Winter’s tale in Northern India: A season of discontent

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Winter’s tale in Northern India: A season of discontent

Saturday, 25 January 2025 | Hiranmay Karlekar

Winter’s tale in Northern India: A season of discontent

Northern India’s winter is more than just a fleeting season; it is a relentless narrative of marrow-freezing cold, breath-choking pollution and a grim forecast for years to come

Of freezing marrows and choking breaths William Shakespeare, emperor of narratives, master of metaphors, celebrated craftsman of sentences and acclaimed presenter of deep insights into human nature, had a way of coming up with expressions surviving the passage of time. One of them is “winter of our discontent.” Richard, Duke of Gloucester, says in Richard III, “Now is the winter of our discontent/ Made glorious summer by this sun of York;/ And all the clouds that lour’d upon our house/ In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.” The expression, which adorns one of John Steinbeck’s most famous novels as its title, should resonate particularly strongly with people in northern India still in the grip of a winter that is cold, damp and utterly polluted. The chances of things improving in the next few years, are, to put it mildly, bleak.

As the chilling flipside of global warming, the cold months will continue to be increasingly marrow-freezing, since, with Donald Trump taking over as the United States’ president, the chances of a deceleration in the pace of climate change, have diminished significantly. This is not to look wistfully back over one’s shoulder to a mythical place like the island valley of Avilion, where, pace Alfred Tennyson in a very different context, “falls not hail, or rain, or any snow, / Nor ever wind blows loudly.” Climates and the weather have been notoriously fickle cousins throughout history. If any part of the past seems golden, it is because of the distance in time which lends it enchantment.

It had, when it was the present, its warts, some of them rather large and ugly. Floods and droughts took very heavy tolls when meteorological devices and skills for predicting their advent and coping with their aftermath, were far less advanced. In the absence of electrical heating devices, which we have, life could not have been terribly pleasant during the last ice age which had covered about 30 per cent of the earth’s surface and ended 15, 000 to 20,000 years ago. On a more specific note, slavery was legal in most parts of the world–including the chest-thumping democracies of the West–as late as the second half of the 19th century. The weather, doubtless, has an impact on life and its moods, which influence thought, speech and feeling which, in turn, trigger action.

All of these, at a certain elevated level, power the wheels of history. These also affect inter-personal relations, causing friction and hostility arising from anger and discontent, or cordiality and warmth caused by harmony. The sum total of the interaction among these factors determines the quality of a community’s social existence in terms of tensions between collective bodies like class and caste, and stress caused by individual actions like crime, which is often caused by alienation resulting from marginalisation, poverty and anonymity in impersonal societies. A crime can be a perverse act of self-assertion, a sub-conscious statement like, “I kill, therefore I exist”—a variant of Rene Descartes much-quoted assertion, “Cogito ergo sum (literally, “I think, therefore, I am”).

Another form of self-assertion can be participation—to say nothing of playing a leading role—in a mass movement. Eric Hoffer writes in The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, “There is in us a tendency to locate the shaping forces of our existence outside ourselves. Success and failure are unavoidably related in our minds with the state of things around us. Hence it is that people with a sense of fulfilment think it a good world and would like to conserve it as it is, while the frustrated favour radical change. The tendency to look for all causes outside ourselves persists even when it is clear that our state of being is the product of personal qualities such as ability, character, appearance, health and so on.” What is the result? Hoffer quotes Thoreau as saying, “If anything ail a man, so that he does not perform his functions, if he has a pain in his bowels even ... he forthwith sets about reforming — the world.” (Italics by Hoffer; Thoreau has used the plurals “ail” and “have” as it was done by many in his time in such contexts).

Attempts to reform the world invariably lead to struggles with status quoists. Besides, social tensions and conflicts will increase following rising ocean levels, caused by global warming, submerging coastal areas. Inward migration of people from these regions would trigger clashes over land and resources in the interior areas. The same factors will also be in operation in other areas to which people may escape from regions made uninhabitable by temperatures rising too high to support life.

One can, of course, argue that people would be kind to global warming refugees, realising that they may have to leave their homes someday for the same reason. But then, kindness is not what a person encounters frequently in life; it is the same with gratitude, the lack of which weighed heavily on the Bard of Avon. “Ingratitude,” he lamented in King Lear, “thou marble-hearted fiend….” He bewailed in As You Like It, “Blow, blow, thou winter wind, / Thou art not so unkind/As man’s ingratitude.” And he says in Twelfth Night, “I hate ingratitude more in a man/ Than lying, vainness, babbling, drunkenness,/ Or any taint of vice whose strong corruption/ Inhabits our frail blood.” Character attributes like proneness towards gratitude are rooted deep inside one’s DNA and are modified by the environment as one grows up. Seasonal changes can impact their intensity, as discomfort caused by extreme heat or cold can put one’s temper on a short leash. 

On the other hand, as Anton Chekhov put it, “People don’t notice whether it’s winter or summer when they’re happy.”

This brings us back to our starting point—northern India’s butt-freezing, breath-choking winter. Can one be happy in its midst? The answer will be in the affirmative, as the news of a progeny scaling new heights at work or being gifted with a baby, will warm the cockles of one’s heart. This, however, is most likely to be a passing phase, overwhelmed, sooner than later, by the many worries and sadnesses that quotidian existence brings and that, again, are ephemeral.

The more relevant question will be whether one can survive northern India’s winter and for how long. The transition to the hereafter caused by pollution stalks one silently but lethally. The final truth in life is mortality.

All this has been said before, and will be said again, as one will hear the much-quoted proverb, “What can’t be cured must be endured.” It has joined the ranks of venerable cliches blessed with eternal life.

(The author is Consulting Editor, The Pioneer. The views expressed are personal)

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