Of Fog and Warmth

The Delhi winter is magic. It completely transforms a city that was a blazing, scorching, burning piece of earth only a few months back, into a sleepy town shrouded in white fog. The mist reduces visibility to just a few meters, every morning for two straight months! It  plays havoc with the traffic, and makes both train and flight travel highly unpredictable. But there’s still a lovely warm snuggly feeling about the Delhi winter. The fog forces you into the warm blankets for an extra half hour every morning….the sun just refuses to come up and wake up the lazy folks of town! You gulp down gallons of hot tea and coffee to shake out the slumber. And in the evenings, you look for the hot spicy food outlets that suddenly erupt around the place… yumm!

A man crouching against the cold inside a pavilion at Mehrauli. Photo courtesy: Shalabh

Of course, it’s not as easy for the thousands that need a roof above their heads and a warm blanket around their shoulders. But I’m sure there are plenty of warm hearts in the city to take care of their fellow human beings. I would love to bring up the Goonj movement here, a clothes-donation exercise that has made a mammoth change to thousands of people in the country struggling against bitter cold, floods and landslides. In Delhi, too, donating your old warm clothes to Goonj or other such organizations can bring warmth to so many…I remember a time in my old office when we would collect donations every winter to buy blankets, and drive around town distributing them to  people sleeping under the over-bridges and on the footpaths. Believe me, it used to bring happiness to the heart like no bonfire, no ‘tikki chaat’, no hot chocolate can! Let’s share the warmth 🙂