Winter Rant

With dust, smoke, and filth.

I am back in India, and more importantly back in Delhi after a long time, since 2012. The simple fact is that I spent the bittersweet years of my high school in this city; I would always come back to Delhi to visit my parents while on break from engineering school. So for a period of eight good years of my life, Delhi was synonymous with home, and that feeling continues to linger in some part of my being.

So, it is heartbreaking to bear witness to what has become of my ‘home city’ after all these years. Maybe it was always like this, and I am only noticing the change because “it has been a while”. Or, maybe I have become too accustomed to the clean streets and clear blue, summer skies of Southern California, Seattle and Zurich. But it is undeniable that the streets and air of Delhi are filthy.

The city, everywhere, is blanketed by a visible, brown layer of dust and smoke. There is no dearth of trucks and vans that emit clouds of dark smoke from their tail pipes, despite the adoption of CNG (compressed natural gas) as a cleaner source of fuel nearly fifteen years ago by the city’s transportation network — busses, mini-busses and rickshaws. And the winter fog is not helping this situation.

I expected the widespread and successful adoption of the Delhi Metro to bring down the pollution levels. However, the stories I hear from my friends and family who travel the metro everyday tell me something different. If I were to believe one such story, it would seem that you can see clearer skies — sans the brown blanketing smog — while traveling in the Delhi Metro that rides on tracks quite higher than the roads; the sky seeming browner and gloomier while on the roads.

Sights of people wearing masks around their faces while riding in their tw0-wheelers is something I have never seen in Delhi before — but that could be just me.

What is more undeniable is the clear coat of dust on the leaves of the many trees planted across the city. In many ways, it is like a dusty autumn where instead of appearing green and yellow, the trees are colored green and brown. Which takes me back to yet another account that suggests that the city’s skies and trees look their natural colors after a downpour of rain giving the impression that the city needs a daily bath to be clean.

And the irony of this situation is the numerous, and again dusty, billboards and posters across the city that highlight the efforts being taken to clean up this mess — be it with the PM’s clean India drive or the CM’s no-cars-day initiative or other crazy ideas that look to cut down the traffic pollution by allowing even and odd numbered vehicles to operate on the roads on alternate days.

Suffice to say that the struggle is real — both in terms of the challenge in front of Delhi and the measures taken by the people and governments occupying this city.