Rainy days were fun. The ways in which an adult looks at rainy days is quite different than how a child does. Thankfully, all of us do get the opportunity to live both stages. While we pray to God to control the downpour to prevent water logging and thus traffic jams enroute to our workplaces, youngsters would not be on our side as it may help an unplanned holiday at school - the always welcome, but never expected rainy day!!!
I remember my younger days at Methodist High School, Kanpur with respect to rainy days. Thought they weren't many, whatever came our way were more than welcome.
Many, like me, used to communte via a charted school bus. Many others used bicycles and in senior school days bikes/scooters. The richer ones had cars with someone to drop them. No matter what the means of transportation was, it wasn't easy to make it to our school that was located in the cantonment area, and reasonably far for most of city dwellers. No wonder, our school, just like others in the vicinity, used to declare a rainy day when the heavens opened up, if I may add - reasonably.
The feeling of ecstasy that used to shoot up within us on hearing the good news can't be explained. There are definately some feelings that words can't express and for everything else there is FaceBook today. Those were the days when there was no Internet at least not what it is today). Since the decision to call off school was taken at runtime, there was little that could be done to inform students and their wards. If there were heavy rains any week-morning, most of the parents used to call up school to confirm, while we prayed to God to answer from the other end saying "Yes". My parents, teachers themselves, however preferred to wait for my bus, send me packed, and be surprised to see me back (happy) of a rainy day.
Rainy days were the busiest days of our school life. It was as if we'd got an extra day added to our lifetimes. It was a day to play cricket on wet fields. It was day to play football. It way a day to play any of our indoor games with our neighborhood kids who were enjoying the same freedom. It used to be a day to watch movies on the now dead VCRs. It was a day to accomplish a lot. Of course, it wasn't a day to look at school books.Well almost, unless one's parents were teachers themselves. We simply loved the monsoons. We were deaf to our parents' worries of us catching a cold by getting wet.
On the day following the rainy day, we used to notice our sports field shining with a layer of water and with some Frog's around playing a high jump. The goal posts of our football field used to have about a thousand amphibians in between.The smell of freshly washed trees was just great.
There should be a concept of rainy days at work too.Not that I mind rains now, but the times have changed. More cars, less roads, weak drainage and lesser open land do not make rains look as good in our city now. I recently saw a full rainbow while driving into Gurgaon on NH-8. It did remind me that rainy days are still as beautiful as they were earlier, we need to be at the right place at the right time.
