Hindustan Times
Some cold comfort
The Issue: Climate change
The Soundtrack: It’s too darn hot
It was nuclear disarmament when I used to wear shorts. Now that I wear boxers (as overwear only!), it’s climate change. Every generation gets its heave-ho with some global danger topic or the other. If my school-going generation was the last one that dealt with posters and slogans advertising the end of the world through nuclear war — what my father’s generation who started talking about it called ‘the atom bomb’ — and if my grandfather’s generation smoked incessantly over the evils of imperialism (literally imperialism, and not the metaphorical versions as punted by the likes of Arundhati Roy et al, then today’s apocalyptic subject of choice has to be global warming.
Now, don’t think I am a global warming-denier. Going by what I’ve read and listened to from people who know the nitty-gritty of climate change and how directly and indirectly it will push the world into becoming a nastier place for our children and grandkids, it is indeed a serious problem. As was the possibility of whole populations burnt into cinders some red button pressed in Washington DC or Moscow some 30-40 years ago. But my point is that climate change is also a most fashionable cause indeed — picking up where the post-nuclear mushroom cloud-worry of hunger in Africa (still unsolved, mind you) and Aids (still eluding a cure, I say) has turned its eager eyes to.
Leaving your carbon footprints? Hell yeah!!
I tend to be fatalistic about a danger I can’t help avert. So if there’s news about an asteroid crashing into Earth and pulverising life into non-life, I’d rather spend my last days doing whatever I postponed (which includes starting and finishing my magnum opus, a manual on lying). Similarly, global warming. As seas rise and temperatures soar and ice-caps melt and we, non-smokers included, start coughing and rasping, I’d put on the delightfully fatalistic Cole Porter number, Too darn hot as sung by the 90s English synth pop duo Erasure.
I get warm comfort when I hear singer Andy Bell bopping out Porter’s lines: “It’s too darn hot/ It’s too darn hot./ I like to sup with my baby tonight./ Refill the cup with my baby tonight…/ But I ain’t up to my baby tonight/ ’cause it’s too darn hot.” But the scientific explanation for the real downside of climate change comes in a later stanza: “According to the Kinsey report/ Every average man you know/ Much prefers his lovey dovey to court/ When the temperature is low./ And when the thermometer goes way up/ And the weather is sizzling hot/ Mr Pants for romance is not/ Because it’s too darn hot.”
While I have personally give up any Late Latif attempt to join the ‘Save the world from global warming’ bus (solar-charged, of course), I can’t help but ask a philosophical question: can there be an environmentalist who has suicidal thoughts? What I mean to ask is whether a person who wants to kill himself care to save the world from its unnatural death? Frankly, if I wanted to top myself, I’d be mighty happy if I take the world down and out with me.
(8 votes, average: 3.5 out of 5)
Loading ...Posted by Indrajit Hazra on Tuesday, October 20, 2009 at 8:03 pm
Filed under Music · Tagged Africa, Arundhati Roy, children, Climate change, global danger, global warming, grand kids, washnigton DC
why the doomsday pipe?
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