Satire | How does one get through Delhi winters? By reading classic literature
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The idea of hell as an inferno must have come from Dante’s cunning inversion of Delhi’s cold, smoggy winter

January 27, 2023 09:19 am | Updated 10:07 am IST

A man crosses a railway track on a foggy winter morning in New Delhi.

A man crosses a railway track on a foggy winter morning in New Delhi. | Photo Credit: Reuters

How can anyone step outside in the Delhi winter and not suffer? I’m amazed every time I see a life form on the street that is not coughing or gasping. Sometimes that life form is a cow, dog or pigeon. But many are unmistakeably human. How? How can they absorb the air equivalent of water-boarding and go about as if the torture isn’t real?

The latest instalment of my annual torture began in late October when Delhi’s Air Quality Index (AQI) settled down in the 300-500 range (‘severe’ to hazardous’). There hasn’t been a day since that I haven’t paid my ‘lung tax’ in the form of unending coughing fits.

At one point, my son Kattabomman began to worry I was going to die. Apparently, his teacher had said in class that air pollution kills. I explained to him that it’s not that simple — yes, air pollution kills, but it does so gradually, over many years, until one fine day you’re on a ventilator and it hits you that your achhe din are well and truly behind you.

Of course, even healthy Indians know this already. But it’s different when you feel it in your chest cavity, when your breathing gets as shallow as the poll promises made by animated electoral bonds in human form.

So how does one get through the hell hole that India’s capital turns into every winter? In my case, what keeps me going is literature, the one with the capital L.

GST-free air

Green Humour by Rohan Chakravarty

Green Humour by Rohan Chakravarty

I want to thank both my chief minister and the Central government — which is based out of New Delhi for a reason — for not only providing free air (not even GST on it) to all Delhiites, but also fortifying it with supplements such as nitrogen oxide, sulphur dioxide, cement dust and carbon monoxide so that you feel compelled to turn to literature. Where else can you find an answer to the question: what’s the meaning of breathing when clean air is rarer than a clean politician?

So I’ve been re-reading Macbeth, and I’ve made some exciting discoveries. Did you know that its opening scene was actually inspired by Shakespeare’s sojourn in Delhi in the winter of 1604? He was waiting at the Ashram flyover when the line, “Hover through the fog and filthy air” came to him. A Shakespeare scholar from Oxford tells me the three witches actually stand for construction work, vehicle exhaust, and biomass burning. Is it any wonder Macbeth is considered a timeless classic?

Then I’ve been reading Dante’s Inferno. Turns out he lifted the famous lines at the gates of Hell, “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here”, from an inscription on an earlier version of the India Gate that used to stand not at the city centre — I’ve always wondered what a ‘gate’ was doing in the middle of a city — but at the Badarpur border.

See more: Green Humour by Rohan Chakravarty

Also, did you know that Dante, to cover up the fact that he had plagiarised his concept of hell from India’s national capital, deliberately made hell ultra-hot instead of super-cold?

Road to hell

Given that the Earth heating up due to global warming is a recent phenomenon, it would make sense that the earliest versions of hell would all be cold places, and they were. So where did the notion of hell as an inferno come from? From Dante’s cunning inversion of Delhi’s cold, smoggy winter.

The seven circles of hell were actually the Outer Ring Road and the Inner Ring Road, followed by the Outer Inner Ring Road and the Inner Outer Ring Road, and finally the outer and inner circle of Connaught Place. I can count and I’m aware that only makes six circles of hell. But as I said, Dante added an extra circle to make it look like it was his idea.

This column is a satirical take on life and society.

But my favourite read, the one I dip into when I’m not busy expectorating, is Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor. My pulmonologist, hearing that my cough hadn’t receded even after six weeks of medication, got me tested for TB. As I was awaiting my turn at the hospital, it was comforting to read about how in medieval Europe ‘consumption’ was considered a “disguised manifestation of the power of love”, an effect of too much “passion” that erupted in “romantic agony” — it altered my perspective on wheezing, to say the least.

Living as we do in the post-medieval 21st century, is there anything to life other than consumption? Just as well that the most important consumable — take a wild guess who that is — is both renewable and expendable.

The author of this satire, is Social Affairs Editor, The Hindu.

sampath.g@thehindu.co.in

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