Jamgram To Potholebai
Our crumbling cities deserve memes & new names
When dark rainclouds rumble, as they have for some days now, and it looks like the heavens may, indeed, fall, there’s hardly a resident in any Indian metro, Mumbai to Kolkata, Chennai to Delhi, Hyderabad to Gurgaon, who looks up in joy at the beautiful skies. Good heavens, no. It’s a scaredy scramble, instead, to rework routes, reschedule meetings, dread the commute, plead for WFH, pray waterlogging won’t swallow you or dear ones, and none will walk into a loose live wire. And, like a bizarre sideshow – because humour is resilience – there’s time to scroll…cackling at memes that say it all.
How about “with that laptop, can I work from water today?” If waterlogged Gurugram is bemoaned as Jamgram, Kolkata is Jholcata in so many ways, where jhol is everything from classic Bengali light curry to something-fishy in Urdu. Jhol, all the way, when it’s urban infra – even at Waterway of India in Potholebai (Mumbai). Delhi is barely a decade into this deluge-monsoon, climate change, game. Traffic nightmares are the city’s promise – a 365-day horror. So, even if Delhi’s Lajpat Nagar is getting by as Floodpat Nagar, Delhi invokes resilience come Sept, pollution season. Meme-makers supply oxygen: Delhi’s dubbed Smogli for good reason. What about Hydrobad for waterlogged Hyderabad? But the real joke, as always, is on us citizens.
https://telanganatoday.com/overnight-rain-triggers-traffic-chaos-in-hyderabad
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
