During the year I shot the monsoon assignment, I learned to see it as a critically important event,
and not the disaster it had first seemed to my Western eyes.
Farmers experience the monsoon as an almost religious experience
as they watch their fields come back to life after being parched for half the year.
Varanasi, India
NEW DELHI (Reuters) – India’s annual monsoon rains have arrived at the southern Kerala coast,
a top weather official said on Tuesday, brightening prospects of higher farm output by aiding
farmers to plant summer-sown crops such as rice, soybean and cotton on time.
- June 6, 2012
Goa, India
Rain is grace;
Rain is the sky descending to the earth …
– John Updike
India
For half the world’s people, good monsoons, those rain-bearing winds of
Asia and the Subcontinent, mean life and prosperity.
Poor ones are marked by famine and death.
Bangladesh
The rains fall on one horn of the buffalo, and not on the other.
-Indian Proverb
Kabul, Afghanistan
Java, Indonesia
Nepal
Northern Territory, Australia
Tokyo, Japan
Tibet
It is no use to grumble and complain; It’s just as cheap and easy to rejoice.
When God sorts out the weather and sends rain – Why, rain’s my choice.
- James Whitcomb Riley
Sri Lanka
Indonesia
Cambodia
The drops of rain make a hole in the stone, not by violence, but by oft falling.
- Lucretius
Porbandar, India
India
Dalit women cleaning streets, Mumbai, India
Burma
Only He shakes the heavens and from its treasures takes out the winds.
He joins the waters and the clouds and produces the rain. He does all those things.
- Michael Servetus (1511-1553)
Spanish theologian, physician, cartographer
Cambodia
Monsoon History
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
The air is wet, soaks
into mattresses, and curls
In apparitions of smoke,
Like fat white slugs furled
Among the timber
Or silver fish tunnelling
The damp linen covers
Of schoolbooks, or walking
Quietly like centipedes,
The air walking everywhere
On its hundred feet
Is filled with the glare
Of tropical water.
Again we are taken over
By clouds and rolling darkness.
Small snails appear
Clashing their timid horns
Among the morning glory
Vines.
Bojonegoro, Java, Indonesia
Monsoon Festival, India
For months there is no rain, and then there is too much.
Half the world’s people survive at the whim of the monsoon.
Two men try to cross a monsoon swollen river after the bridge was swept away, Goa, India
