A Rainy Day!

Yesterday, it rained in Delhi, and after weeks of temperatures in 40(s) degree Celsius', there was finally some relief... until late afternoon yesterday, any place devoid of air conditioning felt like an oven. It was stiff.

But then, this happened (by the way, the shining circles are the rain water droplets reflecting and refracting water. Nice, no?):



As afternoon progressed into early evening, the skies turned a delicious purple:


A picture of the Amaltas trees heavy with flowers and rain outside my back- balcony:


And then the Sun was setting through the hazy rain filled evening.



After that the rain settled a bit, and even stopped for a while before there was a proper storm again a little while later, with the wind- lashed trees swinging in wild angles, straining to uproot themselves.



These pictures are my experiments with different camera settings, once the storm had subsided a shade:





It started raining again at around 9 O' Clock.

The typical Delhi night sky:


They say Delhi doesn't have anything of it's own...
The red sky is due to the winds which blow in from the Indian Thar Desert carrying the reddish sand from the ever dancing dunes of Rajasthan...





At about 10. 50 PM or so, the winds picked up again, howling at about a 100 kilometers an hour. From my place on my parents' balcony, it sounded like two evil, cyclopean air- suction machines were positioned at either end of the street competing with each other to sway the will of the trees towards themselves. It was awesome. And humbling.




I kept trying to catch a lightening on my camera, but was always a few seconds late... until I got the tail end of this one, which went on for about 35 seconds, or so I think...




It's good that Delhi has so many trees (it's one of the greenest capital cities in the world), otherwise such wind- and- rain storms which happen here at this time of the year would have lead to a far greater death toll than they have, over the years. The trees slow the wind down somewhat, resulting in fewer people getting blown away.




Due to the storm, the electricity supply was sporadic last night, one of the reasons I couldn't get this post up yesterday. Before going to sleep at around 1 AM, I went around checking every door and window in the house. I don't do this on normal wind- and- rain free nights, but I had to last night... you see, what if some entry was unbolted, and someone fought through the savage blast of suction- machine induced air currents to break into the house? It wouldn't have done at all... don't you agree?