Himalayas pop into view, as welcome but unintended consequence of the Coronavirus. (Picture courtesy of CNN)
Mt Everest grows by a quarter inch a year due to the unrelenting push of the India land mass into the Eurasian plate. That has created the Himalayan mountains range over millions of years. But to those who woke up in the north of Punjab in the middle of last month, it must have seemed liked they popped up overnight.
When I was a kid, in Dharamsala, Ludhianna, even Chandigargh, I could see the snowy peaks. I imagined Mt Everest, but that was far off, over the horizon. Still, the ridge of mountains remains a lasting refrain, an image, a little fuzzy after 50 years later but one that still guides me toward mountains, wherever I am living.
These days, I live in California. I remember Mom telling me of her visit to Simla, the hill station favored by the British, to get away from India's oppressive heat. I remember the mountains, always with snow on them, from our house in Dharamsala, where my father was dean of the college, and where I met the Dali Lama. He was at a ceremony. He was dressed strange. I remember orange. I was 5 years old.
The Himalyas had been cloaked in air pollution, their majesty hidden to at least one generation. India, in its modernization, took to the internal combustion engine, the oil and coal burning of the industrialized nations to heart. The sky, once just filled with dust, smoke from dung fires, became full with so much particulate matter that the mountains were completery obscured.
India, with thousands of two-cycle engine scooter cabs, have been making travel convenient but breathing difficult.
(Picture courtesy of Tech Crunch)
Now, COVID-19 has put the brakes on the scooter cabs. Their oil-burning two-cycle engine has gone silent. Dehli, Mumbai, Kolkata take their turns as having the worst air in the world. Living there is like smoking a pack of cigarettes a day -- if not worse. Most Inidians are sick a lot If not from the air, it's from the water.
The Coronavirus, deadly and sickening as it is, has brought the scooter cabs to a halt. No longer are they belching black smoke.
And the Himalayas never looked better.
Probably optimistic (given history) but wonder, hope, perhaps we come out of this with another way of measuring 'worth'.
Posted by: RobiNZ | April 16, 2020 at 10:16 PM