Celebrity Column: Smog chal raha hai

Kya chal raha hai? Smog chal raha hai.” This parody of a TV commercial has become a hackneyed joke this time. The health-threatening smog settling down under 10 storeys of buildings has cast an eerie spell in the capital and the adjoining areas. I posted a parody of Dum Laga Ke Haisha on my Instagram account with a piggybacked Bhumi and me in the poster with the masks. But this situation is no joke. This is the first time the winters in the North started with a ban on firecrackers. 

The coal-based Badarpur power plant has been shut down for 10 days. For five days, no construction or demolition work will happen in Delhi. Roads will get vacuum cleaned. Water will be sprinkled on the roads. We mean serious business this time around. I also posted a video on my social media, which shows how China fights the smog. They have built the largest smog vacuum cleaner in the world. It sucks around 30,000 cubic meter per hour. 

Cleans it at a nano level, using very little electricity and releases clean air. This process makes the place cleaner by at least 50 per cent. Which is huge! And the need of the hour is to install such machines in our major cities which are definitely one of the most polluted ones in the world. I’ve got at least 4,000 retweets on this video. 

Even Amitabh Bachchan sir quoted my tweet and was surprised by this astonishing technology used by the Chinese in Beijing. A lot of my followers tagged Arvind Kejriwal and coaxed him to install one in the capital city. They were of the argument that the public money should be utilised to fight such issues of health and pollution instead of expensive statues and over-ambitious bullet trains. 

At this juncture, I would go back to my roots. Live in cleaner greener places, where your future generation will not develop respiratory diseases, eye irritations, etc. We will live 10 years longer. We will know the difference between fog and smog. The former symbolises love and nostalgia for me. 

The foggy winters with smoke-like hot breaths coming out of our shivering mouths. It was one foggy winter morning when I had my first kiss. Smog has killed the nostalgic fog for me. You can’t gauge the difference between a smog and a fog through the naked eye. Smog is just fog with a dark evil soul. Most of us live in a smog. It’s like life in a dark depressing movie for which we have arrived 25 minutes late. 

You know something urgent seems to be going on. But we can’t figure out the story or the exit door to the core issue. We don’t know what part we are supposed to play or what the indecipherable plot is. I belong to the generation, that was fascinated by fog machines and movie lights. I remember using laser lights in the Chandigarh fog in the late ’90s. It used to form a sleek straight-line illuminating the particles suspended in the air. Just like we are suspended in the middle of nowhere in 2017. Life for us may become like a messy vehicle pile-up on a Noida expressway.