Monsoon mystery

Yesterday's newspaper had a feature on unusual climate in north eastern India.Remember Cheerapunji, the place with the highest rainfall?That region is reeling under severe heatwave.Severe deficit in rainfall and the summer is still on and temperatures soaring!
The irony is all the more poignant, when we see that Rajasthan has been receiving bountiful rains and that too Barmer region!When I was posted to Rajasthan i used to be told, that Barmer is such a place that does not get a single drop of rain for several years at a stretch.And some children have grown up to young adults, not witnessing what is a rain!The houses in Barmer have an underground compartment which can store water, whenever there is rain and the rainwater is directly fed into it. Some peculiar skin ailments used to be noticed in people from those areas, as they are seen to consume stale water stored in closed environment.
The heavy rains have flooded rivulets which at best could handle a few buckets of water(!) and downstream all the way to the city of Surat.It is hopelessly flooded and severely inundated several cities in Gujarat.
Very mysterious and unexplainable. My colleague told me that a roadside shopwallah said it is god's way of punishing man for tampering so much with nature. Is it really so?