I live my life in capitals. By which I mean cities with political pretensions, and not my Twitter habits. My immediate family is in Beijing, and I travel frequently back to Delhi to meet my father, sisters and others who haven’t forgotten me.
The Jing and Dilli share many things aside from the pleasure of my company. They’re both in the north of the countries they boss, have a populace that expresses itself gutturally, and prefer wheat over rice. They’re both old imperial capitals with a keen sense of their own historical importance, and have endured “provincial” interludes while younger, sexier, more maritime cities with European connections took their place. They’ve both reclaimed their heft in every way, exuberantly growing in every direction. Plentiful seats of further learning attract legions of young people, whose energy is a multiplier nobody is even close to quantifying. Politics is the big game in town in both places, but increasingly not the only one. Yet, in both Beijing and Delhi, proximity to power is still the marker that matters.
Aside from the cultural similarities between the Chinese and the Indians — and there are many — I think this is a factor in how comfortable I already am in Beijing. This is a city that, at a very deep level, I feel I already understand.
Inland island
Both my cities are famously smog-enshrouded. But even at this end of the scale, it matters which is worse. The first thing I get asked when back in Delhi: “Seriously. Tell us the truth.”
Seriously? There’s no comparison. Delhi sweeps the crap air award. It’s at least twice as bad as Beijing.
So what happened to all that après-Diwali outrage? Now that I’m only an auditor and not a participant, it was fun — sort of — watching the usual Indian hunt for a scapegoat take in central and local government, neighbouring states, “those bloody farmers”, etc. Was the foreign hand invoked, methodically pumping diesel fumes across Punjab and Rajasthan? Damn those prevailing winds.
The simple fact is that nothing will change until Dilliwalas themselves realise they are all, separately and together, implicated in the pollution. Get out of your cars and into a bus or a train; give your poor guards electric heaters so they’re not burning boxes or plastic when it’s cold; give up your LPG subsidy so a family can switch to clean fuel. Educate yourselves and push your legislators to make informed, long-term decisions about power generation, waste disposal, etc. Mostly, just get ready: it’s going to take a while before it gets better. It will though, if everyone pulls together to make it so.
None of this is rocket science. And not everybody can afford HEPA filters and Vogmasks, yet their families (even “those bloody farmers”) are just as entitled to a clean breath as your children are.
The rage and panic of the entitled — “We must have filters in our kids’ classrooms! I need 5k from everyone on this chat tomorrow!” — would be amusing if it wasn’t so genuinely frightening. There are people in Delhi who already provide their own electricity, water and security. If they make their own pure air, but only for themselves, their islanding from everyone and everything else will be complete.
That can’t be the answer. Not even in Delhi.
In media res
Social media gives you the broad strokes of what’s going on back home, but actually being in the motherland is something else, entirely. You land in the middle of the storm, so to speak, and then, while you’re still filling in the gaps, it’s time to leave again. Which is probably a good thing, if you want to maintain your sanity.
In China, unless you speak and read Chinese, access to information is limited and controlled. In India, there’s simply too much, and most of it is rubbish. We stare in smug horror at the U.S. and what they’ve done on the back, apparently, of a flood of misinformation. But the same process is being repeated in India. Indeed, we’ve probably honed it to its toxic limit (one hopes: surely it can’t get worse?). The things people are saying; the utter lies everyone is taking for granted, now; the rhetoric and invective that passes for normal — it is mind-boggling.
Whatsapp, Twitter and the like may well be wagging madly, but the dog itself was primed to misbehave anyway. Years of foolish programming on television, decades — now — of barely edited, poorly sourced and frankly compromised “news” reporting and a caustic political environment have taken their toll.
Can there be a bigger irony than escaping India’s truth deficit by flying back to China?
The writer was an editor and is an author. Necropolis was his last novel. He lives with his wife, son and singing dog in Beijing.
