The comfort of Air Conditioning

News from home galore about the ongoing brutal summer in India with mercury touching 45°C (115°F) in many places, a notch higher than normal at this time of the year. We just entered into the month of May, it's still a long way to go for Indian summer to end. A friend in need is a friend indeed. At this juncture no one is a better friend than the Air Conditioning, more popularly known as AC, thanks to a 25-year-old engineer from New York named Willis Carrier who invented the first modern air-conditioning. The mechanical unit, which sent air through water-cooled coils, was not aimed at human comfort, rather designed to control humidity in the printing plant where he worked. But down the road it became too ubiquitous and attached to comfort, more of a necessity than luxury these days.

Recently I spoke to my father who lives in Bhubaneswar. He apprised me of the current unprecedented heat wave the city in particular and the state of Odisha in general, confided to me of confined to AC rooms as open windows intended for cross air ventilation only brings in lava laced air meandering through the concrete jungle. Never ever in his life he was so much dependent on the AirConditioning. In between occasional power cut is making it worse.  When the Electricity comes back jump-starting the Air Conditioning, its whirring sound sounds like music to his ears.
We are too much conditioned to Air Conditioning these days. In USA, especially in South it can get hot and muggy during the summer. When faced with similar situation during my growing up days in India when the outside air was much 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 middle class household has at least one wall mounted Air Conditioning installed in their home.
I rarely felt the pang of heat, even during the hottest of summers in India. My generation in India grew up at a time when AC was a luxury. 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 (then REC), Rourkela during my student life. Only two places in REC Campus had AC those days - Principal's office and the computer center. The first was out of bounds for us. But come April, we were smart enough to spend many afternoons inside the computer center sitting in front of the Vax 11/780 dumb terminals. Wasn't so lucky in Bhubaneswar where only a few restaurants and movie theatres had AC, who regularly cut corners to save money by switching it off now and then. The owners cheated their hapless customers of Air Conditioning by robbing them of comfort, easily taking them for a ride.

Urbanization and rapid growth of concrete jungles has made our cities hotter than before, but over dependence on AC makes us feel and complain more 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 access to it, I would adjust to the environment, vindicating Darwin's theory of the survivor of the fittest. Humans being intelligent animals readily adjust to the situations and cicumstances. That's why we survived whereas the dinosaurs, mammoths and mammoth number of animals part of the fauna 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 half a day in their native villages which do not provide the same levels of comforts as cities do. My grandmother who lived more than two third of her life without electricity was so much addicted to AC that she wouldn'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 in summer where she lived lived happily the better part of her life.

During the World war II at time of relentless Nazi bombing on England the British Royal Air Force fought bravely against the air blitzkrieg of Germany's Luftwaffe. Winston Churchill, then the British Prime Minister said about Royal Air force - "Never in the History of mankind so many were dependent on so few", a tribute to contributions of a 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 devise. Let's spare a moment to be thankful to Willis Carrier, the inventor of Air Conditioning, after whom "Carrier", a popular brand of AC is named.