Now is the summer of our discontent

Let’s dial things back a bit from climate change and its dangers for one minute and go into climatic conditions from a different angle – the poetic. Specifically, the anglophonic poetic perspective that puts summer on the pedestal, and conjures up the season as when the world becomes the most pleasant with everyone rushing out to meet the outdoors. Pause. Summer in our part of the neighbourhood is – and one can’t put this mildly even in mid-March – not good. While the likes of Shakespeare may use winter as the bad cop among the seasons and summer as the good cop, here, we’d rather have that line from Richard III corrected to, ‘Now is the summer of our discontent/ Made glorious winter by this son of York.’ On the more contemporary side of things, we should also transpose Janis Joplin‘s 1969 rendition of George Gershwin’s 1934 song ‘Summertime’ to ‘Wintertime’.

Obviously, for temperate countries or people living in even colder climes, summer is imbued with the romance that sunshine, blue skies et al bring to these places. Here in the subcontinent, sunshine has less savoury qualities. Think heatstroke, humidity, scorchers. Monsoons have true romance, while winters – short and polluting they may be – aren’t satanic summers. So, let’s quit blindly following the West and praise the glorious winter, not the sultry summer.