes, fires, droughts, floods or hurricanes, our world is changing. Close to home, this means that Bangalore (a city that, in its mad rush after development and its attempts to attract, well, us, has lost 35 lakes in 20 years) is entering another monsoon season without; maybe not monsoon-less, but at least monsoon-lite, obliging us to prepare for another year of water shortages and power outages. While in the rest of India, the rain will not stop. In just the first two weeks of a monsoon season that hasn't even really begun in earnest yet, India has received three times more rain than normal. The hardest hit areas are in northern India, especially the states of Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradash, and Uttar Pradash, where more than 100 people have already died, thousands are missing, tens-of-thousands are stranded, and entire villages and cities have been destroyed. Today, the destruction seems too big, as the papers and news reports have shied away from trying to quantify the loss.
This, it seems, is our new normal, what now constitutes us as a global community: regardless of our distance or location, our history or our time, within our difference - too often becoming our fears and hatreds, wars and violences - and our sameness - not often enough becoming our beauty, love and life - we all now live an ecological precarity, no longer able to displace or ignore the effects of presuming a stable world given for the satisfaction of our desires. We don't yet know what this ecological precarity might become, neither what we might become nor what the world might become, but from here and now, it doesn't look good. As one survivor of a landslide in Uttarakhand told a reporter, "we saw buildings being swallowed and boulders falling from the hills. It seemed as if we were being chased by death."
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