Okay everyone: I’m sick of your pseudo-solicitous messages asking me how bad the Delhi smog really is. It’s bad, yes, but not half as bad as all the other stuff the Delhi-centric Lutyens media never talks about. In my humble opinion, this obsessive whining about the smog is nothing but an aggravated symptom of a sympathy-deficit disorder.
Our own tragedies
Every part of India has its own exclusive natural disaster. Bihar and Assam, for instance, have their floods that arrive punctually every year to give everyone swimming and boating lessons. Andhra Pradesh and Telangana are regularly hit by drought, which they shamelessly use to extract sympathy and funds from Delhi.
Mumbai gets a lot of attention, thanks to the annual monsoon flooding that puts the Spirit of Mumbai on display for everyone to admire. Bengalureans get their annual quota of sympathy from their traffic, which, like the ovum, doesn’t move but keeps growing. Kolkatans in any case don’t need the sympathy of their intellectual inferiors, which is you, if you are a non-Bong from non-Kolkata. As for Chennaivasis, they do deserve everyone’s sympathy, for their lives are at the mercy of animated abbreviations — EPS, OPS, USP, SUPW.
That leaves the Delhiites, which includes me too (no hashtag intended). What do we have? With our wide roads, Lodhi garden, and the largest Metro network in the subcontinent, not to mention the thousands of crores of tribute that flow into our coffers from every corner of the country, we live comfortably off the fat of the land.
Even when the entire nation was reeling under demonetisation – mind you, I am not suggesting it was a calamity or anything – a few phone calls to a few highly placed contacts was all it took. Black became white, and old notes became new, without productive hours being lost in ATM queues. After all, what are drivers and cooks for?
In other words, Delhiites, like Vijay Mallya, have been extremely impoverished when it comes to sympathy-worthy misery. And then, like a godsend, came the smog.
Six days ago, I got a panic attack when I woke up in the morning to find everything a whitish blur, like Mother Dairy milk. My eyes were watering and I thought I was going blind.
Then my wife, an authentic Sanskari lady who wakes up before her husband does (except on her pseudo-feminist days), handed me my infra-red, night vision glasses. The first thing I asked her after wearing it was, “Have you been bitten?”
“Only by mosquitoes,” she said, and assured me there weren’t any zombies. I went to the balcony to check for myself, and what did I see but a scene straight out of Resident Evil .
Apocalypse now
While there were no zombies staggering about with intestines hanging out of shirt pockets, the deserted streets matched my mental image of a post-apocalyptic nuclear winter. The thick smog could have been a mix of industrial smoke and vehicular exhaust, or it could have been radioactive particulate matter composed of pulverised buildings and vaporised flesh. To be honest, I was mildly disappointed that this wasn’t the zombie apocalypse I’ve been training for. But at least in terms of visibility and toxicity, it is still apocalypse-lite. For all we know, the Delhi smog could well be an advanced experiment in capital punishment based on crowd-sourcing a unique mix of lethal gases, which include not only the traditional staple of carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxide, but also the super-toxic gases emitted by the national spokespersons of every political party, all of whom live here. In addition to dangerous levels of PM10 and PM2.5, Delhi also has the highest concentration of the most deadly particulate matter of all time: PM56.
But do you see me complaining? For your kind information, I’m writing this wearing a face mask. I breathe once every 90 seconds because if I type and breathe at the same time, my glasses get fogged up — not that it makes much of a difference as I can barely see my laptop screen.
In fact, the smog in my living room is so thick I haven’t seen my family in four days. Given subzero visibility and the severe acoustic constraints of speaking through a mask, we communicate with each other by slapping ourselves in Morse code.
Despite all these hardships, I am not demanding that other States send humanitarian aid to Delhi. I’m guessing the rest of India is anyway too blinded by jealousy and anti-national schadenfreude to show us much sympathy. No problem, we’ll manage.
Personally, I take a rather philosophical view of the smog. Perhaps it is nothing more than a metaphor made material — a meteorological manifestation of the intellectual, ethical and moral smog that is the hallmark of Kalyug, where fair is foul, and foul is air.
