Summer arrives, city feels the heat

The maximum temperatures recorded in the Colaba and Santacruz observatories on Monday were a scorching 32 and 33 degrees celsius, and the mercury can only soar from here onwards. Add to this a humidity factor of 93 per cent in Colaba and 81 per cent in Santacruz, and one would know why the weather guys are crooning sultry days are here again’ — as chhaas (butter milk) replaces bhutta (corncob) on the streets of Mumbai. “This is the normal seasonal march of the sun, in the absence of a cloud formation. This condition will remain till the onset of monsoon this year. The winds blowing towards Mumbai are from the North, whichagain makes the climate hot,” explains the spokeswoman. But the man on the street (especially the one in a local train) need not really follow this meteorological jargon to decipher that summer’s here. “But of course it’s summer. My sticky, sweaty shirt says so, and I nearly got a heat stroke when I chose to walk instead of taking a share-a-cab from Churchgate this afternoon,” says an executive, obviously hot under his collar. A young collegian adds in a lighter vein, “I wouldn’t mind going down with the Titanic in the icy waters of the Atlantic ocean just to beat this sweltering heat!”