Mysore is sweltering and almost everyone I meet says this year has become unusually hot and, that too, very early. Come to think of it, I have always heard the same comment about the summer every year over the past twenty years. But, unbelievably, my local temperature, rainfall and humidity records maintained by my rather queer family over the past eighty years do not show any significant variations over the last twenty five years. At least not so much that a man can just feel the difference without some form of recording device.
What however is significant is that there has been a 25% drop in the average rainfall which comes as no surprise considering the deforestation that is going on. What is in fact surprising is that the decrease is only 25% although the deforestation is much more. This only shows how forgiving nature is.
Your words offer no comfort whatsoever. My mattress takes me to the brink of near-death experience, night after night during summer. Not really, it is post-death experience, for, I feel, I am being shovelled into the crematorium (though last night, it was surprisingly cool and pleasant). The sun has just about begun to peek into my study, and I am already topless!
Your words are like the bulletins that assure us that inflation has declined, but the common man just does not feel it.
As you rightly said the nature knows and does do the balancing act perfectly.I feel that earthquake, Sunami and other natural calamities happens to bring back to normalcy.which will destroy properties & Life.We should not think that our city is the Safest place in the world.Who knows one day we may also be affected due to the inbalance in our neighbouring towns.Before all these happens to us and also to have enough ground water, we should take up planting trees and make rain harvesting a must by all of us.One can see how our chamundi hills is loosing its greenery year by year.Days are not far away from our C'Hills to become like French rock.Before this happens let all of us teach our younger generation and ourself not to deforest and give importance to ground water.We can achive this by not using natural products like wood. Also we should avoid using PLASTIC.Though we may not be able to fight against our mother nature, at least we try to prevent natural calamities.Any suggestion from you all is most welcomed. LETS GROW MORE TREES & AVOID PLASTIC.
When i travel from Bangalore to Mysore, i feel the real heat in Mysore. Though Mysore is having less vehicular population vis-a-vis Bangalore, the heat plus muskito menace will make me have sleepless nights creating an urge to return to Bangalore.
Further, it is an irony that Mysoreans don't get Kavery water in some parts of the city with hard water being still supplied to them , despite the river being in the close vicinity. While Bangalore gets the credit of being state capital, Mysore can not be sidelined.
More the better, less we talk about power supply status.
As rightly debated, awareness-creation for the forthcoming generation needs to be done right now by every conscious Mysorean before it becomes a Sahara.!!
The more we depend on fans and air-conditioners, the more we tend to feel the change in outside temperatures. Also, houses all around with no greenery also adds to it. [And they ar chopping off trees - even house owners see it as a burden due to fallen leaves!!] The less we depend on fans or A/c the more our bodies get adjusted to the climate - which natural mechanism is prevented in the name of 'feeling comfort'. Our school text books had a chapter on "house". An ideal house would have sufficient space all around, with proper windows and ventilators. The ceiling used to be typically high, usually tiled which was naturally cool. Came the RCC, people began to feel the heat! Came the low ceilings to accommodate a first floor. Cement plastering also adds up to the heat whereas lime mortar do not retain heat.... whatwith people talking "very hot, very hot". This psychology also adds up to make us feel really hot!! No wonder the statistics provided by Dr. JN tends to prove it. Ground water is almost absent [at least in the top layers] and that could be adding to the feeling of heat as well. Defecient rainfall is another major reason. Plus, people are seeing mud as dirt and so they pave whatever little area they find thus preventing rainwater absorption. Easy to maintain the pavements, but at some cost!
Another thing I have noticed is that the sun's "glare" is more since a few years than before. Even the winter sun scorches the skin. The light seems to be a bit brighter on sunny days, with that 'glare". Tinted glasses are becoming useful. Necessary too. No dearth for models now - in the name of fashion too.
It is logical. Finally, these all look to be the aftermath of population explosion. More number of people, less will be the availability of space per person. In Bangalore, it pains me to tell that tube lights will be on during the day (!!) in my house for clear visibility. God save us since human effort seems to have become ineffective.
Thought I'd take a lunch time pot shot while having lunch (in Mosquito free 12th floor at Delhi)at Mr. Nataraj's comments about Mysore having more mosquitos that he feels like going back to Bangalore! I have an explanation-mosquitos are a wise lot. They could not stand the amount of dust and vehicular pollution of Bangalore and have therefore moved enmasse to a safe haven-Mysore! Humans have learned to live with the pollution or maybe for the sake of the stomach, live in gassed out places like Bangalore!
Seeing the couple of comments about mosquitoes I suddenly began to wonder whether there is any difference between the population of mosquitoes at the ground level and in the upper floors of high rise buildings, say above the 25th floor or so. If their population is significantly lesser as you go higher this factor may enhance the market value of flats in the higher reaches of high rise builings. Since i have always been a ground dweller ever since my ancestors decided to get down from the trees, which was very long ago, i have no authority to make any comments on this issue. Capt Anup Murthy and others with more experience should throw some light.
If we do not soon put and end to all the harmful activities that we are heaping upon mother nature and this earth i am afraid that very soon our crematoriums will be cooler than our climate which will slowly cremate us.
It appears there is a move, certainly an unecessary one, to widen the road that leads to the helipad from the Lalitha Mahal Road. It is lined by robust tamarind trees in the prime of their youth and we should watch out and see to it that they are not harmed in the process.
It is now more than five years since the hundreds of more than hundred year old trees were cut down to widen the Mysore-Bangalore road but as of now nobody, neither the authorities nor citizens like us, seem to be even remotely bothered about replacing them. If this work had been taken up five years ago we would have had hundreds of ready-to-provide-shade trees by now.
We should get out of this kind of "Slow-Cerebration" as it is called in medical parlance especially in all matters concerning our fragile environment.
I am in Mysore for only two days and I get into a fight! At the corner of Kuvempunagar double Road near the Airtel office the electric company was busy knocking down branches of a tree. I got down from my car to observe. Soon enough they started to indiscriminately cut branches that were nowhere near the power lines and no chance of these branches growing anywhere close. After a local argument, the workers decided to bring the AE on the scene. I asked if they had asked for permission from anyone. He said they did not need one and they had the power to cut down anything they wanted. I asked for his name and he refused to do so and asked me for my name instead. Out came my full name, address and telephone number. Upon hearing my title, the AE's air got deflated and after that the workers were instructed to cut small branches that were touching the line and not touch anything that was too far and had no chance of becoming an obstruction. After repeated badgering, I got his name as Mr. Prashant (who really knows, these guys don't even carry an ID) and that he was an AE Kuvempunagar. I suspect he mixed up my title to be that of an Army Captain, also helped by my real short hair cut. I also suspect that the AE thought that Mysoreans would not have started shouting at a high decible level and hence was taken aback.
The gist of this is that I found that those who are in a government position think that they can plow their way through everything and they don't need to answer to anyone. This attitude, coupled by general public apathy has led to the massive tree cutting/felling operation in Mysore leading to the weather "feeling" hotter than it actually is.
Regarding temprerature, Dr. Nayeem may be right in that it may not have gone up. I don't know really. But, I find it real difficult to explain things like record cyclone season, record hurricane season last year in the US, early snowfall in the rest of the World and matter of fact snow in England just two days back (not really the season for it), record rain and flooding everywhere last monsoon, record high temperatures in some states even in India last summer (and this summer does not look better either). Cutting down trees, I am sure, is one of the reasons for this change around the World. Temperature remaining the same is mere statistic. There are other factors like I mentioned above that are changing. We can't ignore what we are doing to the planet can we?
