I am a great admirer of that rare breed of humans whose job is to predict the weather.
Wake up every morning and there they are, in newspapers and TV channels. I have made it a practice to check the weather first before moving on to gory subjects like politics, murder and thefts.
These reports make good reading. For example – cloudy day with a few spells of rain, some heavy. Or Having abandoned all kinds of protection like raincoats and umbrellas from age 16 when parental control had diminished, this was an early morning ritual one had to go through. But years of practice of checking the weather had made me into a kind of authority on the subject in the younger days.
If you really want to make peace with the Weather God, think opposite to what these souls are saying.
Always remember this one fact and you will not fall victim to the whims and fancies of that God. I have come to this conclusion after much thought and experience. Back in the days when the blood corpuscles would do the rumba in the body, I seriously decided to take up the game of cricket.
I must admit that whatever skills I possessed diminished as schoolboy flab turned to growing muscle. I consider myself lucky to have been in the Fergusson College cricket team. The first ball during the trials pitched on leg and took off, bowled left-arm over the wicket.
Impressive stuff that and it got me into the team immediately. Of course I could not maintain that level ever but it did win me the post of Cricket Secretary. This was an unopposed victory, thanks to the support of the wonderful women who I had chased some time or the other.
The job of the Cricket Secretary entailed pitching the nets for practise sessions which happened during July, August and September in mostly wet weather. Since I had to two trips to make to the college, one to spend time in the canteen while the college was on and the other to play cricket, I suddenly realised what better than reading the weather report to confirm the sessions.
I got the formula then. If the weathermen says wet then the sun would shine and the practise session would go on. If they said dry then lo and behold it would rain and ruin practise which meant an early departure home.
By the end of the season I had perfected the art of predicting the weather. All the nuances of which way the bad weather would arrive and the wind velocity and its dangers had been learnt thoroughly.
Now having smelt all the perfumes of Arabia and returned home, I cannot scent the weather anymore. That art has been lost with the destruction of the environment. Today I play Russian roulette and still think opposite to those weathermen.
The success rate is about 70 per cent. And I get a lot of help from a friend in the office who is now the Master of the Weather..
“The Rain will stop in precisely 17 minutes,” he often says. So here I am, still surviving sans raincoat and umbrella.
#The views expressed in this column are the authors and Pune365 does not necessarily subscribe to this.
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