Oh! Delhi.
November is the cruelest month for Delhi and you may
survive, if you lock yourself indoors,
denying yourself the much needed fresh air ( such as it is, polluted several times over beyond permissible limits! ) and
sunlight(whatever miraculously
seeps through the blanket of haze, smoke and dust which must
now be declared Delhi’s official dress. As every year, the victory of
the forces of good over evil was celebrated with great verve and vigour and to
the accompaniment of lights and firecrackers raising the pollution level of
ambient air to dangerous levels .The good won in spirit but the symbolic fight
left those of us who have survived in flesh to cope with the consequences.
But as the saying goes ‘If the If Mohammed will not
go to the mountain, the mountain must come to Mohammed ‘Yesterday
the ‘mountain’, - the ‘outside’- broke into my hideout, indoors, with full
force. The living room felt like a traffic island on a busy city intersection,
at peak hour and I escaped to the bedroom which I had sealed hermetically. My
mind was somehow able to draw comfort from the thought that my recycled breath
was better for me.
Newspapers report that to ease the situation,
the Delhi administration plans to install air purifiers at the polluted
hotspots. And then? Some more purifiers? We add flyways and road over bridges
by the dozens every year but the problem of traffic congestion never seems to
go away. After all you have to disgorge, regurgitate the sucked in impurities
of the air at some point, or the volume of traffic clogging a narrow artery,
somewhere. It is like chasing the infinite regress of images in a hall of
mirrors and neighbourhoods are receding at an accelerated pace.
To the survival kit of a bottle of mineral
water the Delhite must now add a gas mask or the bottle of oxygen. Uber is already promising a vertical takeoff
landing aircraft at call. Within a year or two and, with some luck, the Delhite
will encapsulate himself like the Bubble Boy David. Born in US in 1971 with
severe combined immunodeficiency (SICD),
he was, in a manner of speaking, imprisoned in his specially constructed
sterile plastic bubble, till he died at
the age of 12 ,because he was so
inherently fragile as to catch any passing infection.
There is already a long list of health
anxieties, but Dengue seems to be
uppermost on the list . I do not have to go far; the demonic energy and
malevolence with which my daughter goes after the lone ,unfortunate,and vagrant mosquito or anything small and
minuscule that takes to wings, is proof enough of what is on the mind of every
doting mother. Whenever we go out ,along with my grand children, I
also get my quota of protective armour of Odomos. I suffer the elaborate ritual ceremony for warding off
Dengue quite sportingly .
Even though Bharati Nagar, near the posh Lodhi Colony and home to senior civil servants , is one of the better off areas of Delhi
it has reported cases.Dengue and Chikengunya seem to have unmistakably a
Marxist lineage ; they attack privilege.
People who live in cleaner surroundings
are their inevitable target. As further proof of their
distinguished ancestry these mosquitoes can
live and breed only in enclaves
of privilege - clean stagnant water in
desert coolers , flower pots etc. Fetid drains, or polluted water bodies cannot sustain the Dengue population.
Hardly four or five, out of nearly
3500, strains of mosquitoes have any
hostile design on us , yest mosquitoes
have become the universal enemy of mankind – or that species of
homo sapiens which inhabits our part of the earth. Wholesale
extermination of the mosquitoes is high
on human agenda because that is how the
modern man likes to fight his enemies.
The epic fight of man and
mosquito goes on everyday, everywhere here in Delhi, in slums and areas cut off from municipal services as well as in the posh
government colonies where fogging
machines trail clouds of gas, potentially lethal for dengue infected mosquitoes
. Luckily for the mosquitoes the humans
are far too clumsy.They just cannot
manage the en masse extinction !
With the onset
of winter, we are beginning to put the fear of Dengue and Chikungunia behind us
but the resurgent malaria is an ever present threat and cannot be written off. But then what are we to do about the mischievous, shape shifting virus who are the cause of so much
misery by way of giving us flu. ? They are hugely inventive
and slip through the safety net of
anti flu vaccine in a different
disguise. And they have no fear of antibiotics.
We have for so long distrusted our own antibodies that we repose
absolute faith in the antibiotics; there is one for every occasion. They are
our savior and if they let us down, then God help us.
In the meanwhile
the people who could have made a difference to our prospects in our fight
against pollution and the minuscule
enemies, Mr.Kejariwal and the Mr. Najeeb Jung, the CM and the LG are making it worse . Locked in a do or die
battle, they contribute acrimonious decibels and fire and brimstone to an already vexed situation. Mr. Kejariwal declared sometime back that
there was a high level threat to his life . He did not elaborate ,
however ,whether it would be delivered via an infected mosquito or through other traditional means.
In their inactivity they spur the courts to hyperactivity- higher
courts are busy sorting out the issues that the
combatants raise against each
other. Of course all at tax payers’ expense and time!
