I resent that late American politician who encouraged his countrymen to consider what they could do for their country. I believe it helped a lot of people in government absolve themselves of what should be treated as a crime: the dereliction of duty. Nowhere is this clearer than in Bombay when dark water-bearing clouds appear on our horizon every monsoon.

That is when our desperation to escape those darling heatwaves of May compels us to forget the horror that June and July have in store for our city. That is when we exchange notes on petrichor, share the best pakoda recipes on WhatsApp, and add old film songs about the rain to our Spotify playlists. What we also do, in the process, is gloss over the overwhelmingly obvious fact that our government has let us down on yet another occasion.