Word: monsoonal
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...after a three-year hiatus, Nair had a second coming. Scraping together $1.2 million from investors in India, France, Germany and Italy, she returned to what she knew best?family and India?and filmed Monsoon Wedding in New Delhi in the summer of 2000. Working with a handheld camera, she captured four scenes a day, completing the entire shoot in just one month?despite losing five days' worth of film to an airport X-ray machine. Giddily enjoyable but unsparing in its treatment of darker subjects like infidelity and pedophilia, Monsoon Wedding was the budget hit of 2001, topping...
...Droughts and floods account for more than half of the world's total deaths from disasters, according to the United Nations. But unlike many other catastrophes, most water crises are man-made. Nature may bring the occasional monsoon downpour or dry spell, but environmentalists agree that global warming, dams, deforestation and slash-and-burn farming exponentially exacerbate these seasonal weather patterns. Inept and corrupt water management also contributes to the problem, allowing plentiful water to run off to the seas or leaving it to lie in floods on the land, while a few hours away, crops wither in parched fields...
...places is the crisis more apparent than South Asia. Here, every June to September, bulging rain clouds drawn in by the back draft of India's scorching summer roll in off the Bay of Bengal, prick themselves on the Himalayas and disgorge the monsoon. This year, the rains have been unusually concentrated. In Nepal, a nation that has felled 60% of its forests in just 40 years, the waters gushed from the mountains in flash floods. By the end of last week, 255 km of roads, 76 bridges, 61 schools and 220 people had been swept away. The water then...
...given that three-quarters of India's 1 billion citizens live off the land, the human cost of the drought is nearly incalculable. Vidarbha villager Satish Bhuyar was counting on a bumper crop of soybean and cotton to help pay off loans for his sister's wedding. The monsoon arrived in early June, Bhuyar sowed his fields, but the rains stopped and his saplings died. The rains came again in late June, Bhuyar planted once more, but again the crop withered. In desperation, Bhuyar sowed a third time. The rains didn't return at all. On July 13, Bhuyar walked...
Washed Away BANGLADESH United Nations officials arrived in the partially submerged capital, Dhaka, to assess the damage caused by the monsoon floods that have claimed almost 1,300 lives across South Asia. The government has put the cost of flood damage at almost $7 billion...