Why they have clearer skies

Last month, I was in California for a couple of meetings. California just happens to be my favorite place to go to in the US. There's so much natural beauty and so many things to see, so many things to do that I invariably run out of time. I can spend entire evenings sitting at a cafe on University Avenue in Palo Alto, or take a drive on the I680 through the mountains, or walk around near Pier 39 in San Francisco, or better still...make the short drive to Napa Valley and enjoy the vino.

Throughout the trip last time, I regretted not having a good camera with me. I'm still waiting for the Nikon D90 prices to come down (I'm pretty sure that is the camera I want to buy). And I noticed that the skies were so much bluer and the scenery so much more crisper. I wondered if that was because California was higher up from the Equator and so the light fell differently.

Not so!

I was in Delhi almost the whole of the last week and part of this week and I saw that there was poor visibility even when the day was nearing noon. Mostly because of the smog. It looked a lot worse towards the evening when the Sun looked like a red orb hanging in the sky, filtered through a grey atmosphere. Taking off from Delhi exactly demonstrated that. The flight went through a grey layer before it broke through and clear blue skies revealed themselves.

Even when I stand in the balcony of my office on Kasturba Road in Bangalore, I can see that thin layer of grey (not as much as Delhi, but still there) colouring the otherwise clear blue skies. And I now know why the skies in the US and most "foreign" countries look so good.

They have NO POLLUTION!

Here we have trucks, busses and lorries spewing their horrible exhausts, auto rickshaws contributing their bluish grey fumes, motorbikes adding their partially burnt fuel remains and finally the dust from all the surrounding that makes our skies look murky. In most developed countries, there are lawns of really crappy grass instead of open spaces, not only because it makes the place look prettier, but also because the grass holds the earth together and does not let the wind kick up the dust. In India, we have piles of sand and dust lying around unused from held up construction sites or from pot holes that are yet to be repaired. There is just too much dust on the roads which gets kicked up from the relentless plying of vehicles on the roads. So what remains is a highly potent combination of dust, fumes, odour and smoke which makes breathing on our streets a practical challenge.

I know we have pollution laws in India, but we need stricter application of these laws. Just like we need stricter traffic laws. Everyone is in such a hurry to get somewhere that they usually end up taking longer to get there because they caused a traffic jam. And there they stand with their engines running, burning more fuel and contributing more to the already high pollution levels we have. I talked a little bit about this in one of my previous blogs, but this is different. Earlier, I was talking about how a little bit of traffic law enforcement, a little consideration from people driving on the streets and some common sense can make the driving experience in India a lot better. Now I am talking about the implications of these conditions on the pollution levels we experience.

In a country of our size, I know it is difficult to achieve consensus. But that is what makes it our individual responsibility to demonstrate good behaviour one person at a time. We cannot change the whole world unless we change ourselves.

Think about it, India. If we have to demonstrate ourselves as one of the leaders in the future world, we need the equivalent of the Clean Air Act. We need more courtesy on the roads and we need a little bit of patience on the roads. No amount of infrastructure the Government can provide will be enough and unless we change our mindset, we will still be honking our car horns and driving on the wrong side of the road to get to another place in a hurry despite having nice expressways.

It beings with one. It begins with us. It starts here with me.