I spent some time yesterday in Mumbai. It’d been ages since I’d been to Mumbai for shopping, and since Diwali’s coming up, we decided we’d go out and explore. But the best part of the whole experience wasn’t the shopping. That was very mundane, time consuming, and given the fact that I am more of a point-and-shoot kind of shopper, the extended, exploratory shopping style just gets me bored! The thing that really got me excited very early in the day was simply the fact that it was raining cats and dogs en-route and it was steady throughout the time I was in Mumbai.

One of the things I really love about being in India for the Monsoon season is the rain! I love the deluge of torrential rain slamming against the windscreen of the car while you try to navigate your way through some pretty poor visibility due to the prevailing foggy conditions and the water on the windscreen. I love it when the window wipers can’t keep up with the rate at which the raindrops flood the screen, despite being at the highest speed.

More rains in Mumbai! Yaay!

Unfortunately for me, this year has been a disappointment! Until yesterday, I don’t think it really rained like this throughout the monsoons. It used to get dark and cloudy, raising everyones hopes of a downpour, and then just float away with an impressive show of thunder and lightening. Peoples’ hopes were dashed this monsoon. It’s been a really bad season, especially for the small-time farmers who depend on the monsoons for their crop. As is always the case in such drought-like situations, the farmers’ debts and the poor yield of their farm lead a lot of them to suicide. I hope that the heavy rains yesterday have alleviated some of the concerns of these farmers and has given them fresh hope and the chance to make up for what was lost.

But lets come back to my obsession with the rain. After the heavy downpour throughout the day, we experienced even more rain while driving back, up until Kasara Ghat. Kasara Ghat is like the mountain range that divides the areas between the Nashik area and the Mumbai side. Quite often, you’ll find it raining on one side and dry on the other! The Ghat was completely fogged out and it was an effort to cross it with visibility down to a few feet ahead of the car. This was the second time I’d experienced such fog in Kasara. The previous occasion was a few months back, when I was returning from a meeting in Mumbai and got stuck in traffic on the highway. It took me 4 hours of sitting in one spot to get through the traffic, and after we got through we had to deal with the Kasara fog at 4am and no traffic around to help guide you through the road. At least last night there was some traffic that helped us understand the curves!

After we got home, it started raining in Nashik again and it kept raining until early in the morning. You can’t imagine how awesome I feel whenever I wake up in the morning to the sound of raindrops hitting the ground. I hope that it keeps raining like this for the next few weeks at least, especially to ensure that we won’t be worried about a drought anymore!