Kerala – The Monsoon has certainly arrived

It’s been a few weeks since the met department had signed off the arrival of the monsoon into Kerala, but I believe it was not until a few days earlier that the impact is being felt. There are two things about a monsoon. First is a no brainer – rains and thus cooling the temperature around you and giving a boost to the ecological and economic environment. The second is what am going to blog – the experience.

Monsoons are caused by the larger amplitude of the seasonal cycle of land temperature compared to that of nearby oceans. Strengthening of the Asian monsoon has been linked to the uplift of the Tibetan Plateau after the collision of India and Asia around 50 million years ago. Timing of the monsoon strengthening of the Indian Monsoon of around 5 million years ago was suggested due to an interval of closing of the Indonesian Seaway to cold thermocline waters passage from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean which is believed to have resulted in an increased sea surface temperature in the Indian Ocean. I guess this defines what a monsoon is and why it occurs on the Indian Ocean. To read in-depth about monsoons, you can visit the following website – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsoon.

It’s been a couple days since the rain has been constant and persistent, cooling the temperature and killing the humidity, allowing the inner temperature of your body to be constant and certainly keeping your mind calm. You might be thinking, I have lost it – Keeping your mind calm. The answer is yes, thanks to the serenity and the tranquility, the experience created by the rain when it falls and hits the ground over gods own country.

Let me share the wonderful experience I had this morning driving to work. Trust me, I have not had this pleasure so far – especially while driving to work. It certainly was overcast as I drove out my parking lot, of my flat complex heading towards NH 4, the driveway to work. As it should be, it started to drizzle, softly, quietly and so non-chalantly that the wipers in the car were not required but surely the petrichor certainly was filling up my nasals. The sky turned grey from white or light sky blue and within seconds opened up to what was now a downpour. I hit the junction on NH 4 to turn right towards technopark (You can’t define it as a techno – park), the climate around turned really grey and started moving towards shades of black, rain cluttering on your windshield, but the surrounding, reverberating with pastures of green. The green on either side of the road covered the surrounding, allowing the road to reflect the water droplets so prominently that you’re ‘wowed’ into a different world. It felt like the pathway to heaven opened with a black shiny carpet, interiored with greens on the side and grey on the top.

By the time I feel and experience this, the green disappears for a while exposing the greyed sky, fuming out water from the top as if the shower in a bath was broken and I suddenly feel I just walked out of a closed entity or more so a confinement. This experience is so scintillating, it can’t be written. With this experience, I can’t hear the honking trucks, feel the headlights penetrating my eyes from oncoming vehicles (remember it is dark that we need to switch our headlights on, though it is half nine in the morning), the illogical traffic sense (if there is one and sense in the right direction) of my way riders that usually make me fume and sweat even inside an air-conditioned car. It’s an exhilarating experience.

As I soak in the experience and feel the aura of the monsoon around me, I reach the gates of technopark. Technopark is just a name for all the companies situated inside, but ,no where is it close even to resembling one, especially if you come from the IT capital or other IT hubs of this country, where you can see yourself off any building as they are all concrete jungles built with glass all around them, that Saint Gobain would be proud of them. Once you enter the technopark, unless you drive into the side lanes where the buildings are located, you would have no sign of glass till you drive deep into the park to locate the other buildings. And even then there does not exist a building that boasts of only glassed environment that makes you feel that you are a specimen in a lab bottle or a worm in a tequila bottle.

The park itself is simmering green and nature is shining through, thanks to the pelting rain. The environment feels clean, smells green and you feel like a man wearing pure white that you actually don’t feel anything but yourself and the feeling of being one with Mother Nature. All dreams end when you wake and so does this experience as I turn in my car to a parking lot to get to work. The experience had to come to an end, but will live with me for ever and will be synonym with Kerala.