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

In the 2016 Bollywood hit Punk, a scene introducing Amitabh Bachchan’s character shows the actor walking from his home on a winter morning through the smog-filled streets of Delhi wearing a mask.

Other scenes in the film feature masks and Delhi’s smoggy air but are unrelated to the plot.

Nevertheless, it is one of the rare examples of mainstream Indian films that take note of the deadly air that affects many parts of India. Dangerous to live in Every year

Toxic air pollution and frequent winter smog in India’s capital Delhi and other parts of it North India Often make headlines, become the subject of public concern, political debate and legal reprimand. But unlike disasters such as the devastating floods in Uttarakhand in 2013, Kerala in 2018 and the city of Mumbai in 2005 – each of which has inspired films – air pollution has been largely absent from Indian pop culture.

Siddharth Singh, author of The Great Smog of India, a book on pollution, says it is a “huge failure” that air pollution is not a prevalent narrative in Indian literature and filmmaking.

He points out that much of the writing on pollution in India remains within the realm of academic and scientific expertise.

“When you say PM2.5 or NOx or SO2 (all pollutants), what are these words? They don’t mean anything. [ordinary] people.”

In his 2016 book, The Great Derangement, author Amitav Ghosh, who has written extensively on climate change, observed that such stories are missing from contemporary fiction.

“People are strangely normal about climate change,” he said In the 2022 interview.

The author describes being in India during a heat wave.

“What struck me was that everything seemed normal and that was the most disturbing thing,” he said. “It seems that we have already learned to live with these changes.”

Ghosh described climate change as “a slow violence” that became difficult to write about.

This certainly holds for pollution – it can have devastating long-term health effects, but does not present itself in dramatic ways.

However, this topic has been explored in documentaries such as Shonksen. All those breathsWhich was nominated for an Oscar in 2022.

In the film, Sen explores climate change, pollution and the interconnected nature of human-animal relationships in Delhi’s ecosystem through the story of two brothers who fall from the city’s smog-filled sky. Treated black moths.

Sen says he was interested in exploring how “something as big as the Anthropocene” (a term used to describe the current moment when humans are having a profound impact on the living and physical world). Or climate change was tied to petty squabbles. And everyday irritations.

In one scene of the film, the two brothers are shown fighting. One of them then points to the sky and to himself and says, “All this that is happening among us is your fault (what is happening among us is the fault).” .

“[The effects of climate change] In fact, it pervades every aspect of our lives,” Sen says. “And the job of representation, whether it’s cinema or literature, is to give it that kind of strength in its representation.”

Environmental films that are pedantic, prescriptive, or grab viewers by the collar to make them feel bad, he says, do more harm than good.

“For me, the best movies are the ones that are Trojan horses that are able to sneak in ideas without the audience being fully aware that they’re engaging in that conversation.”

Filmmaker Nila Madhab Panda, whose work on climate change and the environment spans over 70 films, believes art can make a difference.

Panda, who began telling stories on climate change with his documentary Climate’s First Orphan in 2005, turned to more mainstream cinema to bring the message to a wider audience.

The filmmaker was born and brought up in the drought- and flood-prone Kalahandi Balangir Korapot region of the eastern state of Odisha and moved to Delhi in 1995.

“It’s amazing to me that I was living in an ecosystem where you see four seasons, you drink water directly from the river. Natural wealth is free to us – air, water, fire, everything. And I come to Delhi where you buy everything, I buy air in every room.

In 2019, Panda made a short film for an anthology in which he explored the topic of Delhi’s pollution through a courtroom drama about a couple divorcing because they couldn’t agree on whether to To be continued. Live in the capital.

“You just can’t make something that isn’t entertaining and a show. [it]” says the panda.

Creators also tackle the challenge of humanizing difficult stories.

Singh, whose 2018 book looked at India’s air pollution crisis, says he struggled to find the people behind the statistics when he was writing it.

“We read the headlines every year about a million or two million people dying because of pollution. But where are these people? Where are their stories?”

While environmental themes have found a place in India’s vast regional literature, many contemporary English writers, including Ghosh, have also highlighted the theme – Nilanjana S. Roy’s crime novel Black River features Delhi’s Bhalsava garbage dump. . In Gigi Ganguly’s Biopeculiare and Janice Parriott’s Everything the Light Touches, the authors explore our relationship with the natural environment.

But there is still a long way to go.

Singh says one reason for the relative dearth of such stories may be that the people who create them are “insulated” by their privilege.

“They are not the people the bank has. [polluted] The Yamuna river, who sees poetry in it or writes stories on its banks.

He says that these days it’s the memes and images on social media that have proven to be the most effective in capturing the gravity of air pollution.

“A meme that went viral a few days ago said something like, ‘Sheikh Hasina [exiled Bangladesh PM who is now in Delhi] Saw on his daily morning walk. But the accompanying picture was completely gray because the satire could not see it due to air pollution!

The author hopes that such creative outlets will gain enough momentum to eventually “trigger a response from those who can actually make a difference”.

“I think that’s what we’re lacking at the moment,” he says.

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