The Weather We’ve Stopped Noticing

May used to mean something. When I was younger, May meant mango pulp staining your chin, ceiling fans rattling at full speed, afternoons so still that even the crows seemed tired. It was hot, it was always hot, but it was a familiar kind of hot. The kind you complained about and forgot. Now May means something different. It means schools shutting before exams because the mercury won’t cooperate. It means construction workers collapsing on Delhi flyovers before noon. It means my mother waking at four in the morning because the bedroom, even with the AC running, feels like the inside of something that’s been left in the sun too long.

Last April, a government school in Rajasthan sent its students home at ten in the morning. Not because of a festival. Not because of a teachers’ strike. Because the classroom temperature had crossed 42 degrees and children were fainting at their desks. This was reported, briefly noted, and then absorbed into the ordinary rhythm of the news cycle. By evening, it had been replaced by something else. That, I think, is the most frightening thing about where we are now, not the disasters themselves, but how quickly we file them away.

The Illusion of a Distant Problem

Climate change, for most of my generation, was introduced to us as a future problem. Something polar. Something that happened to ice caps and species we’d never seen in real life. The images were always distant: glaciers calving into the sea, polar bears on shrinking floes, graphs with lines that curved upward somewhere in the 2050s. It was a problem scheduled for later, meant to be solved by people who weren’t born yet or hadn’t been elected yet. What nobody prepared us for was this: it wouldn’t wait.

It is here. It has been here. And we have been quietly, almost expertly, pretending not to notice.

The pretending takes many forms. There’s the casual kind, “summers are getting worse every year,” said while pouring another glass of cold water, AC humming in the background. There’s the administrative kind, disaster relief funds allocated, flood alerts issued, committees formed, reports submitted. And then there’s the deepest kind, the one that lives inside ordinary people who have no language for what’s happening to them: the farmer in Vidarbha who plants cotton at the same time his father did, watches the rains arrive two weeks late, and cannot afford to change what he doesn’t know how to change. His “pretending” isn’t denial. It’s exhaustion wearing the mask of acceptance.

The Class Geography of Suffering

India is a country that experiences climate change as a class problem, even if we don’t always call it that. The Bengaluru water crisis of 2024 was not equally distributed. The apartment complexes with borewells and tanker contracts held out. The working-class neighbourhoods stood in line. When Kolkata is lashed by cyclones that have grown more ferocious as the Bay of Bengal warms, it is the jhuggi clusters along the river edges that take the first hit, not the high-rises. When Delhi chokes under its winter smog, itself a product of atmospheric inversions made worse by warming, who has an air purifier, and who doesn’t? The answers are not complicated. The geography of suffering is very predictable.

And still we speak of climate change as a shared emergency, as though the weight falls equally. It doesn’t. It never has.

Eco-Anxiety and the Exhaustion of Looking Away

There’s a concept that climate scientists and psychologists have started calling “eco-anxiety”, a chronic, low-grade dread that settles into people who are paying attention to what’s happening to the planet. I understand it, though I’d describe it differently. It feels less like anxiety and more like a specific kind of tiredness. A tiredness of reading about the glaciers in Himachal Pradesh retreating faster than predicted. Of hearing that the Yamuna, already a slow-moving waste channel, flooded again and swept into people’s homes who had nowhere else to go. Of watching flood visuals from Assam or Sikkim, feeling something sharp and painful, and then, because there is always another exam, another deadline, another ordinary demand, turning the phone face down and moving on.

That turning away. That’s what worries me more than any single data point.

There is something happening to collective memory that doesn’t get discussed enough. Seasons are not just meteorological events. They are the architecture of a culture. In Bengal, winter is woven into literature, into the smell of date palm jaggery, into certain kinds of fog that make the city feel briefly gentle. That winter is shrinking. Not dramatically. Just quietly, a few weeks shorter each year, a little less cold, the sweet chill replaced sooner by something that feels like an early summer. The change is gradual enough that each year’s winter still feels, in isolation, like winter. But if you’ve been paying attention across years, you begin to notice the erosion. And there is something genuinely mournful about that. Not the sadness of a disaster, but the sadness of something dissolving so slowly that you almost miss it.

Arrhythmic Monsoons and Unreliable Futures

The erratic monsoons feel similar. Farmers across Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh now describe a monsoon that comes as if it’s in a hurry, not spread over months, but condensed into furious, unpredictable bursts. Months of rain compressed into days. Days of rain that take everything. Then drought. The body of the agricultural year has become arrhythmic, and the humans dependent on that rhythm are paying the price in debt, in displacement, in something that doesn’t get captured in crop yield statistics.

What does it do to someone to live in that kind of uncertainty? To plant and not know? To watch the sky the way your grandfather taught you and find that the signs no longer mean what they used to?

I think about this when people my age talk about career plans, about which cities we want to live in, which jobs feel stable. Somewhere underneath those conversations is an awareness that the future itself is an increasingly unreliable country. That the city you choose might be different in twenty years: hotter, drier, more flooded, or home to people fleeing from somewhere else. Climate migration is not a distant phenomenon. Millions of people within India have already moved because their land stopped working for them, their water dried up, their coastal village became untenable. We just don’t call it climate migration. We call it “urbanisation.” We call it people “coming to the city for work,” as if that framing is complete, as if it captures the whole story.

Refusing to Normalize the Diminished World

The hardest part of writing about this is that I don’t have a tidy answer to offer. I’m seventeen. I know what the solutions sound like in theory: renewable transitions, policy frameworks, degrowth economics, carbon pricing, climate finance for the Global South. I know the language. But I also know that language and reality are not the same country, and that the people who suffer most from this crisis have the least access to the rooms where decisions are made about it.

What I can say is this: the most dangerous thing about climate change is not the heat itself, or the floods, or the failed monsoons. It is the way we have learned to absorb them. The way “it’s getting worse every year” has become a conversational placeholder, something you say between other sentences, something that doesn’t demand a response. The normalization of disaster is disaster. Because once you accept the unbearable as the background, you stop being able to imagine anything different.

My grandmother remembers a winter so cold that the river near her village had a thin glaze of ice on it by January. My mother has no such memory. I have never experienced a cold that extreme in my entire life, and I live in the same general region. That loss passed through three generations without anyone quite mourning it, because each generation’s normal became the baseline for the next. We inherit the diminished world and call it the world.

I don’t want to keep doing that. I’m not sure what the alternative looks like, precisely, but I think it starts with refusing to normalize. With keeping alive some record of what things used to be, some refusal to accept that this is simply how summers are now, simply how monsoons behave, simply how rivers run or don’t run. With the insistence that something has been taken, that the taking is ongoing, and that it is not inevitable.

The climate crisis is not a future threat. It lives in this morning’s heat, in last year’s flood, in a farmer’s sleepless night, in a child fainting in a classroom in April, in the winter that was a little shorter than the last one. It is woven into the texture of ordinary days in a country where ordinary days are already hard enough.

The question is not whether we will face it. We are already facing it, every single day, often without calling it by its name.

The question is whether we will keep looking away.

WriteToWin Summer 2026

Official publication archive for the WriteToWin National Climate Literacy Competition – Summer 2026 Season. Showcasing top shortlisted essays and real-world environmental actions by young leaders across India.