10 things I hate about rain

The Facebook revelations - some overexcited idiot will already have updated their Facebook status to two hearts.

1.   The Facebook revelations. You don’t need to peer outside your window to discover it is raining because some overexcited idiot will already have updated their Facebook status to two hearts around the word ‘rain’. How the hell do they even know how to make those hearts?

 

2.   How ugly the entire city looks. Am I the only one who finds dead cats and dogs floating around everywhere, sewers exploding in your face, stranded cars on the street, and naked kids swimming in pools of dirty water kind of disturbing?

 

3.    The casualties that come with the rains: disease, electrocutions, drownings, road accidents … the list goes on!

 

4.   Electricity woes. It’s a rule of thumb that if we’re all miserable, our electricity suppliers have every right to make us even more miserable. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that there is no electricity until and unless the rain stops. Even when the rain does stop, the lights don’t come back because the electricity wallas are probably out dancing in the rain.

 

5.   The happy troopers on the street with their woofers, loud bicycles, and cheesy grins. I think when the rain starts pouring down, it probably melts away the cerebral cortex of certain gentlemen on the street, leading to crazy motorcycle stunts, and performances such as standing on top of a shaky car, and dancing on top of a moving bus that may well put Shahrukh Khan and Jackie Chan to shame.

 

6.   The leaky house. Although I have a pretty sturdy, well-built house which, by US army standards, may even be considered a ‘fortress’, ‘castle’ or ‘luxury compound’ (wow, they have low standards), come rain or sometimes even shine, it leaks from every possible crevice. If the so-called ‘fortress’ can break down like this, it makes you wonder what others around the city are going through!

 

7.    The extra work that ensues before, during and after the rain. There’s my Mum maniacally wiping away water with her trusty wiper, there’s me filling up buckets of water from all the leaky holes in our ceiling, and finally there’s my Dad screaming obscenities at everyone from the cable-walla to our government. That’s so important, Dad!

 

8.   The pretty name given to this evil. We don’t even try being creative with it, we just call it the same each year — ‘monsoon’. While the words ‘Hurricane Katrina’ bring to mind the image of a psychotic witch cackling as she points her wand at the winds and skies, bringing disaster everywhere, ‘monsoon’ sounds like a beautiful maiden picking up white daisies and enjoying a quick drizzle.

 

9.   The real cherry on top of this tragic cake of misfortune is that everyone will stop delivering food. So for the last few days, not only has there been no electricity, I have also been forced to subsist on a diet of home-made loki, bhindi and tinday which my mother keeps telling me are really “yummy aloos in disguise”.  Why can’t the restaurants just hire the crazy motorcycle stuntmen as delivery boys?

 

10.   The lack of empathy or any sort of assistance shown by our government. While entire cities and towns drown in despair, our leaders frolic around the world. Of course, they do take out enough time to urge hardworking, honest people to donate their money, or sit through meetings with the UN secretary general in order to plead for money for the flood victims which we all know is sure to be misused like always.

Published in The Express Tribune, Sunday Magazine, September 25^th,  2011.