Choke de!

Dustin’ Coffman is the star of
Mumbai’s latest lungbuster

If Air Quality Index is urban India’s haunting tune, then ‘AQI-on mila ke/lungs choke kar ke/chaley nahi jaana’ is the remix version of the 1944 classic crooned by smokey-voiced Zorabai. Dilli is still tops, but Mumbai follows soot. Its AQI has reached such disastrous levels that drastic curbs have been imposed on runaway real estate construction. Poetic justice: BMC has had to cull its biggest cash cow. Developers were allowed to stampede through the city to make up for the Covid slump, and sarkari agencies had milked them for this via commission etc. In fact, the builder-politician nexus had long replaced the underworld in ruining the city. Now it’s payback time. The good news is that tough decisions have been taken. The bad news is that cities, like hell, are paved with good intentions.

Fat-cat builders occupy the penthouse of rule-breaking; they are unlikely to be deterred by the riot act warning them to comply or face a total Stop Work. Some 1,500 scrawnier bakeries are Culprit No. 2, each using 500 kg of polluting firewood a day to supply the poor man’s pav. In the same category are 88 Hindu crematoria, the dead ghoulishly killing the living. The list is longer, but BMC is no Shri Herculeskar who can cleanse the Augean stables aka toxic AQI.

Ani the bigger polluter is the policer only. More particulate matter (PM) is spewed by the sarkari infrastructure being frenetically built as if there’s no tomorrow. Ironically these connectors will encourage a bigger ‘bumper’-crop of vehicles further toxifying our tomorrow.

So, while Longfellow’s ‘Dust thou art to dust returneth was not spoken of the soul’, it has certainly returned to smother every surface of my home. Dealing with it was always fraught since jhadoo-pochha-bartan (sweeping-swabbing-utensils) is the limit of the remit of my part-time help; our old Cal house-boy’s jhhad-pochh (dust’n’wipe) is beyond the ‘My way or the bye-bye-way’ Mumbai bai.

(Un)clearly, a ‘bad heir day’ is a pan-urban problem, not just that of a certain party. Actually, the entire opposition reels under the overwhelming ‘PM’ levels in political atmospherics.
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Alec Smart said: “Alleged Snooping: An Apple is again used to subvert the phone-privacy Eden.”

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