This… author’s image
“Bless you, bless you for all this beauty to wake up to”, my wife says, to nobody in particular.
The flowers show off on the slope behind the living room window, and the oak and rhododendron fight for space just beyond the verandah.
“Just look at this”, she gestures expansively, “why would anyone want to live in the city?”
Her question is rhetorical, yet moot, because I’ve been doom-scrolling for the last two hours, as unprecedented rain has emptied itself over an unprepared Delhi - our cities are never prepared - and I’m waiting to check with my sister how our house in Delhi’s Panchshila Park has coped.
It hasn’t. She’s been up since 5:30, as the rainwater has spilled out of the drains, onto the road, and into our driveway. By 7 a.m., it’s in her living room, and then, as roof-top drains have no place to empty, they overflow, and spill down walls, and find crevices into a first floor bedroom. The wooden flooring in the den has curled up into so much driftwood, and the plaster on newly painted walls is blistering. We’re not alone, and my colony WhatsApp group is clogged with videos of flooded rooms and submerged cars.
As the day progresses, we receive messages from our elected representatives about how hard they’ve been working since 4:30 a.m., issuing orders to officials, visiting their constituencies to see what can be done. Should I be consoled?
I’m not looking for consolation, but action. The problems are well-known. Last year, after similar flooding, government functionaries had done a detailed inspection of the drains along our service road. The drains needed realignment, we were told, as the slopes were wrong. A couple of weeks later, the office bearers of our society told us that the plans had been approved, and the work would shortly begin. Of course it didn’t. The work, as and when it does happen, is complicated by the new houses in our lane, which have been built on elevated plinths; the ramps into their driveway have blocked access to the storm water drains, which now can’t be cleaned.
Unauthorised construction never goes unnoticed. It is connived at, and paid for, and functionaries up and down the ladder share in the spoils. To expect these same folks to now demolish ramps for the unglamorous work of cleaning drains, without the prospect of handsome payoffs, is to live in a fool’s paradise.
Not that there’s anything paradisiacal about my city, Delhi. Its parks, as my friend Nilanjana Roy tweeted, are gorgeous - when they are not flooded. And the cultural and intellectual life of the city is incredibly stimulating. As participant, producer, and joyous spectator, the music, art, theater and literature of Delhi have deeply shaped my life. But the stifling heat of this June, the dysfunction of our civic infrastructure, and above all, the appalling levels of air pollution, have made it into a city you have to deal with, rather than a home that brings joy.
This morning, we rounded a spur in an unfamiliar patch of forest, to meet a chubby-faced village woman perched on a knoll, chatting on her mobile. She put her phone down, and suggested we turn left, toward a naula, a stone structure around a water source. Where were we coming from, she wanted to know. How long had we been here? The questions came fast and furious, and within a couple of minutes, she knew that we had lived two villages away since the 90s, had a home in the city (not rented out, she ascertained), preferred living here, and like her and her neighbours, had a child who lived in the city.
The children all want to be in the city, the little old lady nodded. That, the history of economics tells us, is where prosperity lies. New paradigms may lie ahead; they must lie ahead, my wife insists. The future of mankind cannot be about crowding into noisy, polluted, misgoverned cities, which are the only kind of Indian cities we know. I hope she is right, but we’re not seeing this anywhere in the world.
The material prosperity we now take for granted is the result of escalating productivity and efficiency, which in turn is built on extreme specialisation. It takes a village to rear a child, we used to hear. But now, it takes an obstetrician, an ultrasound diagnostician, and genetic screening - even before the baby is delivered. Then there is the paediatrician, the early-learning center, the child psychologist, the international school faculty, the sports trainers and theater instructors, and the college counsellors to make sure your child finds the right starting point for the rat race of adult life.
Partly, I jest, but it is true that urban density and connectivity have gone hand-in-hand with economic prosperity. My wife and I made - and still make - our money in the modern economy of the city. And when we need medical care beyond the most basic, it is to the city specialists that we will turn. For the young people of our villages, it is the city, whether nearby Haldwani, or the sprawling metropolis of Delhi, that will offer them employment.
Like it or not, the future of India lies in our cities, and it is imperative that we push our politicians, and our neighbours, into making them livable - even if not paradisiacal.
The Vanishing Islands That Failed to Vanish
Underwater SOS
In 2009, the government of the Maldives held a cabinet meeting underwater, to highlight the threat that global warming posed for island dwellers.
“SOS from the frontlines” the cabinet declaimed to the world.
As political theater*, it worked a charm, and added to the doom around carbon emissions.
This morning, Raymond Zhang sent me a link to his piece on the Maldives, which appeared on the front page of the New York Times*. Do read the piece if you can access it, but here are the passages that spoke most loudly to me:
Scientists, he reports:
“found that over the past few decades, the islands’ edges had wobbled this way and that, eroding here, building there. By and large, though, their area hadn’t shrunk. In some cases, it was the opposite: They grew. The seas rose, and the islands expanded with them.”
In the Pacific Ocean, too, scientists compared aerial images of 27 islands from the middle of the last century with satellite images of today:
“Their findings caused an uproar.
“The seas had risen an inch or so each decade, yet the waves had kept piling sediment on the islands’ shores, enough to mean that most of them hadn’t changed much in size. Their position on the reef might have shifted. Their shape might be different. Whatever was going on, it clearly wasn’t as simple as oceans rise, islands wash away.”
Doomsday theories are very limiting. Scientifically, they are simplistic, where nature is complex. But more importantly, they divert attention from the real task at hand, which is making policy choices about how to deal with the changes that nature continually forges.
“Coexistence, to use Dr. Kench’s word, means accepting that the mighty ocean will do what it will and learning to live with it. It means planning smartly around the water rather than trying to keep it away with expensive engineering projects, which carry their own complicated suite of environmental side effects.”
https://sos.noaa.gov/education/phenomenon-based-learning/underwater-cabinet-meeting/
NYT article: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/06/26/climate/maldives-islands-climate-change.html?lgrp=c-bar&unlocked_article_code=1.2k0.dw5q.U3-8L8LecWda&smid=url-share&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
I quite agree. In fact, the same phenomenon was observed for the island nation of Tuvalu which observed some parts of the island growing while the others were being submerged (https://arindamupmanyu.substack.com/p/the-digital-sovereign)