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A Ferocious Heat in Delhi
- skilled 7y agoI was in Delhi a few years back during the hottest month of the year. Temperatures were fluctuating between 45-50 Celsius on average. I had never experienced walking outside the door at 7 AM only to be greeted with scorching heat like that.
- PeterisP 7y agoAnd yet, despite all the claims that the author makes about quality of air and life in Delhi, it's steadily growing, adding something like 4 million inhabitants over the last 5 years. As the article quotes "Yet New Delhi was bursting its seams, because newcomers from rural India kept flooding in." - the people are voting with their feet that urbanization with the associated jobs and wealth is more important to them personally than better environment conditions, since they're leaving the latter to gain the former.
- Tade0 7y agoI would say they're rather compelled to do so by poverty.
- emiliobumachar 7y agoPo-tay-to, po-tah-to. One of the greatest features of urbanization is greater economic opportunities. For the poor, that's means to escape poverty. I agree that it's unfortunate that people have to make the choice.
- computerex 7y agoNo it's not quite that simple. The Indians leaving behind their homes aren't always doing it because they want to enrich their pockets (which BTW is not wrong and something anyone would do). They are often compelled to do it because there is a lack of local resources, like drinking water or electricity. That's one of the points of the main article, maybe you missed it.
- sgregnt 7y agoWhat's the difference between enreaching someone's pocket vs moving to have a better quality of life? It is the same thing.
- random42 7y agoProsperity vs survival
- computerex 7y agoThe difference is owning a Lamborghini vs having drinking water. It's easy for you to make such silly assertions because you probably have never experienced that type of scarcity. Tradition is huge in India. Many people are forced to move to cities and leave behind the lands of their forefathers because life is simply no longer possible in the outskirts due to lack of basic necessities like water or food.
- puranjay 7y agoIndia's great failure in the 20th century has been its inability to nurture urban centers outside a handful of major metros. So everyone floods into Mumbai, Bangalore, and Delhi because there are no jobs anywhere else. Capital cities in other states have nowhere near the quality of jobs on offer in these 3-4 major metros.
- AndyMcConachie 7y agoI think you forgot Hyderabad and maybe Chennai. I generally agree with you, but I would expand your list a bit.
- puranjay 7y agoBangalore's loss is going to be Hyderabad's gain. Bangalore's traffic and water woes will drive more and more companies to switch to nearby Hyderabad. Though I do wonder how the downturn in the automobile sector is going to affect Chennai in the long-run
- modi15 7y agoIts not India's great failure. It is India's great achievement. We need to move people rapidly from rural area to urban cities and India is doing an awesome job at it.
- skbohra123 7y agoI live in Phalodi. The place which recorded 51°Celsius, the highest temperature ever recorded in India. AMA!
- ollie87 7y agoHow do you even breath in 50°C heat? Does it hurt?
- skbohra123 7y agoWell, it's certainly tough. The heat wave makes it impossible to get outside. All you can do is stay indoors in air-conditioner.
- mruts 7y agoWhat percentage of the population has air conditioners? Also, what do you think would happen if you didn’t have one? I honestly can’t imagine that kind of heat and how people could even survive in it.
- skbohra123 7y agoI would say less than 10%. Desert coolers are quite effective here, due to the no-humidity, which are way cheaper. I imagine, people who live here have the bodies adapted to it. Also, the house structures, food and other things have traditionally been developed keeping in mind the extreme heat, so I think that makes a lots of difference.
- Filligree 7y agoBreathing per se should be fine. If you've ever been in a sauna, you'll know you can breathe air even when it's above the boiling point -- not for very long, to be sure, but that's got more to do with the extreme rate of sweating than your lungs. The lungs are always wet, which keeps them cool from evaporation.
- rimliu 7y ago
- fasicle 7y agoI've been working in Madrid the last few weeks and temperatures have been around 35-43 Celsius (~ 110 Fahrenheit). Coming from London, it's been a real shock and sucks the energy out of me. I'm constantly crossing roads to find any shade while walking. I can't begin to imagine living somewhere like Delhi which is even hotter!
- kasperni 7y ago> I can't begin to imagine living somewhere like Delhi which is even hotter! And then combine it with tons of pollution...
- ido 7y agoand delhi is far from the hottest city in india!
- singularity2001 7y agowell it was close this year: 48°C, only 3° below the national record
- eb0la 7y agoLast week in Madrid was hard. I bike to work (it's 1 metro station away from home) and last week about 4pm was harder that usual. I remember a beer commercial some time ago about an alien invasion. Everybody was scared, but the people in Seville was happy because the alien mothership casted a shadow over the city and suddenly the heat was tolerable.
- ignoramous 7y agoThis piece reminds me of Mark Manson's 'A dust over India' [0][1]. > “The boys can’t even stand upright after a few hours in this kind of heat, but the bosses won’t understand this. They say the work must be completed on schedule,” he says. How do the men manage? The general lack of empathy, compassion, and brotherhood is astonishing among the Indian elite. As for the general populace: Nothing unites them like tradition, nothing divides them like tradition. The race to bottom caused diminishing opportunities to secure financial freedom, this zero-sum game in the face of rampant corruption, a dizzying dichotomy induced by income inequality, a severe lack of humanism driven by rising population and dwindling resources, a merit-less-ness permeating the government and the judiciary favouring the powerful who are inadvertently also the rich, deceit at every step as a means to rise above the tide point to a society with hallmarks of an inevitable collapse. > The state of Gujarat is suffering its worst dry spell in thirty years... Its my home state, and I've written about this topic before [2]. The matter of fact is that activists who put tremendous amount of effort to try to bring about change aren't spared by the wolves [3][4] and then eventually there's no one left to speak up. > The monsoon is late this year. We turn our eyes to the sky every evening, fastening our hopes for relief to the tiniest shred of cloud... This is key: I happened to once live close to Kerela in South Western India which gets the first monsoon showers and copious amount of rain (second only to the states in North East India), and on the onset of the monsoons the day-time temperatures would drop up to 20C, from low 40Cs to low 20Cs. This is almost as close as winter temperatures get in the tropics. Unfortunately, this respite from the unrelenting Indian summer is subject to wildly changing events elsewhere on the planet [5], which means global warming is absolutely jeopardizing the livelihood of 1 billion people right this minute. > Chennai, India’s sixth largest city, ran out of water. Chennai was built on wetlands and the erstwhile settlement was littered with lakes and flanked with rivers... zero-day might have been unimaginable just a decade ago-- A city not far from there is surrounded by water bodies, but those are being strained due to sharing of water far and beyond just because the head of the state happens to be from a region hit with water crisis and so naturally all the water elsewhere needs to be transported to his constituency with no regard for environment or costs whatever. The ruling class is borderline nihilistic, morally, in my opinion. > The affluent have already adjusted. The billionaires have their “golden visas,” residence permits that allow them to claim citizenship in some European countries if they have made substantial enough investments in property or businesses. This is not farther from truth. I, personally, know four different families that have sent their kids to immigration friendly countries like Canada, Australia, Sweden for the 'golden visa'. It is almost parasitic behaviour, one would think [6]? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4214480 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4214480 [1] https://markmanson.net/a-dust-over-india https://markmanson.net/a-dust-over-india [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16301765 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16301765 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amit_Jethwa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amit_Jethwa [4] https://yourstory.com/2017/09/rti-activists-murdered/ https://yourstory.com/2017/09/rti-activists-murdered/ [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsoon_of_South_Asia#Changes_of_the_Monsoon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsoon_of_South_Asia#Changes_... [6] https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/IM1-DQ2Wo_w https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/IM1-DQ2Wo_w