I love the rains. On most occasions. But after being deported to Andheri east for work, my romanticised 'South Bombay' picture of the rains has been washed away. Literally and otherwise. My love for puddles has been replaced violently by a desperate search for dry ground. The immunity of the city has been so badly attacked, it seems that soon the island city will be an 'underground island city'.
And as I reminisce of how I usually felt very poetic during the rains, I am left thinking of how poetry would be in this scenario. Imagine if Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Byron and Shelley, with all their creative and poetic juices intact, were born in Bombay - the present.
An example of a Shakespearean sonnet 'Shall I compare thee to a summer's day', as I see it now:
Shall I compare thee to a rainy day?
Thou art more dirty, making me asphyxiate:
Rough winds do shake the umbrellas we take,
And smoke and grease hath leave me no breath:
.... (and i skip to the last 2 lines)
No longer men can breathe or eyes can see,
No long lives left, only choking, suffering and misery.
Maybe, the cynical Eliot would be more fit in these times. His Waste Land is quite apt, with some minor 'tweaking', as we say here in Ad Land:
July is the cruellest month, breeding
Instects out of the dead land, mixing
Smoke with gutter, stirring
Dull roads with acid rain.
