A walk in the rain – What an experience!! – Part 1

It’s been raining the last three days in London and it’s that type of English rain, a relentless drizzle. While walking back home it just struck me, that I really have not enjoyed rain, nature at one of its best. Its not nature’s fury but one of those beautiful little things that nature offer’s you and we being so caught up in our lives don’t even have the slightest inclination to see it, leave alone, enjoying it. As this thought occurred to me, I started relating to the experience of how it feels being in the rain.

I ran the tortoise mosquito coil, to rewind my years in life to check within me, whether I have really experienced rain and it really hit me then, to notice that the answer was a definite NO. It really was reality check of sorts.

When I was young, rain meant, no school and sitting at home and that was the delight rain bought me. Probably I would have ventured a few times, to try a paper boat on the flowing water on the roads, or loved to kick the water out of the balcony in my house. We used to live on the first floor of a house and when it would rain, water would get accumulated in the balcony and you had to push it down to the ground floor to clear the balcony and I remember having fun kicking the water down. Another clear remembrance is how the rain would play spoil sport during Diwali. As a kid, I would have begged for a few tens or hundreds of Rupees from my parents to buy those crackers for diwali and exactly on diwali it would pour, just to sour your childishness, that of bursting crackers.

The next thought of rain surely is college days and in those 3 years there was more rain than I have experienced in Chennai. As guys we would love to go to college during those days, because we knew enough water would have entered the college gates for them to declare the evening off (I was in evening college). Then it would be party time, having that wonderful masala vada and chai at Nair’s tea shop near college or going to Besant Nagar beach in the rain and waiting for it to stop to eat really hot fried rice on the road side. Wow!, those days were great, it was the Summer of 96. By end of this fantastic experience you would be soaking wet, even if you were wearing a duckbag rain coat.

The other only experience of rain was when I was in Mumbai and I was startled and amazed as how the city continued to move on, in its own rapid speed irrespective of the mighty Mumbai monsoon. One certain experience was of getting a Dominos Pizza delivered in pouring rain in less than an hour, that too from Malad to Goregoan. But all these experiences were not life altering till the one I experienced last evening.

To be continued in part two.