India's principal monsoon begins in late May at its south-west tip in the lush and beautiful state of Kerala. Six weeks and several heart-stopping pauses later, the annual rains will - with luck - reach Rajasthan in India's arid north-west. Its progress, sometimes relentless, other times half-hearted, has been celebrated by every poet to have been touched by India - Rudyard Kipling and Rabindranath Tagore included. The sentiment is always traditional: if the rains fail, darkness descends.

Nowadays, however, Indians seem to have banished that fatalism with which, we are told, ordinary people were once so afflicted. The rain gods may or may not fail (India has had two severe droughts since 1987). But it is humans who are held to account.