A Ferocious Heat in Delhi | Hacker News Reader

A Ferocious Heat in Delhi

nybooks.com

54 points80mph48 comments

I live in Phalodi. The place which recorded 51°Celsius, the highest temperature ever recorded in India. AMA!

Has it happened to you to go to bed and feeling the sheets warm against your skin the moment you laid down?

I'm asking because this is something that happened to me for the first time this year (a few weeks ago, when the EU "heatwave" reached its peak pretty much all around. We had peaks of 45C "felt" temperature where I live), and it was the weirdest thing. Usually when I lay in bed the sheets are always cooler than my skin, sometimes you roll around in them in search for some of that quickly disappearing coolness. That time instead, I laid in bed and I felt like I was going to cook. The whole bed was warmer than my skin, despite the fan pointed on it and on me. Rolling around was pointless, both sides of the pillow were warm against my head. Really a weird experience.

Beds with sheets and mattresses are unsuitable for that kind of weather.

The traditional Indian Charpai (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charpai) is much more suited. It's like a hammock, but flat and stable on the ground, with great air circulation underneath the body. In hot weather one sleeps without a sheet on top.

Also known as khat, the etymological source of English "cot":

https://www.etymonline.com/word/cot

Pointing fan at the bed will do nothing. When fans are moving the air of the same temperature around they will not cool any objects. If the ambient temperature is lower than than your body temperature, fans (and wind) help by moving warmed air away from your body and bringing the cooler one. Also fans (and wind) work because we perespirate. The less the humidity of the air around the body the easier it for sweat to evaporate so moving air helps by removing water molecules away and making it easier for new ones to evaporate.

All the time! Beds are always hotter here. Also the running water from the overhead tanks is so hot that it can burn your skin. With the India style bathrooms, you can imagine the horror.

"With Indian style toilets", I know, my hometown is Jaipur.

For the rest, In Indian style toilets, you don't wipe your ass, you splash it clean either with a water jet or your hands. So hot water .....

You store it in a bucket and let it cool down and eschew the water jet in favour of a mug filled from the bucket. This is not just for, er, washing but also for a bucket bath.

It may be a good idea to paint the outside of the rooftop water tank with white reflective paint.

I am used to it being hot, it's not burning (at least not severely :D ) hot. Too inconvenient otherwise.

I wonder what happens to sweat in that level of heat? The normal cycle would be Hot Weather > Sweat > Evaporation > Cool down a bit.

But I imagine there is a time component in there meaning if it's soooo hot, does the much faster evaporation make cooling down more or less efficient?

It's hot here, but the humidity is almost 0%, which makes it bearable as compared to heat in cities like Chennai. Sweating is still efficient I would say, nights are certainly cooler in the area due to the sand dunes, which gets cooled quicker.

There is a point where the combination of heat and humidity means that humans can’t cool themselves adequately and die, even in the shade. This is happening more and more, and seems likely to start happening in places like eastern China and the US sooner than people think.

https://robertscribbler.com/tag/wet-bulb-temperatures-35-c/

Evaporating a given amount of water takes the same energy regardless of air temperature, but of course it'll evaporate faster, yes.

Low humidity makes it bearable, though you need to drink a lot.

Do you even manage to get anything done in such temperature?

How hot it is during the night?

Temperature usually fluctuates between 45-50 in peak summer days. That is the time when you cannot do much outside, but people do work. Most people have air coolers or air-conditioners at home and work.

Nights are relatively cooler, but heat waves can continue till late night as well.

Do these regions in India something similar to the tradition in some Mediterranean areas where it's expected that noone works in the hottest hours in the middle of the day, everyone's in shade resting, and instead you work both early and late in the day when it's not so hot?

I recall from my trip in 2008, doing camel safari from Jaisalmer (west india, Thar desert, amazing place). I counted plastic bottles and drank 6 litres of water just on the camel, and literally nothing came out of me. Sweat quickly evaporated in that low humidity environment. It was around 45-50 degrees outside, just sitting on that animal, slowly moving around.

At one point, I nearly collapsed from heat fatigue. It was just a sudden weakness, my head spinned a bit, I had to sit down and after few minutes I was a bit better. This was 3rd month backpacking in india, so one would expect at least slight adjustment. In cities, you just move from one AC place to the other and suffer through short periods outside of it (in fact heat subjectively gets much worse if you stay predominantly in AC place).

I can't imagine people doing any physical work under these conditions. There are some hard limits on human biology

How do you even breath in 50°C heat? Does it hurt?

Well, it's certainly tough. The heat wave makes it impossible to get outside. All you can do is stay indoors in air-conditioner.

What percentage of the population has air conditioners? Also, what do you think would happen if you didn’t have one?

I honestly can’t imagine that kind of heat and how people could even survive in it.

I would say less than 10%. Desert coolers are quite effective here, due to the no-humidity, which are way cheaper. I imagine, people who live here have the bodies adapted to it. Also, the house structures, food and other things have traditionally been developed keeping in mind the extreme heat, so I think that makes a lots of difference.

Breathing per se should be fine. If you've ever been in a sauna, you'll know you can breathe air even when it's above the boiling point -- not for very long, to be sure, but that's got more to do with the extreme rate of sweating than your lungs. The lungs are always wet, which keeps them cool from evaporation.

People go to saunas where it is above 100 so 50 should not be that bad. Of course, I do not imagine anything productive can be done. OTOH, is it not close to working conditions in some mines? That sounds like hell.

Above 100°C? So saunas that are hotter than boiling water?

They are but theres very low humidity. Water at that temperature would boil and we know what happens when we stick a finger in boiled water. For that reason 120C is bearable in saunas. For a short period of time though

That's right. Almost any sauna would be like this. Try one in your country and check the thermometer for yourself.

The air is so dry. When someone throws water on the coals, then you really feel it in your lungs.

have you ever been in a 120°C sauna? It's not that bad ... if you can leave after 15 minutes ;)

I've been working in Madrid the last few weeks and temperatures have been around 35-43 Celsius (~ 110 Fahrenheit).

Coming from London, it's been a real shock and sucks the energy out of me. I'm constantly crossing roads to find any shade while walking.

I can't begin to imagine living somewhere like Delhi which is even hotter!

Last week in Madrid was hard. I bike to work (it's 1 metro station away from home) and last week about 4pm was harder that usual.

I remember a beer commercial some time ago about an alien invasion. Everybody was scared, but the people in Seville was happy because the alien mothership casted a shadow over the city and suddenly the heat was tolerable.

> I can't begin to imagine living somewhere like Delhi which is even hotter!

And then combine it with tons of pollution...

and delhi is far from the hottest city in india!

well it was close this year: 48°C, only 3° below the national record

I was in Delhi a few years back during the hottest month of the year. Temperatures were fluctuating between 45-50 Celsius on average. I had never experienced walking outside the door at 7 AM only to be greeted with scorching heat like that.

And yet, despite all the claims that the author makes about quality of air and life in Delhi, it's steadily growing, adding something like 4 million inhabitants over the last 5 years. As the article quotes "Yet New Delhi was bursting its seams, because newcomers from rural India kept flooding in." - the people are voting with their feet that urbanization with the associated jobs and wealth is more important to them personally than better environment conditions, since they're leaving the latter to gain the former.

India's great failure in the 20th century has been its inability to nurture urban centers outside a handful of major metros. So everyone floods into Mumbai, Bangalore, and Delhi because there are no jobs anywhere else. Capital cities in other states have nowhere near the quality of jobs on offer in these 3-4 major metros.

I think you forgot Hyderabad and maybe Chennai. I generally agree with you, but I would expand your list a bit.

Bangalore's loss is going to be Hyderabad's gain. Bangalore's traffic and water woes will drive more and more companies to switch to nearby Hyderabad.

Though I do wonder how the downturn in the automobile sector is going to affect Chennai in the long-run

Its not India's great failure. It is India's great achievement. We need to move people rapidly from rural area to urban cities and India is doing an awesome job at it.

Yes, but urban cities. Not "just 3-4 urban cities".

I think urban areas of around 30-40mn are doable. We just need around 30 cities to take most of the population.

I would say they're rather compelled to do so by poverty.

Po-tay-to, po-tah-to. One of the greatest features of urbanization is greater economic opportunities. For the poor, that's means to escape poverty.

I agree that it's unfortunate that people have to make the choice.

No it's not quite that simple. The Indians leaving behind their homes aren't always doing it because they want to enrich their pockets (which BTW is not wrong and something anyone would do). They are often compelled to do it because there is a lack of local resources, like drinking water or electricity. That's one of the points of the main article, maybe you missed it.

What's the difference between enreaching someone's pocket vs moving to have a better quality of life? It is the same thing.

The difference is owning a Lamborghini vs having drinking water. It's easy for you to make such silly assertions because you probably have never experienced that type of scarcity.

Tradition is huge in India. Many people are forced to move to cities and leave behind the lands of their forefathers because life is simply no longer possible in the outskirts due to lack of basic necessities like water or food.

Prosperity vs survival

This piece reminds me of Mark Manson's 'A dust over India' [0][1].

> “The boys can’t even stand upright after a few hours in this kind of heat, but the bosses won’t understand this. They say the work must be completed on schedule,” he says. How do the men manage?

The general lack of empathy, compassion, and brotherhood is astonishing among the Indian elite. As for the general populace: Nothing unites them like tradition, nothing divides them like tradition. The race to bottom caused diminishing opportunities to secure financial freedom, this zero-sum game in the face of rampant corruption, a dizzying dichotomy induced by income inequality, a severe lack of humanism driven by rising population and dwindling resources, a merit-less-ness permeating the government and the judiciary favouring the powerful who are inadvertently also the rich, deceit at every step as a means to rise above the tide point to a society with hallmarks of an inevitable collapse.

> The state of Gujarat is suffering its worst dry spell in thirty years...

Its my home state, and I've written about this topic before [2]. The matter of fact is that activists who put tremendous amount of effort to try to bring about change aren't spared by the wolves [3][4] and then eventually there's no one left to speak up.

> The monsoon is late this year. We turn our eyes to the sky every evening, fastening our hopes for relief to the tiniest shred of cloud...

This is key: I happened to once live close to Kerela in South Western India which gets the first monsoon showers and copious amount of rain (second only to the states in North East India), and on the onset of the monsoons the day-time temperatures would drop up to 20C, from low 40Cs to low 20Cs. This is almost as close as winter temperatures get in the tropics. Unfortunately, this respite from the unrelenting Indian summer is subject to wildly changing events elsewhere on the planet [5], which means global warming is absolutely jeopardizing the livelihood of 1 billion people right this minute.

> Chennai, India’s sixth largest city, ran out of water.

Chennai was built on wetlands and the erstwhile settlement was littered with lakes and flanked with rivers... zero-day might have been unimaginable just a decade ago-- A city not far from there is surrounded by water bodies, but those are being strained due to sharing of water far and beyond just because the head of the state happens to be from a region hit with water crisis and so naturally all the water elsewhere needs to be transported to his constituency with no regard for environment or costs whatever. The ruling class is borderline nihilistic, morally, in my opinion.

> The affluent have already adjusted. The billionaires have their “golden visas,” residence permits that allow them to claim citizenship in some European countries if they have made substantial enough investments in property or businesses.

This is not farther from truth. I, personally, know four different families that have sent their kids to immigration friendly countries like Canada, Australia, Sweden for the 'golden visa'. It is almost parasitic behaviour, one would think [6]?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4214480

[1] https://markmanson.net/a-dust-over-india

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16301765

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amit_Jethwa

[4] https://yourstory.com/2017/09/rti-activists-murdered/

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsoon_of_South_Asia#Changes_...

[6] https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/IM1-DQ2Wo_w

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