Met Mess
The Indian Meteorological Department offers this strange information: Monsoons "officially" retreat from West Bengal on October 16. Now, when does something as unpredictable as the weather follow an "official" timetable? And just to prove that it doesn’t, the skies opened up just a day after theMet office here proclaimed that the monsoon was over (officially), thus leaving the meteorologists fumbling for an explanation. Not only heavy rains, but storms and hailstorms have lashed Kolkata and its neighbouring areas for the past few days. Trees have been uprooted and, as what has become routine by now, roads in large parts of the city have been going under water. All this, of course, has caused deep embarrassment to theMet office. Scrambling to come up with some excuse, they’ve now laid the blame on "faulty radars" that couldn’t detect the formation of low pressure and depression that led to the showers. And, just to be on the safe side, they’ve ‘predicted’ "moderate to heavy rains may occur" in Gangetic West Bengal for the next four weeks. And, after that, the mercury would dip to herald the onset ofWinter. How smart! Do we need meteorologists to tell us that temperatures would fall in mid-November? If these are the sort of predictions that theMet office here is capable of coming up with, I say there’s no need to waste taxpayers’ money in thisestablishment.