I don’t know what the scientists are saying but it feels like the earth is moving closer to the sun every year, especially during the summer months.

Despite this, the traffic hasn’t become any lighter even in the middle of the afternoon. The residents of Bhopal, all wrapped up in cotton and linen like mummies, move around in ever greater numbers. As soon as they reach their destination, they take off their outer coverings, wipe the sweat off as best as they can and air out their clothes by tugging up at their collars.

The most common way to beat the heat for those on the road is called a Gamcha in Hindi and its essential to survive the summer months. Its a piece of fine cotton cloth about a meter long and half a meter across for men and longer for women. Its so thin that if you hold it against the light, you can almost see through it. But its super absorbent and if you wet it, it becomes almost like a personal desert cooler as the air passing through it is chilled by the water trapped between its fibers. You can wipe with it, cover your head and face with it, even wrap it around your neck like a muffler and keep the heat from going any farther in.

White is the most common color for it but enterprising Bhopalis have created designs in a myriad of colors and shapes. You even get them shaped like a Poncho covering the head and the upper body in one smooth motion. The main area that needs its protection is the nose and the mouth. The air is so hot outside that you will dehydrate yourself very fast if you’re moving around on a two-wheeler in the afternoon. Most people just wrap it around their face and sprinkle water on it once in a while during their journey. This is the first line of defense against the summer heat.

Also, according to folk-lore, keeping a peeled onion in your pockets as you move around in summer afternoons will prevent heat-strokes and dehydration. Even in this day and age I am surprised how many people actually leave their house with a small onion on their person. Some people keep small slices of lemon in their pocket and suck on a piece when they are outside. I guess the vitamin-c and the generated saliva keeps the mouth and throat wet.

What I do know is that chilled aerated drinks are THE worst way to keep cool. They just end up dehydrating you faster and giving you useless sugar in the process. Carry a small water bottle with some lemon juice and salt mixed with drinking water at room temperature. Just take a small swig every once in a while; it’s a wonderful aid.

Enjoy the summers.

This is the first time my daughter will be out of the house on her own. Even though she will be with her own battalion in the army cantonment area of Pachmarhi with twenty other kids from her own class, we are all a little bit nervous. We are hoping she will enjoy herself and acquire some more independence and self-confidence in the raw natural habitat Pachmarhi offers its visitors. Her itinerary includes shooting, hiking, climbing, outdoor cooking and a basic course in survival. The fellowship and camaraderie instilled in the kids during these camps often generates memories and friendships cherished for a lifetime.

NCC or the National Cadet Corps is a branch of the Indian armed forces started in 1948 to develop character and incorporate qualities of discipline, leadership and self-less service. Each year kids are selected from premiere schools and colleges in India to participate in NCC activities across the country. Its an honor to get the opportunity to be a part of the NCC family. And if she should so choose when she is older, participation in NCC gains preference for those opting for a career in the armed forces. Besides, she will be a more confident and disciplined person as well as being a better human being for having been a part of the NCC.

My daughter attends a missionary school here and it just so happens that the order of sisters which run her school has its regional headquarters situated in Pachmarhi and lot of the older staff of her school, including the previous principal, currently live in Pachmarhi. It will be double the fun for her party as a sort of homecoming for her troop. I am sure she and her friends will be delighted to meet their former teachers and principal.

Right now we are going through a long list of things she needs done before the trip. Also this was the perfect opportunity for her first cell phone. Since mobiles are not allowed in any schools here, there was no sense in getting one for her before now. But its almost a requirement for the camp and we got her a basic model which would fit the bill. It may be pretty basic today but compared to my first mobile, it has features I couldn’t dream of in those days and today none of us could live without. Now while her mother and I go around the city collecting her various uniforms, boots, sleeping bag, backpack and a hundred other things big and small, she is busy playing with her mobile as soon as she comes home from school. LOL.

I am proud of her selection and hope that she will have fun, learn some essential survival skills and return home safely from her two weeks trip. Her summer vacations will be going on when she returns. I know once she gets back, her usual summer past-time is sitting before the TV or the computer. At least now, all this physical activity will be a good start of the holidays.

And that’s not the worst news. Yes, yes, there’s more. I have a multi-session DVD that I’ve been using for backup. Since blog entries are not really data intensive, I’ve been incrementally backing up my blog for a long time on this DVD. I think I’ve used up about 15-20% of its capacity. I never really bothered to check the backups since there had never been a need for it. Imagine my shock when I found that the DVD is corrupted and the data on it is literally gibberish.

Abyssus Abyssum Invocat, loosely – when it rains, it pours. It wouldn’t have been a big deal if my backup hadn’t failed. I have had the server crash before but because the backup had worked, things returned to normal within a few minutes. But this time not. Now I just have to work at it all over again. I can’t replace the lost entries, the only thing I can do is move on and keep writing. Which on the whole isn’t such a bad deal. I write mainly because I want to write, the content or the frequency of entries isn’t all that important. Almost like having a clean slate all over again for a fresh start. At least this time I’ll pay more attention to keeping working backups, something I have advocated to everyone who has ever bothered to ask.

Its just embarrassing that I never bothered to verify whether the backup I was creating was any good. I have learned a very important lesson in the digital age the hard way. I’ve also learned that just giving a write command to the DVD and hoping it will do the rest isn’t always in my best interests. It did what I told it to do but not what I wanted it to and computers are exceptionally gifted with that attribute.

I’m sorry but I’m going to be keeping the comments ‘off’. Apparently, its easier to get access to the website server if the comments are turned ‘on’ through some security vulnerability. I didn’t know that. I only found out in response to the searches I did hoping for a solution. Its not a big loss but I hope you all will understand. Its no fun to get hacked. My stats are also all haywire, I hope Google will take me off its black-list and allow people to visit my blog again. It may take some time but then I suppose it will also give me more time to fill up the posts again.

I don’t have a backup of all the customization I did for the original theme ‘Ad-celerum’. I love this theme and have used it for a long time but I don’t have the patience to tweak it up again, so I just managed to grab the first free theme that fit the bill, modified and stripped it of all the encrypted dynamic code leading to the outside world (there was a lot of it). The website from where I downloaded it specified a normal GPL license. I guess I’m good with that.

Ok, ready, here we go!