Letter to a Friend – Delhi Pollution,

Today, a dear Mech 71 friend, Anand Julka, sent an email about the severe life threatening air pollution of Delhi. He is now a renowned philanthropist who has an entire building and graduate school named after him in a leading US University. He quoted from a report that mentioned,

“India’s rapidly worsening air pollution is causing about 1.1 million people to die prematurely each year and is now surpassing China’s as the deadliest in the world.”

Needless to say, the air pollution deaths are mostly in polluted cities like New Delhi and not in the vast countryside and smaller towns that still enjoy good quality air. My reply to him had enough useful information on the topic for others too, therefore I am sharing it with a wider online readership here just as I had shared two other email letters earlier in this blog,

Dear Julka

To get an idea of the gravity of situation, perhaps one need look no further than our own class group that still lives in Delhi, a well educated group knowing what is good for health in life style and having a quality of life better than most in Delhi, yet –

Perhaps a third have already been under the surgeon’s knife while one could make a fair guess that the rest would have been far healthier and vibrant had they better air to breathe. It is also true that the most affected are the most vulnerable – aged, children and the infirm. Sometimes I feel the poor of Delhi are luckier, they do not have enough money for such treatment and just leave the world sooner.

It is sad, but some say it is their fate, what can they do? My belief ,on the other hand, is that each one of us can make little contributions to improve the world we live in, true an individual can not do much change the world but then within it, the world around us changes, to make it better for us individually, for then that becomes our karma or fate.

The universe definitely returns, sooner or later, whatever we put into it. I had an old, very rich widowed, grand-aunt who lived in Ranchi. She was desperate to donate a large portion of her wealth for charity near her end and she called my mother all the way from Delhi to come and assist her in the task because she was a bit infirm to move around for that on her own.. She explained that when she dies she would not be able to take it with her but perhaps someone up there will note and give it back to her in her next life just as he had in ample measure in this one.

LOL, I would not call her charity a selfless deed! But then God never said we should give up our self interest but he surely appreciates us being enlightened about it, something that helps others, not harms them, while bringing benefits to the soul.

Every little contribution anyone of us makes for the world helps, drops fills oceans, and then there is the sheer joy of doing stuff for something far removed from our own immediate self interests that is such a huge stress reliever, when stress is something that can be even more deadly than polluted air.

Cheers and regards

NOTE: Some useful suggestions for improving air quality of Delhi are included in an older note here:

http://steamcenter.blogspot.in/2015/01/on-possible-future-new-capital-for-india.html