Bangalore Shivers

Take a girl out of a sweaty, sand filled place with a couple of nice beaches thrown in and put her in a place where the biggest water body around happens to be called Ulsoor LAKE.

Now mix in a hundred even days dry as tinder, a fifty or so emptying the heavens and an odd eleven with temperatures of fifteen on an average.

The resultant is me shivering in my bathroom after dunking myself with water at sub zero temperature. It is a vicious cycle with a deep dark conspiracy thrown in. The thought process goes something like this, depending on the outside temperature...

Hmmmm, a nip in the wind... should I switch on the geyser? Hmmmm... yeah that should be about right...let me try anyway...(a mug of hitherto unknown, but very soon to be discovered cold water is on its way to my toes, which are about the only parts I can feel after the water flows down)...holy %^$@....the geyser is a good thing after all! (opens the hot water faucet)... ah! all that steam makes me feel that much better! Wait a minute now we would not want the water getting too hot ha ha I am not going to fall for that and scald myself let me see how hot.....aaaaaaaarrgh! !@#!^% &^%$%^!(*, bloody hell!

Lesson learnt: One can be scalded in one way too many, for example, by the water on its way into the bucket from the faucet which coincidentally might also result in a long long burn on your forearm.

If it only all ended there! But no, finally after one manages to collect enough water to take a bath, the first mug is warm enough not to scald you but cold enough to continue giving you goosebumps from the cold. Then the wiser-after-getting-burnt you decides to use all that calculus and begins to add hot water in delta amounts. And you wait, and you wait and you wait some more, while you freeze some more and the water, miraculously is nowhere close to that Utopian temperature. So you decide to defy all logic and add a heuristically appropriate amount of hot water now and get ready to soak in bliss when again, you cannot feel anything but your toes, this time for the rest of you is busy being burnt.

It is approximately around here that lesser mortals would just give it all up, drench yourself in freezing water and stumble out, grateful to have your skin still on.

As for me, I head to work and bully them into parceling me to warmer climes called Bombay