We are too much Air Conditioned to AC.
This weekend I spent couple of hours doing yardwork, addressing the root cause - uprooting the weeds from the root, root cause of the problem which stunts growth of veggie plants. The weeds, appropriately called BALUNGA is Odia (ascribes to useless, unproductive folks) are those parasitic plants growing near the productive ones, hampering their growth by sucking away nutrients maint for the fruitful ones.
Suddenly I felt the heat. Longing for the cool comfort of the Air Conditioning I ran into my home. Temperature outside was 90F (32 degree Centigrade), not too hot by Southern US standard where we are seeing the initial days of the dog days of summer.
When faced with similar situation in India during my growing up days when the outside air was hotter and more humid, I didn't run to the comfort of AC - because like most from my generation we didn't have AC in our home. Now every one has at least one wall mounted.
I never felt the heat so much even during the hottest of summers in India. Though the weather was a lot salubrious then, for me exposure to AC was limited to its cooling comfort wafting inside the Computer Lab in NIT, Rourkela during my student life. No more, no less.
A few restaurants and movie theatres had AC, but they regularly cut corners to save money by switching it off now and then. The owners cheated their customers Air Conditioning which the proprietors thought as a luxury which should be robbed off from the hapless customers.
Urbanization and rapid growth of concrete jungles has made the cities hotter than before, but over dependence on AC makes us feel and complain about the heat. As the saying goes in Odia - MANISHA SABUTHARU BADA SUBIDHA BAADI PRANI (Humans are creatures of comfort). Now that I have the comfort of AC, every now and then I look forward to it. Without it, I adjusted to environment. It yet vindicates Darwin's theory of the survivor of the fittest. Humans being intelligent animals readily adjust to the situations and cicumstances. That's why they survived, the dinosaurs, mammoths and mammoth number of animals didn't.
Same applies to most from our parent's generation who grew up in villages. After living in the cities for decades they can barely spend more than a day in their native villages which do not provide the same levels of comforts of the cities. My grandmother who lived more than half of her life without electricity was so much addicted to AC that she won't leave her room which was a cool 20 degrees cooler than the outside world. She was too tuned to AC and refused to visit her native village home in summer where she lived happily lived the better part of her life earlier in village.
During the World War II at the time of relentless Nazi Bombing on England the British Royal Air Force fought bravely against the air blitzkrieg of Germany's Luftwaffe. Winston Churchill, the then British war time Prime Minister said about the Royal Air force - "Never in the History of mankind so many were dependent on so few", a tribute to the contribution of the handful of pilots who stubbornly defended the entire English population from the Nazi onslaught.
Same can be attributed to AC - "Never in the history, so many humans were dependent on a mechanical unit". When in the summer month of July, 1902, a 25-year-old engineer from New York named Willis Carrier invented the first modern air-conditioning, little he knew his invention would be indisipansible little more than a century later.
This weekend I spent couple of hours doing yardwork, addressing the root cause - uprooting the weeds from the root, root cause of the problem which stunts growth of veggie plants. The weeds, appropriately called BALUNGA is Odia (ascribes to useless, unproductive folks) are those parasitic plants growing near the productive ones, hampering their growth by sucking away nutrients maint for the fruitful ones.
Suddenly I felt the heat. Longing for the cool comfort of the Air Conditioning I ran into my home. Temperature outside was 90F (32 degree Centigrade), not too hot by Southern US standard where we are seeing the initial days of the dog days of summer.
When faced with similar situation in India during my growing up days when the outside air was hotter and more humid, I didn't run to the comfort of AC - because like most from my generation we didn't have AC in our home. Now every one has at least one wall mounted.
I never felt the heat so much even during the hottest of summers in India. Though the weather was a lot salubrious then, for me exposure to AC was limited to its cooling comfort wafting inside the Computer Lab in NIT, Rourkela during my student life. No more, no less.
A few restaurants and movie theatres had AC, but they regularly cut corners to save money by switching it off now and then. The owners cheated their customers Air Conditioning which the proprietors thought as a luxury which should be robbed off from the hapless customers.
Urbanization and rapid growth of concrete jungles has made the cities hotter than before, but over dependence on AC makes us feel and complain about the heat. As the saying goes in Odia - MANISHA SABUTHARU BADA SUBIDHA BAADI PRANI (Humans are creatures of comfort). Now that I have the comfort of AC, every now and then I look forward to it. Without it, I adjusted to environment. It yet vindicates Darwin's theory of the survivor of the fittest. Humans being intelligent animals readily adjust to the situations and cicumstances. That's why they survived, the dinosaurs, mammoths and mammoth number of animals didn't.
Same applies to most from our parent's generation who grew up in villages. After living in the cities for decades they can barely spend more than a day in their native villages which do not provide the same levels of comforts of the cities. My grandmother who lived more than half of her life without electricity was so much addicted to AC that she won't leave her room which was a cool 20 degrees cooler than the outside world. She was too tuned to AC and refused to visit her native village home in summer where she lived happily lived the better part of her life earlier in village.
During the World War II at the time of relentless Nazi Bombing on England the British Royal Air Force fought bravely against the air blitzkrieg of Germany's Luftwaffe. Winston Churchill, the then British war time Prime Minister said about the Royal Air force - "Never in the History of mankind so many were dependent on so few", a tribute to the contribution of the handful of pilots who stubbornly defended the entire English population from the Nazi onslaught.
Same can be attributed to AC - "Never in the history, so many humans were dependent on a mechanical unit". When in the summer month of July, 1902, a 25-year-old engineer from New York named Willis Carrier invented the first modern air-conditioning, little he knew his invention would be indisipansible little more than a century later.
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