In June this year, I visited Keylong in upper Himachal Pradesh — an amazing place and an artist’s delight. Reaching Keylong at night, I asked the locals for directions to my hotel. They pointed to a lone bulb glowing in the midst of the mountains, “that’s your hotel!” How do I reach it? “The foot-path in the fields lead to the bulb...” Somewhere, there’s a water stream, the sound of which was echoing all over in the mountains, making it difficult to locate it. The moonless night complicated my situation. I did not realise that I was walking adjacent to the stream until my suitcase got promptly washed away with the flow when I placed it down for a moment. In the process of retrieving the same, I also got washed away. Both my suitcase and I came to a halt upon hitting a pipe running across the stream. Reaching the hotel, I was told that the temperature then was hovering around zero. Cool. Well, I had my bit of adventure tourism.
Global warming effect
No regrets. What I actually saw the next day was ‘melting snow’ or the ‘dirty snow’ as it is popularly referred to. People told me that the snow hardly melts there around that time of the year. Maybe, it was the accelerated effects of global warming. Come September, courtesy Dussehra, we had an extended weekend. This time, I went to Kurukshetra, Haryana. Man, it was blazing hot with temperatures hovering around 40 degrees C. At the end of September? Something is indeed wrong with the thermometer or is the globe really warming? Something is definitely wrong with the weather at least this year compated to the past. Well, the reasons for this might be many. Scientific research has documented that any human intervention and the nature does not know how to deal with the same.
ADVERTISEMENT
As an example, one of our politicians once quipped, “Why is pottery excavated from civilizations of the past, still intact?” Pots are made up of mud, clay and water, all of which are natural elements. Yet they are not degradable – reason being human intervention? Perhaps, anything that humans do is not degradable adding to the pollution.