kalimpong forever (3)
Devotees of Alfred E. Neuman
Recently a prominent daily of North Bengal published a report saying that in just another 75 years the nearby town of Kurseong, India would crumble into a heap of stones, mud, slime and rubble due to degradation of the environment and changes in the weather pattern.
This should have started ringing alarm bells in Kalimpong too,since it is well known that each year, the south westerly monsoon, after sucking up millions of tons of water from the Bay of Bengal, attains critical mass over these fragile hills and quite literally explodes above our heads, dumping as much as 3-4kgs of water for every square inch of the district of Darjeeling. And with predictions that the number of storms will increase dramatically due to global warming, the newspaper
report is entirely believable.
But does all this worry the people of this little town?
Well, the answer is that the denizens of Kalimpong suffer from an acute infection of Alfred E. Neuman's (remember Mad Magazine??) WHAT ME WORRY? syndrome and nothing, not even predictions of extinction can diffuse the carefree disposition of the mountain folk out here...
So despite the grim future and sinister prophesies, multi-storey complexes continue to spring up like jack-in-the-boxes and the drainage system and roads certainly ache for repairs.
Oh! Let the glaciers melt away and the monsoons continue to machine-gun these hills with unabated fury or let the writing be writ large and loud on the wall...
Tra la la !!!
WHAT ME WORRY ????
Recently a prominent daily of North Bengal published a report saying that in just another 75 years the nearby town of Kurseong, India would crumble into a heap of stones, mud, slime and rubble due to degradation of the environment and changes in the weather pattern.
This should have started ringing alarm bells in Kalimpong too,since it is well known that each year, the south westerly monsoon, after sucking up millions of tons of water from the Bay of Bengal, attains critical mass over these fragile hills and quite literally explodes above our heads, dumping as much as 3-4kgs of water for every square inch of the district of Darjeeling. And with predictions that the number of storms will increase dramatically due to global warming, the newspaper
report is entirely believable.
But does all this worry the people of this little town?
Well, the answer is that the denizens of Kalimpong suffer from an acute infection of Alfred E. Neuman's (remember Mad Magazine??) WHAT ME WORRY? syndrome and nothing, not even predictions of extinction can diffuse the carefree disposition of the mountain folk out here...
So despite the grim future and sinister prophesies, multi-storey complexes continue to spring up like jack-in-the-boxes and the drainage system and roads certainly ache for repairs.
Oh! Let the glaciers melt away and the monsoons continue to machine-gun these hills with unabated fury or let the writing be writ large and loud on the wall...
Tra la la !!!
WHAT ME WORRY ????
posted by praful at 2:02 PM
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