Barsaat in the times of battery of apps

Hindustan Times

5 hours ago

It's that time of year again when the rainy season is at the doorstep and one is not sure whether it's going to rain cats and dogs, or whether one has saved enough for the rainy day. In these times of artificial rain, a la Dubai's fake cloud fiasco, not sure whether we should be saving for a rainy day or saving for a fake rainy day. (Instagram/Soumarup Ghosh)
Come monsoon, and these are just some of the rain idioms one ends up pondering about.
How digital life has perhaps even rendered redundant some monsoon proverbs and rain ditties.
How technology has even transformed the ways in which we get rain ready.
In these times of artificial rain, a la Dubai's fake cloud fiasco, not sure whether we should be saving for a rainy day or saving for a fake rainy day.
Or take 'My Fair Lady's' fabled rain ditty. Were Hollywood's late diva Audrey Hepburn to do an Eliza Doolittle in this digital era, she may have had to croon tweaked lyrics:
'The fake rain in Bahrain,
stays mainly in the plain...'
Rain readiness
As for being rain ready, in pre-digital times, it entailed a huge flurry of preparations.
The rainy season saw people bustling about busy to bring on the three S's :
Stocking. Sealing. Saving.
Stocking: It entailed stocking up on provisions lest the Rain God and team decided to play a Test match up in the clouds rather than a sort of quick half-day IPL.
The stocking meant piling up mostly daily provisions --- dabbalroti to doodh, eggs to veggies and fruits --- lest the doodhwallah and pheriwallahs play truant in the Test match staged by the Rain God's franchise.
Since the cup cakes and sweet buns that the dabbalroti-wallah ferried were a daily staple come rain or shine, they too were very much part of the monsoon stockpile building.
Digital life has changed all that, even our exertions to be rain ready.
No worry now of a dabbalroti-wallah not turning up, he has as it is been delivered a death-knell. No tension now of a doodhwallah, with clanking and clanging milk cans, playing truant in the barsaat.
Blinkit, BB Now, Instamart & Co hain naa.
Even on days when it's raining cats and dogs, Digital India is generally assured of the bloke with the brown paper bag banging the doorbell. Unless the roads are clogged like a heart patient's arteries or Trump's grey cells.
Sealing: Rain readiness spelt all kinds of sealing and screening.
Cracked windows, leaking crevices and nooks needed to be sealed.
A major concern for booklovers of yore was how to protect shelves and cupboards, chock-a-block with tomes and texts, from dampness.
Damp shelves or dripping roofs could ruin literature of a lifetime.
Stumbling upon patches of mouldy greenishness while thumbing through a treasured tome are a dreaded sight for a book collector.
Thus, earlier days would see manual exercises of rain-proofing the walls of damp book cupboards or bookshelves. The weapons of protection would be anything handy -- mammoth plastic sheets culled from discarded atta bags to even rolls and rolls of aluminium foil.
Ditto for clothes closets housing treasured silks and delicate chiffons.
Exquisite brocades and Banarsis needed to be stowed away in potli bags or damp-proof stout steel trunks, with silica gel pouches.
Digital life has changed all that, too. Rain-ready your home now, just at the tap of an app.
Urban Company, UrbanRoof, and dehumidifier contraptions hain naa.
Saving: Strange how with time, phrases and idioms sometimes grow up to acquire more literal meanings, than the original figurative connotations.
Take the phrase 'to save for a rainy day'. Given the contemporary scenario, it may now carry more a literal meaning.
Saving for a rainy day may entail investing in insurance against false ceiling collapses in chandeliered condos, where Digital India's mushrooming builder brands parked material as cheap as a Sarojini Nagar faux vanity kit.
Saving for a rainy day may now literally mean buying life jackets and personal customised speedboats, sporting 24x7 wi-fi, to survive flooded flyovers, swimming skyrises and clogged condos in metropolises or millennium cities such as Gurugram.
This should suffice to give a drift of things, without flooding the reader with more monsoon imagery.
The curious case of 'A Walk In The Faux Clouds'.
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