Word: monsoon
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...Miss India gala, have to settle for other, less glamorous affairs, including scores of neighborhood beauty shows, intercollegiate contests and parade-queen competitions. In Bombay earlier this month, for example, 16 women tramped up and down a lumpy catwalk in a damp, steamy tent vying for the title Miss Monsoon. "Please watch out for holes in the carpet," warned the choreographer during a run-through. "We don't want any falls." Seventeen-year-old Rebecca Alvares, one of 150 applicants, explained, "This is a real stepping-stone for me. Maybe someone will spot me here...
...expanding list of pageants is spurred and sponsored by cosmetics companies eager to tap into the $1 billion-plus Indian market. The search for Miss Monsoon, for instance, was funded by American Dreams, which sells "fine fragrances from the U.S.A." It is these vendors, say cynics, who have put the spotlight on Indian beauty. With millions of Indians tuning in for live broadcasts of competitions featuring their countrywomen, the pageant scene is an advertiser's dream. "I am not getting paranoid about an international conspiracy, but it obviously helps the cosmetics giants to have India associated with beauty," says novelist...
...oddly, as the predictability recedes into a small speck on the horizon, as more and more of what I think and see and feel is filtered through new lenses, the wonderment with which I approach the world swells. Every red-earth-encrusted-nook, every monsoon-dampened-cranny, every horn blast and door-slam and shantytown and palace-wall screams of its life-altering-potentiality and bears the message that small places often conceal large secrets that an overly-habituated mind is too lazy to uncover...
...color, soot absorbs solar energy rather than reflecting it. So when a recent scientific excursion to the Indian Ocean established that big soot clouds were circulating through the atmosphere, a number of scientists speculated that their presence might be raising sea-surface temperatures, potentially affecting the strength of the monsoon...
...monsoon is not the only climate cycle that human activity could alter. Atmospheric scientist John M. Wallace of the University of Washington believes that rising concentrations of greenhouse gases are already beginning to have an impact on another important cycle, known as the North Atlantic or Arctic Oscillation. In this case it's not the warming these gases create in the lower atmosphere that is key, but the cooling they cause in the stratosphere, where molecules of carbon dioxide and the like emit heat to space rather than trapping it in the upper atmosphere. This stratospheric cooling, Wallace and others...