Climatic changes make traditional sayings look irrelevant

Not only the climatic changes have led to various natural disasters but it has also made long-established folk wisdom based proverbs (traditional sayings) irrelevant during present times.
Various festivals here are associated with weather and are accordingly celebrated. For example, the proverb ‘Aya Basant Pala Udant’ (spring arrives and frost evaporates) is now a misnomer since with the arrival of Basant neither the winter has ended nor the frost has evaporated.

On Monday morning, a day before the Basant festival, Amritsar was enveloped in a thick layer of fog and frost with less than fifteen to twenty meter visibility making the morning walkers surprise over the ‘dramatic’ change of weather and during day time people were wearing heavy woollens and heads covered with beanies.

On Monday, the head of the Geography department, Government College Chamba Professor Shivani Abrol said that in the northern hemisphere a phenomena ‘June solstice` occurs when the sun reaches its highest and northernmost point in the sky. This event marks the start of summer in the northern half of the globe.

”But due to global warming there is a disruption in the seasonal cycle so we can’t predict seasons and the traditional Indian weather proverbs which are prevalent among masses are fast becoming irrelevant, “ said Shivani adding that during the present winter season there had been very little rains also due to western disturbance.

Stating that global climatic change was a reality whose effects were now being visible in India Kulbhushan Upmanyu who studies the impact of human-caused climate change said “ if we look into the prevalent proverbs which connect weathers with the celebrations of festivals, they have almost become irrelevant because these days the celebration of festivals doesn’t correspond with change of weather as is in the case of Basant” adding that in past there never used to be so much cold and fog during Basant time. "It is strange to see a thick layer of fog and frost during Basant which actually symbolizes the beginning of evaporation of frost," he said.

Echoing with Upmanyu, Professor Satnam Singh of Khalsa College blamed global warming behind the changing pattern of climate which had made the traditional sayings immaterial in the present context. “Now it looks odd to give examples like ‘Aya Basant Pala Udant’ which is no more a reality,” he said. Eom