On Winds

Winter has switched to spring quite abruptly this year. 

Within a span of a week cold foggy mornings gave way to bright sunshine all day prompting us to pack up our jackets and sweaters a month ahead of the Holi festival -  the traditional end-date for winter in this part of the country. There is however one lingering sign of winter that still remains - a cold, steady wind that blows before sunrise and after sunset.

Winds have a language of their own. They always remind me of a passage in Michael Ondaatje's classic, "The English Patient":

"There is a whirlwind in southern Morocco, the aajej, against which the fellahin defend themselves with knives. There is the africo, which at times has reached the city of Rome. The alm, a fall wind out of Yugoslavia. The arfi...which scorches with numerous tongues. These are permanent winds that live in the present tense.

There are other, less constant winds that change direction, that can knock down horse and rider and realign themselves anticlockwise. The bist roz leaps into Afghanistan for 170 days - burying villages. There is the hot, dry ghibili from Tunis, which rolls and rolls and produces a nervous condition. The haboob - a Sudan dust storm that dresses in bright yellow walls a thousand meters high and is followed by rain. The harmattan, which blows and eventually drowns itself into the Atlantic..."

One of the winds named here - the Ghibili - has been immortalised by the Japanese anime legend, Hayao Miyazaki, who has named his production house, The Studio Ghibili Collection, and churned out some of the most endearing animation movies we have seen. 

Recent research has also revealed that the great Amazon forests owe their nutrition to winds that emerge from the Sahara desert. Molecular level analysis combined with remote sensing technology tells us that an estimated 22,000 tons of phosphorus from Saharan dust is deposited on Amazon soils every year!  Even more astounding is the discovery that much of this phosphorus comes from one specific area in the Southern Sahara, the Bodélé Depression in Chad, an ancient lake bed where rock minerals composed of dead microorganisms are loaded with phosphorus!

Do the winds that blow through Delhi have their own names? Have they inspired any creative genius, or carried vital nutrition into distant ecosystems? We don't know yet.  Perhaps the answer, my friend, is blowing in the winds...the answer is blowing in the winds.

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REFERENCES & LINKS

* Nature (4 Jan., 2021) - Dust arriving in Amazon Basin over the past 7500 years came from different sources

* NASA Satellite reveals how much Saharan dust feeds Amazon's plants - https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/nasa-satellite-reveals-how-much-saharan-dust-feeds-amazon-s-plants

* The Studio Ghibili Collection - Hayao Miyazaki - https://ghiblicollection.com/

* Demons of the African Air - https://www.irishtimes.com/news/demons-of-the-african-air-1.90392