The mercury hits 45 degrees Celsius in Delhi, and the city’s poor are dying. Not from the heat alone, but from a systemic neglect that would make a Victorian factory owner blush. We have seen this before, in the bread riots of Rome, in the famines of British India. The elites retreat into their air-conditioned bubbles, while the labourer on the construction site, the rickshaw puller, the street vendor — they are left to bake. This is not a natural disaster. It is a moral failure dressed in meteorological data.
The parallels with the fall of Rome are instructive. As the Empire crumbled, the rich fled to their country villas, leaving the urban plebs to fend for themselves. The aqueducts fell into disrepair; the grain dole was cut. Today, we have air conditioners instead of villas, but the principle is the same: the separation of the privileged from the suffering of the masses. Delhi’s heatwave is a slow-motion catastrophe, and the government’s response — a few water tankers, some vague advisories — is a paltry offering to the gods of indifference.
But let us not pretend this is uniquely Indian. The intellectual decadence of our age means we have lost the language of collective responsibility. We speak of ‘resilience’ and ‘adaptation’ as if the poor should simply endure. Even the Victorian era, for all its callousness, had moments of public outrage. The novels of Dickens, the reforms of Shaftesbury — these were born from a recognition that suffering had a face. Today, we have algorithms and heat maps. The poor are reduced to data points.
And what of national identity? A nation that cannot protect its most vulnerable from the elements is not a nation at all. It is a failed experiment. The Roman Empire fell because it lost its sense of civic virtue. The rich stopped caring; the poor rebelled. This is not a prediction, but a warning. The heat will not kill everyone. But it will kill the bonds that hold a society together. We have seen this cycle before. History does not repeat, but it rhymes with a cruel consistency.
So here is my sharp-tongued diagnosis: Delhi’s heatwave is a mirror. Look into it and see the rot of privilege, the intellectual laziness of our leaders, the hollowing out of compassion. The only question is whether we will act before the mercury rises again or simply retreat into our air-conditioned tombs.
