Delhi AQI: Why there’s no song and dance around India’s killer air

In the 2016 Bollywood hit Pink, a field introducing Amitabh Bachchan’s personality shows the artist emerging from his house on a spring morning into Delhi’s smog-filled roads, wearing a helmet.

Other scenes of the movie have the helmet and Delhi’s hazy air, but they have little to do with the plot.

Yet, it is one of the rare examples of mainstream Indian films taking notice of the deadly air that makes many parts of India dangerous to live in every year.

The toxic air pollution and recurrent winter smog in Indian capital Delhi and other parts of northern India frequently makes headlines, becoming a matter of public concern, political debate and legal censure. But unlike disasters such as the devastating floods in Uttarakhand in 2013, Kerala in 2018 and Mumbai city in 2005 – each of which have inspired films – air pollution is largely missing from Indian pop culture.

Siddharth Singh, author of The Great Smog of India, a book on pollution, says that it is a “big loss” that air pollution is not a prevalent tale in India’s books and film.

He points out that the majority of writing on waste in India is still written in the field of education and medical expertise.

” When you say PM2.5 or NOx or SO2 ( all pollutants ), what are these words? They mean nothing to]ordinary ] people”.

In his 2016 text, The Great Derangement, artist Amitav Ghosh, who has written extensively about climate change, observed that such tales were missing from modern literature.

“People are weirdly normal about climate change,” he said in a 2022 interview.

The author described being in India during a heat wave.

The most disconcerting thing he said was the sensation that everything seemed to be standard. It seems as though we have now learned to adapt to these changes.

Ghosh described culture shift as” a slow crime,” which made it challenging to write about.

That is undoubtedly true of pollution; it can have long-lasting negative effects on people’s health, but it is not suitable for serious visuals.

The subject has, however, been explored in documentaries like Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes, which was nominated for the Oscars in 2022.

Through the story of two sons who treated wounded black kite that fell from the state’s smoke-filled stars, Sen explored climate change, pollution, and the connected character of human-animal connections in Delhi’s ecosystem in the movie.

Sen claims he was interested in learning about climate change and” anything as big as the Anthropocene,” a term used to describe the current state of humankind’s profound influence on the life and real world.

The two boys are seen in a scene in the movie argue. Then, one of them turns to the sky and says,” Yeh sab jo hamare beech mein ho beloved hai, ye is sab ki galti hai ( What’s happening between us is the problem of all of this )” and then points to themselves.

“]The effects of climate change ] basically pervade through every aspect of our life”, Sen says. ” And the task of picture, be it film or poetry, is to provide it that kind of resilience in its representation”.

Economic films that are pretentious, restrictive, or keep audiences by the neck to make them feel poor do more disservice than great, he says.

The best movies, in my opinion, are those that are Trojan horses that can infect thoughts without the viewer realizing it.

Filmmaker Nila Madhab Panda, whose work on climate change and setting spans more than 70 pictures, believes arts can make a change.

Panda, who began telling tales on climate change in 2005 with his film Climate’s First Orphan, turned to more mainstream film for the information to achieve wider people.

The director moved to Delhi in 1995 after growing up in the Kalahandi Balangir Koraput area of the eastern state of Odisha, which was sensitive to droughts and floods.

” It amazed me that I was living in a world where I could see four months and immediately guzzle water from the river. Normal wealth is complimentary to us- atmosphere, water, fire, everything. And I come to Delhi where you buy anything. I buy ocean, I buy atmosphere. Every place has an atmosphere filter”.

In 2019, Panda made a short film for an anthology in which he explored the theme of Delhi’s pollution through a courtroom drama about a couple getting a divorce because they couldn’t agree on whether to continue living in the capital.

” You can’t just make anything which is not entertaining and show]it ]”, Panda says.

Additionally, authors face the difficulty of humanizing challenging stories.

Singh, whose 2018 guide looked at India’s air pollution problems, says he struggled to find the individuals behind the data while writing it.

” We often read the news stories about a million or two million people per year passing away from waste,” the source said. But where are these folks? Where are their reports”?

While Nilanjana S Roy’s crime fiction Black River frequently includes environmental themes, many modern English artists, including Ghosh, have also highlighted the subject. Delhi’s Bhalswa rubbish dump functions. In Gigi Ganguly’s Biopeculiar and Janice Pariat’s Everything the Light Touches, the writers explore our relationship with the natural environment.

But there is still a long way to go.

According to Singh, one of the causes of the relative lack of these stories may be that the authors are “insulated” because of their privilege.

” They are not the people who are by the bank of the]polluted ] Yamuna river, who see the poem in it or write about the stories along its banks”.

He claims that memes and photos on social media these days have been the most effective at capturing the gravity of air pollution.

Sheikh Hasina, the exiled Bangladesh PM who is now in Delhi, was mentioned in a meme that was popular a few days ago. However, the accompanying photo was completely gray because the joke was that the air pollution prevented people from seeing her.

The writer hopes that those who can actually make a difference will eventually find the momentum to” trigger a response.”

” I think that’s what we lack at the moment”, he says.

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