‘So, now that’s how it feels,’ is the tinny voice being heard inside many a hypothalamus, the part of the brain that tells the body to get back to its regular temperature when it gets too hot or cold. Concerned and ‘experienced’ advice about the need for northern Europeans to take siestas like their southern cousins are doled out like wet sponges from our good old tropics.
How-to-siesta tips are already being sent out like European food and medical packages to the Congo. Thanks to Europe’s unused-to, unprecedented heat, our local spartan third-worlders, who can ‘handle the heat easy-peasy’, are feeling as first worldly as they come.
Being secretly chuffed at someone else’s hardships is hardly the right thing to do, especially if you really think vasudhaiva is kutumbakam. But blame the likes of Wordsworth and William S, who never stopped to think what, say, Indian readers of their poetry would make of them going on and on about the loveliness of summer. Sure, it was Britain and this was the tropics. But how are you doing now?
