
A Ferocious Heat in Delhi - 80mph
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/07/08/a-ferocious-heat-in-delhi/
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skbohra123
I live in Phalodi. The place which recorded 51°Celsius, the highest
temperature ever recorded in India. AMA!

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ollie87
How do you even breath in 50°C heat? Does it hurt?

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skbohra123
Well, it's certainly tough. The heat wave makes it impossible to get outside.
All you can do is stay indoors in air-conditioner.

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mruts
What percentage of the population has air conditioners? Also, what do you
think would happen if you didn’t have one?

I honestly can’t imagine that kind of heat and how people could even survive
in it.

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skbohra123
I would say less than 10%. Desert coolers are quite effective here, due to the
no-humidity, which are way cheaper. I imagine, people who live here have the
bodies adapted to it. Also, the house structures, food and other things have
traditionally been developed keeping in mind the extreme heat, so I think that
makes a lots of difference.

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fasicle
I've been working in Madrid the last few weeks and temperatures have been
around 35-43 Celsius (~ 110 Fahrenheit).

Coming from London, it's been a real shock and sucks the energy out of me. I'm
constantly crossing roads to find any shade while walking.

I can't begin to imagine living somewhere like Delhi which is even hotter!

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kasperni
> I can't begin to imagine living somewhere like Delhi which is even hotter!

And then combine it with tons of pollution...

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ido
and delhi is far from the hottest city in india!

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singularity2001
well it was close this year: 48°C, only 3° below the national record

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skilled
I was in Delhi a few years back during the hottest month of the year.
Temperatures were fluctuating between 45-50 Celsius on average. I had never
experienced walking outside the door at 7 AM only to be greeted with scorching
heat like that.

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PeterisP
And yet, despite all the claims that the author makes about quality of air and
life in Delhi, it's steadily growing, adding something like 4 million
inhabitants over the last 5 years. As the article quotes "Yet New Delhi was
bursting its seams, because newcomers from rural India kept flooding in." \-
the people are voting with their feet that urbanization with the associated
jobs and wealth is more important to them personally than better environment
conditions, since they're leaving the latter to gain the former.

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puranjay
India's great failure in the 20th century has been its inability to nurture
urban centers outside a handful of major metros. So everyone floods into
Mumbai, Bangalore, and Delhi because there are no jobs anywhere else. Capital
cities in other states have nowhere near the quality of jobs on offer in these
3-4 major metros.

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modi15
Its not India's great failure. It is India's great achievement. We need to
move people rapidly from rural area to urban cities and India is doing an
awesome job at it.

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puranjay
Yes, but urban cities. Not "just 3-4 urban cities".

~~~
modi15
I think urban areas of around 30-40mn are doable. We just need around 30
cities to take most of the population.

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ignoramous
This piece reminds me of Mark Manson's 'A dust over India' [0][1].

> “The boys can’t even stand upright after a few hours in this kind of heat,
> but the bosses won’t understand this. They say the work must be completed on
> schedule,” he says. How do the men manage?

The general lack of empathy, compassion, and brotherhood is astonishing among
the Indian elite. As for the general populace: Nothing unites them like
tradition, nothing divides them like tradition. The race to bottom caused
diminishing opportunities to secure financial freedom, this zero-sum game in
the face of rampant corruption, a dizzying dichotomy induced by income
inequality, a severe lack of humanism driven by rising population and
dwindling resources, a merit-less-ness permeating the government and the
judiciary favouring the powerful who are inadvertently also the rich, deceit
at every step as a means to rise above the tide point to a society with
hallmarks of an inevitable collapse.

> The state of Gujarat is suffering its worst dry spell in thirty years...

Its my home state, and I've written about this topic before [2]. The matter of
fact is that activists who put tremendous amount of effort to try to bring
about change aren't spared by the wolves [3][4] and then eventually there's no
one left to speak up.

> The monsoon is late this year. We turn our eyes to the sky every evening,
> fastening our hopes for relief to the tiniest shred of cloud...

This is key: I happened to once live close to Kerela in South Western India
which gets the first monsoon showers and copious amount of rain (second only
to the states in North East India), and on the onset of the monsoons the day-
time temperatures would drop up to 20C, from low 40Cs to low 20Cs. This is
almost as close as winter temperatures get in the tropics. Unfortunately, this
respite from the unrelenting Indian summer is subject to wildly changing
events elsewhere on the planet [5], which means global warming is absolutely
jeopardizing the livelihood of 1 billion people right this minute.

> Chennai, India’s sixth largest city, ran out of water.

Chennai was built on wetlands and the erstwhile settlement was littered with
lakes and flanked with rivers... zero-day might have been unimaginable just a
decade ago-- A city not far from there is surrounded by water bodies, but
those are being strained due to sharing of water far and beyond just because
the head of the state happens to be from a region hit with water crisis and so
naturally all the water elsewhere needs to be transported to his constituency
with no regard for environment or costs whatever. The ruling class is
borderline nihilistic, morally, in my opinion.

> The affluent have already adjusted. The billionaires have their “golden
> visas,” residence permits that allow them to claim citizenship in some
> European countries if they have made substantial enough investments in
> property or businesses.

This is not farther from truth. I, personally, know four different families
that have sent their kids to immigration friendly countries like Canada,
Australia, Sweden for the 'golden visa'. It is almost parasitic behaviour, one
would think [6]?

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4214480](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4214480)

[1] [https://markmanson.net/a-dust-over-india](https://markmanson.net/a-dust-
over-india)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16301765](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16301765)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amit_Jethwa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amit_Jethwa)

[4] [https://yourstory.com/2017/09/rti-activists-
murdered/](https://yourstory.com/2017/09/rti-activists-murdered/)

[5]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsoon_of_South_Asia#Changes_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsoon_of_South_Asia#Changes_of_the_Monsoon)

[6] [https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/IM1-DQ2Wo_w](https://www.youtube-
nocookie.com/embed/IM1-DQ2Wo_w)

