> “The boys can’t even stand upright after a few hours in this kind of heat, but the bosses won’t understand this. They say the work must be completed on schedule,” he says. How do the men manage?
The general lack of empathy, compassion, and brotherhood is astonishing among the Indian elite. As for the general populace: Nothing unites them like tradition, nothing divides them like tradition. The race to bottom caused diminishing opportunities to secure financial freedom, this zero-sum game in the face of rampant corruption, a dizzying dichotomy induced by income inequality, a severe lack of humanism driven by rising population and dwindling resources, a merit-less-ness permeating the government and the judiciary favouring the powerful who are inadvertently also the rich, deceit at every step as a means to rise above the tide point to a society with hallmarks of an inevitable collapse.
> The state of Gujarat is suffering its worst dry spell in thirty years...
Its my home state, and I've written about this topic before [2]. The matter of fact is that activists who put tremendous amount of effort to try to bring about change aren't spared by the wolves [3][4] and then eventually there's no one left to speak up.
> The monsoon is late this year. We turn our eyes to the sky every evening, fastening our hopes for relief to the tiniest shred of cloud...
This is key: I happened to once live close to Kerela in South Western India which gets the first monsoon showers and copious amount of rain (second only to the states in North East India), and on the onset of the monsoons the day-time temperatures would drop up to 20C, from low 40Cs to low 20Cs. This is almost as close as winter temperatures get in the tropics. Unfortunately, this respite from the unrelenting Indian summer is subject to wildly changing events elsewhere on the planet [5], which means global warming is absolutely jeopardizing the livelihood of 1 billion people right this minute.
> Chennai, India’s sixth largest city, ran out of water.
Chennai was built on wetlands and the erstwhile settlement was littered with lakes and flanked with rivers... zero-day might have been unimaginable just a decade ago-- A city not far from there is surrounded by water bodies, but those are being strained due to sharing of water far and beyond just because the head of the state happens to be from a region hit with water crisis and so naturally all the water elsewhere needs to be transported to his constituency with no regard for environment or costs whatever. The ruling class is borderline nihilistic, morally, in my opinion.
> The affluent have already adjusted. The billionaires have their “golden visas,” residence permits that allow them to claim citizenship in some European countries if they have made substantial enough investments in property or businesses.
This is not farther from truth. I, personally, know four different families that have sent their kids to immigration friendly countries like Canada, Australia, Sweden for the 'golden visa'. It is almost parasitic behaviour, one would think [6]?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4214480
[1] https://markmanson.net/a-dust-over-india
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16301765
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amit_Jethwa
[4] https://yourstory.com/2017/09/rti-activists-murdered/
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsoon_of_South_Asia#Changes_...