From the memoir: The story of climate scientist Jagadish Shukla, who modernised monsoon prediction

In the remote village where I grew up, we knew the weather when it hit us on the head. This was thirty years before and five hundred miles away from where that airplane swung low over the angry Bay of Bengal in July 1979. In Mirdha, a tiny outpost not far from the Nepalese border, there were no radios, no newspapers, no books. Our calendar was the seasons; our clock was the sun.

Our understanding of the weather might have been primitive, but our relationship with it was intimate, deep, and ancient. There was hardly a moment of our lives when the weather was not our most conspicuous companion. Sometimes, it was a joyful host, inviting us to lie in swaying fields under puffy white clouds. Other times, it was a wrathful parent, punishing us with drought or fearsome heat. But either way the weather was always in charge.

Without sturdy kerosene lamps, we endured stormy evenings in darkness. Depending on the weather’s fickle moods, my primary school education took place beneath the spidery branches of a banyan tree or, when it rained, on the hay-strewn floor of the cowshed. On frigid winter mornings, while the adults did their chores, we children raced outside,...

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