I’d like to introduce all of you to Mr. Mondal. I had gone down to get my car’s pollution certificate renewed, and I always return to the same man for this exercise. He sits in a van, body contorted, allowing the increasingly hot air to wash over him. Mr Mondal runs a chai shop ten steps from the pollution checking center, and I walked across for chai and a chat. My good man in the van refused my offer of chai. Maybe he drinks too much chai during the day, and it’s muggy.
Delhi’s summer has changed. For young folk, this is the new normal, and when I speak of Delhi’s summer being hot and dry just a few decades ago, they stare back at me blankly. For a few decades, we used air coolers until the end of June. Air coolers do not require as much power as air conditioners; they can cool large sections of an apartment and do not emit blasts of hot air from their vents.
Air conditioners cool the interior of a home but heat the external environment. We are murdering our planet.
Mr Mondal does not have the luxury of an artificially air-conditioned office. I once owned a car with a non-functioning air conditioner. The car’s AC blasted me with scorching air in summer and freezing air in winter. Luckily, it did not sprinkle me with water during the monsoons! There is no point in talking about all this with youngsters. The blank look on their faces communicates their thought: they think we are crazy!
Mr Mondal arrives at 6 am, sets up shop, and is in his office serving chai and cookies until 9 pm daily. I asked him if he was from Orissa (now called Odisha). He insisted he was from West Bengal, and another gent insisted Mr Mondal was from Bihar. We debated the issue but did not arrive at an accord!
Mr Mondal does not bring food from home. His humble office does not have a fridge, nor does he have a microwave oven on the premises. He orders his food from nearby restaurants.
In this ecosystem, small business owners support each other and develop an easy, undemanding friendship.
Mr Mondal, his friend, and I discussed the increasingly torrid and unpleasant summers that Delhi experiences. The friend had one thing to say: “If you keep cutting trees and replacing them with concrete, the summers are going to become hotter and more intolerable every year.
Politicians and big corporate folk must stop assuming that the people on the street are fools: they are more perceptive than we realize. The balance of power is just not in their favor.
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