Here comes the sun

One downside of going the full tonsure is your scalp fights a lost battle against the sun. Stepping out for lunch turns into an excessively perspiring expedition unless you have protection of a cap/hat, which doesn't give you that naked feeling on top.

Ri-baldry apart Bangalore has turned quite into an oven over the last couple of weeks. And its only February! Climate change is here and its on your (at least my) head. When was the last February night you remember having turned the fan on full blast, apart from the last two weeks? Never in my living memory! An Uncle of mine mentioned of how they hadn't even installed a fan when they initially settled in Bangalore some 30 years back. Air conditioning is the norm now.

I have always hated the heat. Even though I was born in Madras and root around Trichur in Kerala. Summer holidays were never as romantic as in Enid Blyton stories. A month would be spent half naked fakir like in Trichur, gulping down coconut water by the dozen from the decently endowed garden in my grandfathers house. Sweet mangoes would be decimated after lunch, only to lead to further discomfort with their strange ability to increase gastronomic combustion. Just as we were getting comfortable with the frying pan we would be shunted right into the fire, a moist one at that, to Madras. A city known for its wide variety of weather conditions- hot, hotter, hottest. I would invariably land up around the peak of the last option. The evenings would provide some respite, from the sea breeze, but you would still look like you have just emerged from a sauna right after a shower. I never found much reason to having a shower in Madras. The only right thing would be stay under it-forever. In hindsight, despite the flak against heat, those days were enjoyable-they were after all the summer holidays, a time when you had absolutely no responsibilities, no deadlines, no bosses, no most things that irk me now.

What is happening to all this solar energy anyway? Apart from making us and other natural entities we share this planet with tick, what does it do? Oh, it makes a lot shiny panels generate electricity which is then used to cook food, heat water and an assortment of such nice stuff. What happens to the rest of it? I am sure there is a lot which is wasted, being absorbed by the earth to bake one hell of a huge pie. What are the scientists and other knowledgeable characters in such matters doing? Can't all this energy be tapped to run- more air conditioners? There's also the catch, the more we use such equipment, the more chemicals released into the air, blocking the sun's rays from escaping back into the upper zones of the atmosphere and leaving us hot (not just under the collar).

If things are so hot why doesn't it melt all the fat stored under my skin? Just imagine the possibilities, eat, drink, lead a merry life in say Manali or Ladakh and come down to Chennai for therapy. At the rate Bangalore's temperatures are soaring, we could heat up the competition. After reading news bits about melting ice caps and glaziers, increasing sea levels and becoming a victim of a burnt scalp I have resigned to my fate and decided to wait and marginally increase the waistline of a polar bear: