On Monday evening there was a shower, and Varun went out in the rain, as all of us usually do. After a little while, he felt itchy and came in: We took a look and saw that his whole body was turning red.

We had him bathe in tank water and gave him a dose of homeopathy (Belladonna 200). This seems to have done the trick, and the next morning there was no burning, only a mild itch, “that I don’t need to scratch”. There is still some mild residual itch, today, a few days on.

All through our 18 years’ stay here, and in particular during this year’s drought, all of us have enjoyed rain baths, thoroughly. It was only in mid-August this year, when I had a rain bath one night (both the boys were away), that I found a rash developing next morning. Sonati and I thought it was due to a spider bite or caterpillar hair, until we saw that it was spreading slowly, all over my body, arms, legs, thighs… I thought it might be erysipelas, whatever that might be, and by the time I blamed the rain, it was a week+ of suffering. It was this suffering that enabled us to catch Varun’s problem on time.

Thinking about it, we remembered that that morning we had heard the spray of the pesticide machine nearby. So, of course, the rain brought it down on Varun. We were in fact ruing the fact that in spite of classics like Silent Spring, people have not got the message, or choose to ignore the message.

Today, The Guardian and The Hindu talk about the closure of Delhi’s primary schools, and the advice to stay indoors, if possible, because the air is “too polluted”. Is this Insanity or The New Normal? Or both?

For us the usual problem of How Do We Respond comes up. It requires us to think about our own lifestyles, for surely, this is a problem of individuals consuming. It requires us to think of farmers who adopt technology without being adequately informed about its pitfalls. It requires us to think of large companies who predicate their bottom-line over safety, or indeed over anything else. It also requires us to think of political action, for the scale of the problem is too big to be solved by individuals alone.

Anything anyone consumes and throws, cannot be thrown away: There is no “Away”.