With dry winds getting chilly with every delayed sunrise and sudden disappearance of ants, the most awaited (as per the views of my family) season of the year is on the arrival terms. You know when winters are round the corner when you start hearing “changing weather” and “D-Cold” in the same sentence.
The season is undoubtedly quite a sought after one for no good reason apparently. The concept of liking winters is something completely beyond my “band of understanding”. I mean for me, you wouldn’t probably like winters unless you are someone who loves lethargy and babbling for a whole day about how much unfair it is to be woken up by your mom at 6 o clock even when it is still dark outside. Talking of matters as delicate as sleep, even the nature is understanding enough; making provisions on its own for conservation of human glycogen reserves. But telling your mom about the kindness of the divine would be the last thing you would want to do early in the morning because for the species called ‘Mom’, only the ticking sound of a clock marks the outlines of day and night; and time doesn’t usually go on some yearly hibernation mode like us humans (though unnaturally).
The season, like every other thing in the universe, means differently to different type of people. To the working class it comes as a discount on energy expenditure; for them it is great relief, getting to save the labour to wipe sweat off their backs. To the younger lot, the season brings the pleasure of staying wrapped up in warm quilts and a delay in the school timings and the best part, extra sleep! Owing to the biting cold nights, people get a good excuse to shake some work off their hands too; the shopkeepers benefited the best. You can definitely attribute to winters, the fact that you see shutters down as early as 8:30 in the evening. But there is this one last and unusual category of people which i fall under; the people who take winters as a freedom to eat. Honestly whenever people like me think of winters, all what comes to our mind is gajar ka halwa and gond ke laddu. These are probably the only things which count as the “flowery band” that keeps me bounded to the earth in winters.
Besides the invention of cold and flu, the wicked season is convicted of much more, charges which it can probably never get itself cleared of: innocent lives. I do not write to advocate the plight of the destitute but of some sheer unlucky souls whose community i belong to. People like me seem to be affected with some sister syndrome of HIV which doesn’t act on your immunity system as a whole out of philanthropy but in turn chooses one disease and recovers all its favours. Cold and cough being the lucky winner in my case. Every year, there is this one point in the season when I’m trying curb my feelings of hatred, and am even successful to some extent; thanks to the extended holidays and my napthalene-odour quilt. And at that very moment, winter again plays dirty with all its strength and I get a full amplitude cold , a really bad one; it is like if there was a Richter scale for cold, mine would score no less than 9 points. All this eventually results in the loss of all my goodwill for the season once again.
Cold is not considered a very serious disease in medical sciences, but even Charaka would agree that it is the most irritating disease ever. It is just supposed to last few days and give you some breathing problem, a pink-coloured running nose and probably a headache. But it makes full use of those few days and renders the whole of your body useless. No one can probably concentrate with a nose that constantly needs to be taken care of to avoid embarrassing public accidents. And with lucky ones like me, it happens on an yearly basis.
But frankly enough, since I cannot pretend to like winters, I’ve recognised a way to cheat my own senses; turning on the ostrich mode. Because the best way to deal with things that you can’t change, is to ignore them. Now if you excuse me, I need to get back to my ‘almost-finished’ box of tissues before my nose starts to revolt about my bad nanny skills.