Dusty Delhi unwinds on special Saturday

Vipul Asthana (26) woke up at 6 am, an hour too early for him on a weekend on Saturday morning and did not regret it.There was a nip in the air; a cloudy sky to gaze at and a light drizzle outside to greet him, reports Abhishek Sharan.

Vipul Asthana (26) woke up at 6 am -- an hour too early for him on a weekend -- on Saturday morning and did not regret it.

HT Image

There was a nip in the air; a cloudy sky to gaze at and a light drizzle outside to greet him. The dozen flowerpots on his 10 feet by 4 feet balcony were all wet.

Asthana, a foreign-exchange dealer with a multinational bank who stays in a two-bedroom flat at Chittaranjan Park in south Delhi, swore he heard the birds at the adjacent grove “singing” as well.

“I just love the changes taking place in the city’s weather after July left us begging for a little rain,” he told HT.

He said he has started going on drives at night. “I have started going on long drives in my Fiat Palio car with bollywood, pop, and blues music,” he said. “A few weeks ago, the heat was driving me crazy and I was irritated with everything.”

The Indian Meteorological Department said the change in weather was due to the “southwest monsoon being active in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand”.

The minimum temperature recorded was 25.7 degree Celsius; the maximum temperature on the day was 34 degree Celsius. As much as 5.4 mm of rainfall was recorded.

Before this spell of rain and cloudy sky in thelast two weeks, the mercury had climbed to 41 degree Celsius.

A bout of heavy downpour in the intervening nights of July 27 and 28 went a long way in calming the heat and giving the city a feel of the monsoon it had been seeking.

It had rained 126 mm in 24 hours and the temperature came down by 10 degree Celsius.

The rain deficit too had halved, thanks to the southwest monsoon from south to north.

Kapil Saxena (54), a lawyer and Mayur Vihar resident, said: “Let us hope this spell of nice weather stays on till the winter comes with its own extremes.”