My ebook: Journeys with the caterpillar

My ebook
"
Journeys with the caterpillar: Travelling through the islands of Flores
and Sumba, Indonesia
" is available at
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Wednesday, June 15, 2005

The Met needs a sting operation

One service that The Indian Met department religiously performs for our country is to provide a punching bag for our usually frustrated souls. Every year, the Met officials toil night and day, study ghostly satellite images and build fuzzy models to predict the monsoons. And most of the time, the rains behave with the Met like Indian communists -never agreeing to anything. It is a sad occasion when every year in March, a hesitant met official appears before press and says amidst roars of laughter and boos, "The rains will be normal (96.34343221%) this year". Readers of this post, please observe a moment of silence for this official.
The Met has tried all sorts of things: asked Indian space agencies to make more satellites, asked for faster supercomputers, put in all sorts of variables. But alas, it's the same story - the rains don't agree. Rumors say that one frustrated Met official started to fight with neighbours asking them to take out their umbrellas while there was not a semblance of cloud in the sky. To maintain his sanity, his wife had to go to the floor above his house and drop bucket-loads of water on the ground to resemble rain.
Unauthorized reports from a sting operation on met officials reveal that after this years failed forecasts, Met employees are thinking of putting up a final all-out fight: Met officials have been asked to make offerings to the rain gods to oblige with their learned forcasts; the government is planning to send blue-eyed Met boys to Africa and North America to learn rain-dances from their natives; opinion polls are being conducted among astrologers.
The met department has always insisted that its very complex to predict monsoons compared to other weather systems and hence the disconnect. Since the met has not stopped bothering us with their forecasts, they will have to bear with our punches and laughs. Many can also form an uninformed opinion about the quality of met forecasts by trying to visit their website.

PS: Jayesh has written a nice post on Mumbai and Monsoons

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