Sweltering

For those of you not living in Bombay, we are currently besieged by the sun. A heat wave is bad enough, but we have to deal with humidity that might as well be visible, it’s that thick, and the wonderful aroma of the ocean at low tide and the fish markets, which are downwind of me all day!
I never thought I’d say this - but I miss the Boston winter, the New York spring, the London…well, the entire year in London really. Heat I can handle, but humidity thick enough to garnish and stir with a soup spoon is a bit more than I can handle. Give me another year here and I guess I too shall become inured to it, but for right now I shall have to channel my discomfort creatively.
What the hell is wrong with the world???
The morning newspaper is so packed full of bad and depressing news that I’m actually laughing out loud. That’s the only healthy response, I think. You either get full of (very real, very visceral) fear, or you cackle like a maniac. The world is going to hell in a hand basket and yet there is our wonderfully inept Madam President, waving from the gangway leading up to her brand new (disgustingly low-tech) answer to Air Force One. There are people dying all over, even more people making sure that they die quicker either by stabbing them, or drowning them, or shooting them with rocket launchers (I swear, I read somewhere yesterday that this man tried to kill his mother-in-law with a rocket launcher - and the woman survived!!!!!!!!), and our President, who I’m not sorry to say, is the most embarrassing diplomatic poster girl our country has ever chosen, is waving to us from her not-so-shiny new plane, that we are reminded doesn’t have any escape pods in the case of a hijacking.
Has anyone ever seen this tiny, tiny woman standing in front of any foreign delegate and smiling away? The Prime Minister needs to run the country, he can look like the back end of a sick bulldog as long as he’s doing his/her job. The President is a symbol, an icon, an ambassador to the world, our diplomatic flagship. I’m sorry, I’m sure she’s a lovely lady, but for god’s sake. Can we find someone a little more imposing and impressive, so that at least he/she can knock the pathetic way the world views us back a few steps?
I took nine hours for the commandos to get from Delhi to Bombay when this city needed them the most. But huzzah! for the President. She has her own plane. Well, three new planes, that she has to share with the PM. But progress! At last!
Wonderful…
I need to switch to decaf. And maybe turn the air-conditioner on for an hour. And take a cold shower…