Bahut Garmi Hai

Going for morning walk is routine start of my day. “Don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t do this, don’t, don’t…..” is what every child goes through since childhood. These don’ts are for simple reason, “addiction”. As a normal, obedient child, I too believed in those preaching, and consequently kept at bay all these so-called social vices.

How do we describe addiction? Anything, without which, we become unstable, for which we yearn badly, absence would stimulate unnecessary mood oscillation, affect body metabolism and to meet the addiction we do anything. I think this suffices layman’s quest for definition. Despite all my precautions, I miserably failed. I got addicted. I was addicted to morning walk. I suffered from all the symptoms mentioned above, if I failed to go for morning walk.

I browse through newspaper headlines before I step out of my home. I think most of the people do the same. The headlines indicated, Madhya Pradesh was inferno. The temperature had broken all records and reached 46 degree centigrade. It was 30+ in the early hours of morning itself. Maximum minimum temperature recorded, was another headline. The newspaper has a great say in swaying the topics of discussion for morning walkers. Today, quite pertinently, Lord Sun grabbed the attention.

Immediately after getting out of the gate I found two people greeting each other with folded hands, but instead of wishing ‘Namaskar’, ‘Ram ram’, ‘Good morning’, ‘Hari om’(as my milk vendor would do), they greeted “Bahut Garmi Hai”. Very casually, I appreciated the remark, passed a quite smile, acknowledging their knowledge on rising temperature and moved on. But, today that was not the end. As I moved forward, I found that in maximum cases, the usual greeting had been replaced by this phrase “Bahut Garmi Hai”. The walkers would start with that greeting and continue on the issue of heat for some time.

One of the very interesting observation of my wife, about men, was that there were three main topics of discussion among men, while walking- politics, money and women. I had quite closely followed it and my research had corroborated her observation. Politics could be office politics, real politics, or any other, but that majored the topic of discussion. Women being top among the close buddies of all age and youngsters. Money was cutting across age, religion, caste and class. However, today it was belied… “Bahut Garmi Hai”, had beaten all the topics on all fronts. So friends, “Bahut Garmi Hai, kuch karo yaar”.