Word: monsoonal
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...gods must be an ironic bunch. When I visited Mumbai, India, this June, the air was thick with humidity and heavy monsoon rains flooded the crowded streets. Yet even in my grandparents’ flat in the upscale suburb of Bandra—home to Bollywood’s glamorous film stars—low water pressure in the public pipeline meant that the plumbing system worked only two or three hours a day, often in the middle of the night. My grandparents have made do for years by adapting their cooking habits and keeping a bucket of water handy...
They pour out of the Shwedagon, an immense golden pagoda that is Burma's most revered Buddhist monument, two miles north of downtown Rangoon. The monks form an unbroken, mile-long column--barefoot, chanting their haunting mantras, clutching pictures of the Buddha, their robes drenched with the late-monsoon rains. They walk briskly, stopping briefly to pray when they reach Sule Pagoda. Then they're off again, coursing through the city streets in a solid stream of red and orange, like blood vessels giving life to an oxygen-starved body. Their effect on Rangoon's residents is electrifying. At first...
...leave Rangoon for Bangkok, the 2007 democracy uprising feels over. Even the monsoon rains--such a feature of these once joyous protests, with the monks marching shin-deep through flooded streets--have petered out. The sun returns, and a cheerless rainbow arcs across the city. "Peace and stability restored, traveling and marketing back to normal in Yangon," trumpets The New Light of Myanmar...
...India: over 100,000 boisterous Calcuttans fill the divided sides of the stadium, one half festooned in the maroon and green of Mohun Bagan, the other in the red and gold of East Bengal. Firecrackers and smoke bombs exploding in the stands drown out the thunder of the monsoon above...
...when they act, people follow. By Sept. 24, thousands of ordinary Burmese had overcome their fear of the regime and joined the demonstrations, their shoes slapping through the monsoon downpours alongside the monks' bare feet. While marching monks recited prayers in the commercial capital Rangoon, civilians raised their fists and chanted their own mantra: "Democracy, democracy." The participation of normal citizens has turned what had been a series of sporadic rallies into the largest sustained display of dissent in Burma in nearly two decades. "The people's only weapons are their hands," said an elderly teacher watching the procession...