Ramanan - The Weather Man

The earliest memories of me seeing Mr. Ramanan - The Weather Man of Tamil Nadu - dates back to my high-school days. A simple-man, with a small mustache, in white shirt(most of his shirts looked white in our Black & White TV), sitting behind a table. A few computers - two to three in number - that belonged to our grand-fathers generations would be there, facing the camera, in front of him. Unlike these days, there were not many cameras in front of him, but only the DD's. No mikes too. Once the camera rolls, he will bend forward and look into those computer monitors, which makes one to wonder if that is the first time he is seeing those monitors for the day. He will pause for a few moments, when one is supposed to assume that he is thinking and analyzing the data, mostly black & white images of clouds floating over the map of India. Then he will look into the camera and tell his prediction, which most of the time will be exactly opposite to what is going to happen. For example, when he says if its going to rain heavily for the next two days, people got used to interpret that as that the sky is going to be clear and no rain will be there. On the other hand, if he says that the weather will be good and there wont be any rain for the next days, one can safely assume that its going to rain heavily for the next two days. But in those days the government and the authorities didn't go to the extreme of declaring leave for schools and collages, since they too appeared to follow the well-established interpretation of Mr. Ramanan's weather forecasts.

At times the prediction given by my grand-father, just by seeing the sky used to be somewhat accurate than the prediction of Mr. Ramanan and his metrological department.

All of a sudden, after I grew up into adulthood, I saw a colorful Ramanan in Sun TV (By this time we had switched to a Colour TV). In the mean time, Mr. Ramanan has completed a doctoral research and has become Dr. Ramanan (so, lets also change from Mr. Ramanan to Dr. Ramanan). His cute little mustache was also gone. So many mikes in front of him, based on which one can also assume that there should also be many cameras in front of him. The computers in front of him were missing.  But at times, we could see him standing in front of a big TV that displays clouds over the a world map and Dr. Ramanan explaining how the wind is formed and how it is expected to travel. Having seen his predictions from my childhood, I never worried about them and sometimes have planned and executed beautiful outings in pleasant climates, when he said that we can expect a heavy downpour for the next two days. But now there is a big change - the government and the authorities seemed to believe whatever he said, and are going to the extreme of declaring holidays whenever he said that there is going to be a heavy downpour. May be, with improved technology, his predictions are somewhat close to that of my grand-father's.

Move forward a couple of years... I receive memes about Dr. Ramanan!!! Looks like he has become the favorite darling of school and college students, since he is pivotal in prompting the regulators to declare holidays, sometimes up to 2 weeks at a stretch!!!

Some of the memes below...

And here is the ultimate one :-)  (which made me to laugh continueously for 5 minutes while having tea in our office cafeteria, which made others around me to assume that I have gone mad...)