“There’s going to be a heat wave this weekend,” I was warned, as I leaned back into the cool embrace of an air-conditioned sofa in my Chicago home. I looked out of the window. The grass outside was green, the sun was generous, and I nodded gravely, as a responsible holidaying Indian should.

“Oh dear,” I muttered to myself, “better not step out.”

But then it struck me — step out to where? Nobody really steps out here. You step into the garage and from the garage into the car. Then from the car into another garage, and from there into a building that might even be refrigerated enough to freeze your thoughts. The most anyone risks is the perilous three-second transition between car door and shopping mall entrance, during which sunglasses are pulled down fiercely like a cowboy drawing his revolver. Welcome to the American Heat Wave. Where it’s warm outside, and polar inside.

But back home in India, a heat wave is not just a weather warning.

It’s a red alert.

It’s farmers fainting in fields, migrant workers slumped on footpaths, and schoolchildren walking long distances with wet handkerchiefs on their heads. Back home, we don’t dodge the heat — we live in it. We work in it. We collapse in it. And if the heat wave really overstays its welcome, many even die in it.

And that’s when I felt the first prick of discomfort. Not from the heat, mind you — the AC was still doing its job — but from something that felt a lot like guilt.

Or was it hypocrisy?

Because isn’t that exactly what many of our dear leaders back home do? They make policies that they themselves will never have to live with. “Let’s go to war!” they cry, from air-conditioned command centres with full-course lunches and strategically scheduled media briefings. But it’s not their sons who are dodging bullets on the border.

It’s someone else’s child, carrying a rusty rifle and a photograph of his mother folded in his breast pocket.

“Don’t speak English!” they declare with great patriotic pride, while their children sit smugly in Harvard dorms or sip beer in a London pub. The poor are told to be proud of their mother tongue, and they are — right until they realise job interviews don’t come with subtitles.

And so I sit here, in my comfortably cool Chicago house, pontificating about heatwaves, and I realise — I’m doing the same. I sympathise with the suffering while sipping cold water from a double-insulated tumbler.

The truth is, it’s easy to speak of sacrifice when the heat doesn’t touch you. It’s easy to wave a flag when someone else is holding the pole. And it’s very easy to talk of a heatwave — when you’re shivering under a thermostat.

Ah well. Maybe I should step outside. Just for three seconds. For penance, and I wish our political leaders will do so too..!

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