Delhi smog: It's time to refuse to accept it as a yearly ritual

You can smoke 50 cigarettes a day or you can spend 24 hours in NCR. You will be better off with the former. This is no Twitter joke, but stark reality.

Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh says that crop stubbles will continue to burn, citing the 20 million tonnes of paddy straw he is sitting on. Manohar Lal Khattar, his Haryana counterpart, says he has “requested” people burning stubble not to do so. The chief minister of UP, Yogi Adityanath, is mum. And Arvind Kejriwal of Delhi is calling for a “meeting” which no one wants to attend. The Centre is unmoved… as if Delhi’s air does not come under Swachh Bharat. And we the people are wearing a mask, filtering out the truth.

The truth is that the day sun shines, air clears up and oxygen returns, we will forget how close we came to collective annihilation. Vehicles will choke the streets of Delhi again, construction work will resume on double shifts (to make up for time lost due to the NGT order), coal will return to eateries, invites to parties around the fireplace will roll out. In other words, we will return to our forgetful best.

It is imperative that we get ourselves out of this loop. For that, some or parts of the emergency measures that are being imposed now need to be woven permanently into administrative policies as well as into our lifestyle patterns. It will be a bitter medicine to swallow, but not half as bitter as the air in Delhi now.

Let us resolve not to have a re-run of this next year. And, make this Edit redundant.

The writer is Editor-in-chief DNA.