Meltdown

The good thing about being away from home is always finding something new to whine about. That way you never get tired of whining about the same old leaky tap or the neighbour's cats. As is customary, I woke up this morning and spent three whole minutes wondering what to whine about the whole day.

The weather. Yes, the weather. I shall whine about the weather today.

The weather forecast in Chennai is quite predictable as it can only be one of three options - hot, hotter and hottest. It doesn't get more depressing than that, especially at this point of time where temperatures are well over 30°C and it hasn't even hit the peak yet. Things are about to get a lot worse and if I don't ditch my two week long summer internship and run home to safety, I might really drop dead in the middle of the Lloyd's Road junction.

The temperatures are soaring everyday, true, but what makes it even more unbearable is the humidity. Being a coastal city, Chennai during summer is akin to a ginormous sauna. The humidity makes the air so heavy that it sinks to the ground and refuses to budge. It plays dead better than a well-trained Pedigree dog. The few trees that have escaped being chopped down stand motionless and dry as wind movement and natural breeze become an urban legend. The only time you can feel the sea breeze brush against your skin is when you're standing lesser than two feet away from the seashore.

There seems to be no respite from this sultriness. With the sun beating down on your head, the only way for the body to stay cool is by sweating. Sweating profusely and copiously is anything but pleasant, especially when you can feel it trickling down your back and your clothes are ridden with sweat patches. No amount of water intake seems sufficient when you're sweating two litres of water or more every hour and given the amount I've been sweating of late, it's a small wonder that I don't have a dark rain cloud floating over my head all the time. Sometimes I feel like just peeling my weather-abused skin off like a wetsuit and jumping into a new one. If you've watched that episode of Man vs. Wild where Bear Grylls is lost in the Sahara Desert, you know what he did in an attempt to conserve water and stay cool at the same time. That's right, he took off his shirt, pissed on it and slipped right back into it. Now I don't intend to go to that extreme but I'm beginning to wonder.. what if I had to?

I just found another sub-topic to whine about... yay me! Tans. If I had to go to Africa right now, I would have to risk getting humped by a horny zebra. Why? Because that's how closely I resemble a zebra right now! A whole variety of sunscreen lotions have proved futile in preventing me from getting tanned. I could have still lived with it if the tan was even, but as luck would have it, it isn't. I can positively identify atleast 25 different skin tones out of which atleast 5-6 of them would make nice shades of lipstick (not that I would know).

If I have melted to the ground by tomorrow, I shall find something else to whine about. Until then go read up on global warming.