Reading a "bad" news story can be encouraging. Sometimes.

The headline for the news story in The Hindu that made me feel good?

Chennai commuters ask for more AC buses to beat the heat

The details were even more heart-warming:

With the summer heat intensifying, bus commuters in the city are desperate for the Metropolitan Transport Corporation’s (MTC) airconditioned buses.

No, this is not any case of schadenfreude.  It is genuine happiness on reading that. Why?

It is a measure of how much people have come to expect in their daily lives. And this rising expectation is a reflection of the increasing levels of affluence in the part of the old country that was once home to me.

Back when I lived in Chennai, to begin with the city was called Madras then.  I bet that the summers were no less hot and muggy as the summer is now.  But, those were the years when rarely did a home have AC, and one of the greatest thrills was to watch a movie in an AC theatre for the cooler temperature for those couple of hours.  Thus, the best we could do then was to seek comfort under the ceiling fan, or sit as close as possible to a table fan.

We didn't know any better than to live that life in the heat and humidity.  A life in which mothers and sisters (yes, terribly sexist it was then) prepared hot foods and snacks in the hot kitchens on hot days. Fathers and brothers went to work on hot days too.  And we youngsters, whose only worry was about school and college, grabbed a couple of rupees and headed to spend time with friends.  To meet with friends, meant using the bus.  The crowded bus.  We sometimes clung on to the crowded bus, hanging out with the feet barely on the foot-board.

There were no air-conditioned buses then.  There were air-conditioned undershirts--that's what we called the undershirts that had holes in them.  Holes as in tears, or holes as in the design of the undershirt with patterns of openings in them.

So, you see, to read about people asking for air-conditioned buses is, thus, really a measure how much the living conditions have improved over the years.

It is, after all, the increasing expectations that propels not only economic development but the forward progress of humankind itself.  Otherwise, we would never have reached this stage of me blogging and you reading--our kind would not even have ventured out of Africa.  "Ask and you shall receive" is a defining characteristic of the modern economic existence, though we do not receive anything for free but for a price.  And if we are ready to pay the price, miracles happen--air conditioned buses to iPhones to Armani suits to anything we can make happen.

I wish the people in the old country demanded more. Demanded more from their political leaders. From their businesses. From their schools. And, most of all, if they demanded more from themselves it will be even more encouraging to this American whose heart continues to beat for his old country.  May a thousand AC buses bloom!

I scanned through the copy of Poems from the Sanskrit for an appropriate poem for the Indian summer.  Turns out that the good old Bhartrhari, whom I had quoted at least once before, was quite naughty as well ;)

On sunny days there in the shade
Beneath the trees reclined a maid
Who lifted up her dress (she said)
To keep the moonbeams off her head.