It is not your imagination, and it is not just talk over chai — this has been a genuinely brutal stretch of winter. Jammu recently logged a day temperature of around 7.2 degrees Celsius, roughly ten degrees below normal and reportedly the lowest daytime reading the city has seen in over a decade. For two days running, the plains city was actually colder than Srinagar, an inversion that locals find equal parts alarming and grimly funny.
The headline character of this cold wave, though, is not the temperature. It is the fog.
When the fog runs the city
A thick grey blanket has been settling over Jammu in the mornings and refusing to lift, dropping visibility to the point where daily life simply slows down. On the worst days, poor visibility has forced the cancellation of flights at Jammu Airport, stranding travellers and reminding everyone how quickly winter can rearrange plans. Photographs of people huddled around roadside bonfires have become the defining image of the season — a scene that feels less like a weather event and more like the whole city pressing pause together.
Living through it, sensibly
For most of us, the cold wave is less an emergency than a daily negotiation. A few things genuinely help:
- Drive for the fog, not the clock. Lights on, speed down, and leave a generous gap. Most winter accidents here are visibility-related, not ice-related.
- Check before you fly. If you have an early flight out of Jammu, confirm status before leaving home — morning fog is the prime culprit for delays and cancellations.
- Watch the vulnerable. Elderly relatives, young children and anyone sleeping rough feel this cold hardest. A flask of something warm and a spare blanket go a long way.
- Mind the heaters. Gas and coal heating in closed, unventilated rooms is a quiet danger every winter. Crack a window.
The flip side of a hard winter
There is, at least, a consolation. The same cold snap that has the city reaching for thermals has dumped generous snow on the hills above — Patnitop, Nathatop and Bhaderwah have been drawing crowds precisely because this winter means business. A harsh January in the plains usually means a glorious one up the highway.
For now, Jammu does what it always does when the fog rolls in and the mercury dives: it slows down, lights a fire, pours another cup, and waits for that one bright hour around noon when the sky finally clears. It always does. Eventually.
