Delhi, where even China’s pollution fades into insignificance
Long in the smoggy, high-profile shadow of the poster-boy of pollution Beijing, Delhi has emerged as a rival to even the most acrid of choking megalopolises. Yet, just as in China, change is in the air
Having grown up in perennially polluted New Delhi, smoggy skies were so unremarkable to me that I didn’t even notice anything was awry in Beijing for years after moving there. Till a spring morning in 2006.
It was an ordinary start to the day in most respects. I ate a quick breakfast of jian bing, crispy dough and egg pancakes brushed with a spicy sauce, and then made my way to my study. It was only when I looked out of the window above my desk that I realised this was anything but an ordinary morning. I blinked hard, gasping in wonder at the apparition: a cerulean blue sky, punctuated by the sweep of rolling hills. For the 10 months I had lived in this apartment, the view from my study had only revealed the low, tiled rooftops of the courtyard homes that clustered around our complex, and beyond that a patch of turbid sky that varied only in its shades of grey. The appearance of the hills felt magical, except it was not magic, merely the absence of air pollution.
Before that moment, I don’t think I had really “seen” the dirty air in China. My first few years in Beijing only evoke romanticised nostalgia. I remember the summers as hot and languid. The autumn was short and crisp, the streets layered with fallen leaves the colours of sunset. Winter conjures images of candied crab apple vendors and fearsome winds from Siberia. In spring the hot-cold sand of the Gobi Desert blanketed the city in gritty orange. It was on this seasonal occurrence that most of the local conversation on pollution used to be focused.
WATCH: China’s air pollution returns
Rich-country expats certainly muttered aplenty about Beijing’s toxic air but my reaction to these were initially akin to that of most Chinese themselves: dismissal as overblown first-world concerns. In China, as in India, the general attitude even to days when the skies were thick enough to cut with a knife was to associate the griminess with weather phenomena like fog and sandstorms, rather than pollution.