Never mind where you are in India, there is a heat wave in your life. My workmates in Coonoor have been complaining of a 21°C heat wave that is not allowing them to sleep well at night. Meanwhile, my friends in Srinagar are angry about their 12°C heat wave.
HEAT is the big four-letter word in our lives today. Every city, town and village is getting hotter than it ever was. As many blame global warming to be the prime culprit, we petty human beings are not able to accept the real cause as yet. Let me explore that a bit as my heat-addled mind is getting angrier by the minute. And sorry for calling us petty. It’s more I than you.
The heat around us, and most certainly the heated minds and heated bodies it is creating, is the subject at hand. Just as the heat wave starts inching up degree by degree, there is an entire economy that is on the hot move. The skincare industry is out there in the hot sun with you, offering you every solution for skin-defence (a new science on its own), just as the garment industry is offering you summer fashion to beat the sun. The air-conditioner industry is on overdrive celebrating the heat, just as air-coolers are being bought by every other segment that cannot afford an air-conditioner. In the bargain, I am told many brands have a waiting list, just as tedious and long as the LPG queue.
Managing heat waves is a science on its own today. If the best way to avoid the sun is staying indoors, that is not much of an option. Remember, summer is when the ‘summer holidays’ are on with a vengeance. Every school is off and every parent is under pressure to take a vacation. So you need to be out. Those of us who work have our daily office routines on. Can’t avoid that. Those of us who work in the field do not have the luxury of staying away from the sun. Summer is certainly a cruel season for those of us who can’t afford to escape to cooler climes.
The heat wave in our midst is not only causing more road rage cases, but it is also bringing down productivity all across. We are able to work less than in the winter months, or for that matter in the months in between the extreme weather patterns.
The sad fact is that minimum temperatures are climbing faster than the maximum that hits our cities and towns. We seem to be tracking the maximum temperature more than what is happening at the level of the minimum. Our days are getting hotter and hotter, and the nights are getting even hotter. In the bargain, there is just no time for the city to cool off. We begin our mornings on a hot note. In more ways than one. Have you noticed?
The global warming baseline is telling. As per data on hand, the world crossed the dangerous +1.5°C threshold in 2024. This means that 2024 was the first year with the global average temperature 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels—making it the warmest year on record. What then is the ambition of 2026? To beat 2024, for sure.
Add to it the measure of the ‘dangerous heat’ days experienced. The world in 2024 experienced 41 more such days as opposed to the baseline. Look at India. Year 2024 was the hottest since records began in 1901. The annual mean land surface air temperature was 0.65°C above the 1991-2020 average.
Leave the data aside and look at what happens everywhere to all of us. We somehow seem to lose our cool all too easily. Road rage numbers tell the story all too clearly. Public health and productivity drops. Power grids are under extreme stress as we pull that much more energy out of them to stay cool and energetic. Outdoor weddings and events, however late in the evening, are events one wants to avoid. The bad news is the big news, though. Every passing year is going to see this worsen. Every summer is going to be worse than the previous one.
Is it then time that we sit up and look at solutions to help mitigate it all? Isn’t it time to stop being the problem and pretending to look like the solution at least?
Is it time that each one of us took a long-term view of heat rather than the fatalistic “here comes summer” kind of an attitude? Must we look at ourselves and audit everything we do? Even the solutions we bring to mitigate the problem seem to instead worsen the problem. Air-conditioners and their use, for instance. Must we abandon the short-termism that clouds our mind? The answer is, of course, a resounding yes.
The big cities need to lead the way. The steel-and-glass buildings in our Gurugrams, Bengalurus and Punes are prime culprits that reflect the sun and leave no breathing space for the earth at large. Our concrete, white-topped roads, pavements and boulevards are the biggest enemies of the cool-way our townships and cities were meant to be.
Even then, we plan with mindsets of cities far cooler than ours. What works in Kyoto, Japan is brought into Adugodi, Bengaluru and implemented without a contextual understanding of ground reality. We are devoted to the cosmetic and totally divorced from the functional reality that must actually rule the roost in such decision-making.
We have built on our lakebeds. Not one city in India can claim to be above this accusation. We have destroyed our water bodies at the altar of development. We have uprooted our trees and removed natural foliage spaces. We have not re-planted enough. We have destroyed everything natural and replaced them with everything unnatural. Even Delhi airport’s new waterfall has real water falling on plastic foliage. The cosmetic movement is in full swing.
Compare that to our Bengaluru airport’s Terminal 2, which is going in the right reverse direction. Its greening—real, not cosmetic—is possibly a case study to follow for every airport, every city and indeed every corporate space that wants to devote itself to re-creating a climate pattern in which even the poor can survive.
The sad fact remains that those with enough money can escape the heat. Little do they know why all this is happening. And little do they care. Nobody cares. Those with money don’t. Those without money don’t as well. Do all us lead petty little uncaring lives? Is that the gross big truth? The ugly truth. The sad truth.
Harish Bijoor | Brand guru and Founder, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc
(Views are personal)
(harishbijoor@hotmail.com)