Love the rain

I fondly remember the monsoon. I remember the drive up from Chandigarh to Baddi (Himachal) in the rains. Last August, I was teaching some students at Baddi, and used to drive up every Tuesday and Thursday. The road is broken all over the place and it is a complete roller coaster ride all through. The entire journey takes a good two hours, when ideally it should take 30 minutes if it were a good road. With the torrential rains we saw last monsoon, the road was almost non existent, and it was more like the car was splashing through pools of water one after the other, and I think it was the pure momentum that let the car move forward. The dilapidated road was eroded more in the process and every time the drive was to start, one had to brace oneself for an eventful journey. The funny thing is that all this is not enough to dampen anyone's spirit! Trucks, buses, cycles, rickshaws galore - everyone is out there on the road, and so what if your four wheel drive ends up almost scraping by on two wheels while tilting to let a truck go through - its all fun anyway!

I for one loved it. The rain battering down on my window. A few times I even gave in to the temptation of rolling the window down, and managed to get myself and the car seat completely drenched in the process! The weather would be amazing - a cool breeze, the cloudy sky, the majestic gray in the distance, telling you that more rain is on the way. The rainbow right after a hearty cloudburst. What I loved the most was the fact that the drive was through lush green rice fields. And the freshness of the green around me would lift my spirit. Every blade of grass seemed to stand up so strong and tall. Happy, just being there, enjoying the shower of water, soaking up the sunshine, and rejoicing in the company of its folks around it. It seemed as if it was smiling back to me, conveying to me that there is life in the smallest of creation. Be at one with nature, it can make even the most difficult of journeys (pun intended) more pleasant.