Nature's violent beauty

There was the most incredible hailstorm here late this afternoon. Seriously, I am not given to exaggeration, but I have certainly never seen anything like it with my own eyes in all my fifty years. One minute, there was a regular nor’wester raging, sky black, wind howling, rain pouring, the next minute there was the familiar rat-a-rat on the window panes, signaling the beginning of the hail onslaught, but unlike hundreds of previous occasions the noise rose to a thunderous crescendo, like a thousand machine guns going off at once, and I was so terrified all my west-facing window panes would shatter that I ran to open the windows, and the furious gust of wind laden with literally scores of hailstones the size of large marbles almost pushed me off my feet. Within seconds half the room was covered with ice, and so was my whole garden and the road in front: it was as though someone had suddenly covered everything in a winding sheet! Thank God the fury lasted only a few minutes, else heaven knows how things would have turned out. It is still raining as I write, but now it’s only a mild drizzle, and all the accumulated ice is visibly melting away. Soon enough it will be only a dream. This is the nearest thing to a snowfall that Durgapur will ever see, I think, located as we are bang on the Tropic of Cancer, but what a spectacle it was, how much more awesome, yes awesome, than a gentle, silent snowfall could ever be!

(The road in front, my garden, a close-up of the garden, and my doorstep half an hour after)

budding talents galore

I have been feeling a lot of things lately - as readers of the other blog will know - but humorous was not one of them. Still, I must admit people have been supplying me with things to laugh about every now and then. I notice, for instance, that the number of kids who, after ten to twelve years of schooling have virtually no grasp of spelling nor any clear idea about how to use number and tenses while constructing basic sentences is steadily on the rise, as also those who invent words like 'teached' and 'seeked' and 'catched'. And they all go to expensive private schools, mind you; also, many of them are going to land up in the so-called 'elite' engineering colleges in this country. I can name a lot of them from my own erstwhile batches.

As for knowledge of the world, here's a recent gem I discovered in a 15-year old's essay: 'Raja Rammohun Roy fought hard against the custom of sati, but it was emporer (I wasn't the one who misspelled the word) Akbar who finally abolished it. And this is one of the toppers in his class, too...

P.S., April 21: I was marking someone's essay yesterday, and I read that he was 'busy relaxing'. Speaks volumes about which way the world is going.