The heat is on. Boy it is hot. 44 Celsius and climbing and it is only the ides of April! I should be complaining but I am not. Wonder why? Please read on…

I decided to get my old rambling and falling apart house repaired this year after almost 2 decades. The idea was to begin in April and have all finished by May when the heat is really on. Little did I know that this year Nature had another plan. And as usual even with supposedly sound planning and the best of intentions of doing things in an organised way floor by floor, room by room, I suddenly found myself in the middle of a construction site with workers everywhere. You see the plumber had finished his work on floor 1 so needed to move to floor 2 and so on. Within the batting of an eyelid the whole house was under wraps and we were banished to two rooms. The cooler was of course out of commission, hot air blew from open doors and windows and my resolve to never use ACs in the day to limit my carbon foot print resulted in a fans only situation, and that also when the electrician had not cut the power!

Sunday then should have turned out to be a miserable day. Quite the contrary. It was a huge reality check. As it was terribly hot, I was unable to stay put in one place so I ambled all over the house watching the workers. There were many, of all ages, each one of them busy in their work, some on the terrace under the scorching sun, some carrying loads, some hung on the terrifying rope basket painters use in India for painting outside walls. They were busy with their work, chatting, laughing, fighting when needed! Sometimes one of them would run down to the kitchen to get bottles of cold water. But there was no complain about the heat. Heat or no heat they had to work. Most of them were daily wagers, and work meant food in the evening. It was as I said a huge reality check and somehow it did not seem so hot!

I remember another reality check I had last year when I had reacted rather unreasonably to the amount of kids that were packed in the creche in the hot summer. I had not realised that our seemingly hot classroom was far better than a tiny jhuggi with a tin roof!

So this year I for one am not complaining about the heat!