Weather and whether

I am a lay person. Have always been one of those average intelligent types with no apparent misgivings about the extent of their insight.

I am a lay person. Have always been one of those average intelligent types with no apparent misgivings about the extent of their insight. But I think today I might have landed myself a jackpot of sorts.

My tryst with serendipity is not 8216;breaking news8217; material but is surely worth a few minutes of pondering when you have nothing better to do. I think I8217;ve chanced upon the one big reason behind the majority of problems in the world today. And my biggest aid in this discovery is our good old Met Department.

It all started with my quest for a term it liberally uses: western disturbances. When January passed in Delhi without so much as a drop of rain, western disturbances were to blame. February arrived with its freak downpours and the culprit was again 8212; you guessed it 8212; western disturbances. The Met office uses it all the time as a reason for everything 8212; from drought to rain and from thunder to hailstorm. And the meaning of it neatly escapes me each time.

But it set me thinking. Is there something more to this innocuous phrase than just freak weather? That8217;s when it dawned upon me that it was actually the right phrase to describe all that was happening wrong in the world.

Who8217;s causing innumerable innocent deaths in Iraq every day, I asked a friend over lunch. She hummed and hawed, wondering what Iraq had to do with a Chinese meal. 8220;Western disturbances,8221; I mumbled in answer. When the TV news in the evening lamented about the sudden plunge of the Mumbai Stock Exchange, it was once again attributed to western disturbances.

I figured that, with a little bit of lateral thinking, we could safely attribute most of the prevailing ills 8212; from the Nithari outrage to my grandmother worrying endlessly about how the cultureless West has eroded our values 8212; to, well, western disturbances. The term simply glides in and fits like a glove for any situation.

The TV news is on again. It has snowed heavily in Shimla last night they say, unprecedented for this time of year. Some expert with a blue tie and a grim look is in the channel8217;s studios for his analysis. I know what he has to say even before he begins. 8220;Western disturbances8230;8221; he starts. I smile.