A Sea Change

A Sea Change

I am a climate refugee - or about to become one. 

Last winter, frustrated by  being caged into the filter-cleaned air of our Delhi home, we decided we would spend this winter in peninsular India, where the air is scrubbed clean by breezes from either coast.

Immediately after Bhai-dooj, we leave for Goa, where we have rented a small apartment in a southern village, “12 minutes from the beach, in my flip-flops”, according to the landlady.

For someone who loves the sea as much as I do, this will, inshallah, be our longest stay near a beach. This morning, the anticipation began to swell, and I resolved to make a set of resolves for my time there, perhaps for a longer term sea change:

To immerse myself in the outdoors - not just in the sea, not just as a gymnasium for my athleticism, but as a landscape of observation, reflection, and deceleration.

To wean myself away from default modes of existence, dominated by turning to my phone several times an hour. The average US user apparently picks her phone up 53 times a day. I suspect I clock in at a much higher number.  It is true that I cannot do without my phone, since it is my primary business tool. Spreadsheets, share trading, zoom meetings, e-mails, are largely mediated by my phone, and allow me the freedom to work from anywhere. But I spend way too much time on Twitter, and on indulging my insatiable curiosity. This needs drastic surgery.

To acquire a new skill, and I’m tending towards the purely mundane, perhaps the simple craft of cooking a basic meal of dal and rice.

To ignore the clock, which currently dictates I finish breakfast by 9, watch the markets all morning, eat lunch at 1, and so on. To let my body tell me when it wants to eat, when to stretch, when to go for a long walk, whether before dawn, or well into the dark of a midnight stroll.

And to allow myself to hear, to be quieter. For longer.

Such a short, simple list, no?

Wish me well.

And have a Happy Diwali, find the glow within:

AI image generated with Nightcafe.

No Demand for Clean Air

A deep rumble woke me on Friday morning.

Even by the standards of the traffic on Delhi’s outer Ring Road, it was unusually thunderous. Light flashed through a chink in the curtains. That couldn’t be from the street, three concrete walls away. Was it raining? Clear skies, almost too much to hope for, after two weeks of hazardous air?

The AQI screen on my phone was a collection of merely ‘unhealthy’ flags, a cheerful parade of bright yellow after two weeks of sombre maroon. Like a schoolboy liberated from detention, I pulled on my running shoes and bolted out the door, undeterred by the grimy puddles, the cold drizzle, and the ankles that groaned, “Easy does it, ol’ boy”.

Late that afternoon, the sun actually shone through my backdoor, and Lado Sarai, the closest monitoring station, metered the AQI at 164. The ring on the air purifier subsided to a reassuring blue within minutes of turning it on. My sister came up to check something with me, and lifted an eyebrow at the humming machine, “Today?”

After a week of readings in the 4th and 5th centuries, 164 is really, really low, but the WHO air quality goal (AQG) for the finest particles - what we call PM 2.5 - is 15. After decades of filthy air, we have recalibrated our expectations to the point where anything short of disaster is bliss.

Pallavi Aiyar, who lives in Spain, writes* about the putrid air of Delhi she encounters every Christmas. But when she talks of it to friends, she is  “met with blank stares or eye-rolling to indicate how much of a ‘foreigner’ she has become”. 

Not my experience - the season’s air has come up with virtually every Delhi friend I’ve met in the last two weeks. But on the street, not more than two of every hundred pedestrians or bikers are wearing masks, the cheapest prophylactic against air-borne pollutants. The average Indian life is beset with concerns - employment, inflation, the future of their children. An environmental hazard that may take a few years off their life - and by definition at the end of their life - is not worth worrying about today.

Dealing with air-pollution, as I mentioned last week, requires governmental action across state boundaries and ministerial fiefdoms. Tackling it will require the expenditure of huge amounts of political capital. Politicians, like all entrepreneurs, respond to demand, and the demand for clean air is not something they perceive.

“But leaders”, one idealistic young man countered, “they should tackle a major problem irrespective of public opinion.”

Ah, that thing - Leadership.

*https://pallaviaiyar.substack.com/p/in-delhi-its-the-season-to-choke