Rain Dance with the Gods

At a cursory glance, there seems to be little in common between festivals and climate change. One seldom looks at the two together. Yet, if most Indian festivals have evolved around cycles of nature and harvest seasons, as we know they have, it logically should follow that if climate change affects rainfall, cropping patterns, and harvests, there would be significant impact on the nature of these festivals and the temporal, professional, and artistic engagements linked with them as well.

Growing empirical evidence has established without doubt that climate change affects the poor disproportionately, and has a much greater impact on developing countries. An editorial in this journal, titled “Climate Change and the Poor” (2 February 2019), makes a pertinent point on the immediacy and impending danger of climate change. It maintains, quite emphatically, that the widely held belief that climate change is a gradual, slow-moving pheno­menon has only recently been contested with facts.