The Aestheticization of Disaster — the "Beautiful Rain"

When I say "It is raining," a lot of people instantly feel like sipping a warm cup of tea, with their favourite snack, looking out of their window while smelling the wet earth rising like a small miracle. Films have built their most memorable scenes around it. Poetry has chased it for centuries. Entire playlists exist for this feeling.

And yet, this rain — the rain of mood and metaphor — belongs only to some people. For others, the same water falling from the same sky means something else entirely. The aestheticization and romanticisation can only be done when one sits inside their home, on a comfortable chair feeling sheltered. The petrichor is only poetic if you can afford to stand still and breathe it in. For a construction worker whose daily wage disappears the moment it rains, for a farmer watching water swallow a crop, for a family in an informal settlement where the roof leaks and the lane floods, rain is not atmosphere. It is an emergency. What gets called a "romantic" season is, for a significant portion of the population, a season of loss. Romance, then, is not a natural response to rain. It is a class position, one that has learned to present itself as a universal feeling.

Indian cinema has perhaps done more than any other cultural form to fix rain as the language of longing. The baarish song is almost its own genre — drenched protagonists, desire barely contained, the rain arriving like permission. Bollywood's monsoon is lush, cinematic, electric with feeling. It is also almost entirely set among people who have the luxury of being moved by weather rather than endangered by it. This is not unique to Hindi films. Hollywood has long used storms as Gothic backdrop, floods as dramatic devices, rain as a shorthand for emotional intensity, while the actual human cost of water, the dispossession and displacement that follow real floods, stays largely offscreen.

The famous quote — "You hate the rain? How can anyone hate the rain?" — from the famous series The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair, strikes up a big question. It seems romantic and happy from the film's perspective, but in real life, people can hate the rain. "It's a feeling, isn't it?" that instinctive defence of rain, the sense that anyone who doesn't love it is missing something. But that's almost exactly the argument the article is making. The question "how can anyone hate the rain?" is only possible to ask from the inside — warm, dry, watching it fall. It carries within it the assumption that rain is primarily an experience to be felt rather than a condition to be survived. The question to be asked is, "why do people hate the rain?" And that can be answered. The person whose mud wall collapses in heavy rain doesn't hate rain the way someone hates a bad film. It's not aesthetic distaste. It's that rain has a completely different meaning in their life, one that has nothing to do with mood or beauty or petrichor.

The rain songs don't just hint at possible beginnings of romance as is the case in "Dekho Na" from Fanaa (2006), depictions of yearning and separation in "Aaoge Jab Tum" from Jab We Met (2007) but also act as sites of subversion. Since the 1940s, dance sequences in the rainy weather have been exploited to portray sensuality and eroticism, sometimes with sexualized imagery of Bollywood heroines without any censor interference.

None of this is to say that rain cannot be beautiful, or that beauty is suspect. It is to say that beauty, when it consistently belongs to some and not others, is worth examining. The aestheticisation of rain is not innocent, it shapes how we talk about floods, how we respond to disaster, how much we are willing to understand about the lives of people for whom weather is not backdrop but condition. Susan Sontag wrote about the way suffering, once photographed, becomes available as an aesthetic experience; something to be looked at, felt, consumed. Rain and floods are subject to exactly this transformation. The viral image of a flooded street where the water lies still and silver, catching the light just so, is doing a kind of ideological work. It makes a disaster into a composition. It invites us to feel something atmospheric rather than something accountable.

The aestheticisation of the monsoon has older roots. Colonial and Orientalist writing spent considerable energy turning the Indian subcontinent into landscape — mysterious, fecund, overwhelming — to be admired from a distance. The monsoon, in this imagination, was a spectacle: something that happened "to" a place, revealing its essential character. This gaze did not disappear with colonialism. It persisted in travel writing, in literary fiction, in a certain kind of nostalgia for rain that is still, quietly, the nostalgia of those who could "observe" rather than endure. When we reach for the monsoon as a metaphor without asking who is standing in it, we are often reaching for something inherited, a way of seeing that was never designed to include everyone in the frame.