#365DaysOfWriting — Day Seventeen
It’s hot in Mumbai.
Oh yes, it is.
But it’s not just the heat though. Heat, I can bear to an extent. I’ve lived in Dubai for 2 years. It’s the humidity I can’t stand. That icky, hot feeling through the day. I’ve lived in Chennai for 2 years too, and that was a lot worse than Dubai.
I recently read an article about 2016 being ‘the hottest year in history on record’. You can read it here. It says there’s a 99% chance. Looking outside, I’d say we’ve gone well beyond 99%. We’re almost halfway through 2016, and there’s no sign of the heat abating.
Recently, I was having a conversation with my father about the lack of green in Mumbai these days. 11 years ago, in 2005, I had visited Hyderabad for a day. Now, I may not have an entirely fair estimate of the whole city, but whatever I saw of it, it seemed like a concrete jungle. The place I visited was called HITEC City. HITEC indeed, with all the fancy offices like Google and Infosys, but apart from the buildings, there was almost no green. Back then, I thought to myself, well at least Mumbai has some green. I’m not entirely sure that’s the case any more. The green has been disappearing.
And that has led to the disappearance of my favourite bird from this city — the sparrow.
I loved sparrows. As a kid, I could sit and watch a whole flock of them twitter (no pun intended). This article gives a list of reasons why they’ve disappeared — it also tells us how we can help them.
All of this begs the question — are we heading towards an ecological apocalypse? This may sound bombastic on the basis of a few personal observations, but I don’t think I’m too far off the mark. It may not happen during our lifetimes, but don’t we have a responsibility to look towards the future?
