A New National Festival (दिल्ली की सर्दी)

Delhiites must think that they are God’s gift to Indians. They enjoy the best civic amenities in the country. Delhi has the best roads, pavements, parks, malls and schools. A Delhiwallah enjoys the  benefit of the best universities and colleges, and the best hospitals, both government and private. Delhiites have uninterrupted power, clean water, roads that are swept every night and drains that flow like smooth single malts in their collective oesophagus. An average citizen of Delhi thinks he has arrived in life what with rubbing shoulders with the mighty and the powerful.

Yet, the annual gripe and grouch on pollution by Delhiwallahs visits the whole nation with unfailing regularity. Come November and the city is agog with plaintiffs crying white death, “Oh, the air is filthy, smokey and we can’t breathe. Damn the farmers of Punjab, Haryana and UP.” Juxtaposed pictures of Delhi in June and November are flashed across newspapers and in social media to prove how the nation has failed its capital. Oh, how thankless and how uncouth the unwashed Indians elsewhere are! It is for them that the privileged elite can’t even have an easy breath while strolling in the lush green Lodhi Garden and Nehru Park and the Europe-like vistas of Chanakyapuri and Connaught Place. That the rest of India pays for the carpet grass and blossoms of these parks and yet can’t ever imagine a fraction of that in its towns and mofassils is not even a wispy thought in their minds.

Yet, the same Delhi residents, in spite of the spectacle they create on pollution heaped on them by the hoi polloi of the netherworld of India can’t get their act right on COVID-19. The most educated and aware single, contiguous lot of people, supported by the best healthcare system in the country, still throw up an ever increasing number of the infected, five times higher proportionately, than the rest of the country. Who is to blame for such carelessness, and who will bear the brunt when the high pressure cauldron of Coronavirus ultimately cracks open to inflict on the whole country yet another wave of the deadly virus? Surely not the farmers of Punjab and Haryana.

Show me a photo of Delhi in June and November of 1950s and I will show you the same contrast. Visibility impairment by fog is not a proof of pollution. Well, there is some smoke that creates a smog. The smog continues much after all the paraali is burnt and disposed of. The pollution is as bad, or worse in December and January. Surely There is no smoke coming from Punjab and Haryana then. It is from Delhiites’ own cars, buses and two-wheelers.

Yet, firecrackers are banned in Diwali. They are banned not only in Delhi, but in entire India just because someone in Delhi approaches the law and lawmakers and the Green Tribunals that Diwali is oh-so-polluting, and merriment of children in Patna, Bhopal, Lucknow and Mumbai; in Jaunpur, Hubli, Nanded and Midnapore is clamped down. This is an annual ritual and the whole country of one hundred and thirty crores is deprived of festival fun of a few hours in a year so that smoke of firecrackers doesn’t blow in the winds from Indore, Nagpur, Coimbatore, Kochi and Jaisalmer straight to Delhi. I have never heard of someone from a smaller city or a village ever seeking a ban on Diwali festivities.

The whole nation must collectively lament that Delhi has polluted air in the winters. We owe it to them. The entire media chokes and coughs like there is no other event they have to cover. Sino-Indian standoff takes a backseat, so do politics, COVID, Kashmir, article 370 and Masood Azhar; the country suddenly becomes a place of harmony and peace. Isn’t smog over Delhi the biggest apocalypse that has descended on the humanity?

So, friends and countrymen! Let’s celebrate the biggest festival of India - the Smoggy Winter of Delhi.