Too Hot To Handle: Indian Cities In A Giant Air Fryer Sudhir Mishra & Saumya Verma 28 April 2026 7:08 PM IST Some of the most formative memories of my senior and co-author, Sudhir Mishra's childhood has nothing to do with a classroom. Growing up in Bihar in the 1970s and 80s, his school did not always have enough walls or ceilings to contain a class, so teachers would hold lessons under the wide canopy of peepal and banyan trees. Even at the peak of a Bihar summer, sitting cross-legged beneath those trees, it was bearable. The trees breathed. They exhaled cool, moist air. They were, in every meaningful sense, infrastructure. I, Saumya Verma, grew up in Noida. The Noida of my childhood was sparse: wide roads, open land, dust and possibility in equal measure. It was not beautiful, but it breathed. Today, that same Noida is a concrete grid. On a May afternoon, stepping outside feels less like walking into summer and more like opening an oven door. We did not lose our climate to bad luck. We surrendered it to bad policy. There is an old Glucon-D advertisement that has stayed with many of us: a cartoon sun bending down over a child, inserting a straw into the top of the child's head and gleefully sucking out their energy. It was meant to sell an electrolyte drink. It was also, as it turns out, a documentary. That advertisement is no longer a metaphor, it is a medical reality playing out across India's cities every summer, except the child in question is not a cartoon, the sun has no straw, and there is no Glucon-D large enough to fix what we have built. The Numbers That Should Shame a Nation India is on fire, not metaphorically, but literally, measurably,