The Day We Tell Our Children About Blue Skies…..by Manreet Kaur

Imagine a future with a mask on every face, an inhaler in every hand, and children asking their parents: “Did people really breathe fresh air without a mask?” And the parent, somewhere between nostalgia and grief, answering: “Yes. There was a time when the sky was blue, the stars were visible at night, and we could sit outdoors for hours without a second thought and walk around freely without wearing a mask, which is non-negotiable today.”

It sounds like a scene from a dystopian novel, which we casually believe won’t happen. But it is closer to reality than most of us realize.

Some months ago, I was on my way to college in an auto-rickshaw when a stretch of road was closed due to a political convoy. The road remained closed for nearly two hours, and hundreds of vehicles were idling nose to tail, with their engines running the entire time. I remember the moment the smell of exhaust stopped being background noise and became something I could taste and feel inside myself. Breathing normally took actual effort by the end of it.

That two hours of inconvenience doesn’t stay with me, but a thought does. If a healthy young person found that stretch of road hard to breathe through, what was it doing to the people around me who weren’t healthy? The asthmatic schoolchild, the elderly passenger, anyone with compromised lungs? None of them had a say in whether that convoy passed through, and none of them chose to sit in that smoke. Most of it, too, was needless: a large share of those two hours’ worth of emissions would simply not have existed if drivers had turned their engines off while they waited.

After that day, it was possible for me to imagine a future where everyone is wearing a mask and carrying an inhaler, like we carry a smartphone today. Carrying matching inhalers with outfits will be a trend among all of us, like we carry fancy phone cases. Sounds like a joke, but actually, it is not. The actual joke is that we are completely unserious about the most serious crisis of the decade. It is the reality that we somewhere believe in but are not ready to accept or take action on.

There was a brief window during the COVID-19 lockdowns when much of this reversed almost by accident. Traffic disappeared, factories slowed, and several Indian cities recorded their clearest skies in years. It was treated, at the time, as a strange and temporary curiosity while it lasted. That reaction was itself revealing. Clean air shouldn’t need a global pandemic to become momentarily possible. It should be an ordinary condition we choose to maintain.

We tend to talk about pollution in terms of masks and AQI apps, rarely in terms of what it actually drains from the country. The World Bank has estimated that premature deaths and pollution-linked illness cost India close to $37 billion in a single recent year, which is over 1% of GDP, from lost output alone, before counting healthcare spending. Separate labour-force research has found that Indians lost, on average, over 400 hours of productive labour per person in a recent year to pollution-related illness and heat stress, a figure that has risen sharply since the 1990s. Agricultural researchers at Stanford, publishing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, have even traced measurable crop-yield losses across Indian farmland back to particulate pollution from coal-fired power plants, which means pollution isn’t only shortening human lives; it’s quietly shrinking harvests too.

And this burden doesn’t stay outdoors. More than 40% of Indian households still cook with wood, dung, or crop waste, and researchers have found that this exposes people to indoor air pollution levels roughly thirteen times higher than what they breathe outside. The problem isn’t confined to smog-choked winter mornings in Delhi. For a large share of rural India, the worst air quality of the day is inside their own kitchen.

A recent conversation with an ENT specialist named Dr. Padampreet Singh reframed that whole pollution episode for me. Dr. Singh had recently returned from Japan, and what had impressed him wasn’t the technology or the transit systems; it was the people. He described commuters who would hold onto their own trash for hours rather than litter, and crowds that queued without needing to be told to. He put it plainly: coming from a country with considerable medical experience, what unsettled him most was realising how much of that discipline was simply absent at home. People here feel no shame in carrying their garbage until they find a dustbin and proudly honk in areas where honking is prohibited.

That’s the uncomfortable bridge between his story and mine. The idling engines in that convoy jam weren’t a technology failure or a policy gap. They were a few hundred individual decisions, each one small, each one avoidable, adding up to two hours of unnecessary toxic air for everyone trapped inside it.

But it is not only the fire or smoke we add to the air. Sometimes, it is what we take from the ground. Cutting down trees for fast urban growth is part of why breathing difficulties are increasing rapidly. I think about the fields around my own village, how a stretch that used to have a proper row of shisham and kikar trees along the boundary is now just a bare edge. Every extra colony, every widened road, has come at the expense of whatever green cover was standing there before. Trees pull carbon dioxide out of the air, cool the ground around them, and their roots let rainwater soak into the earth. If we keep losing our trees, all three stop happening at once. The air holds more carbon, the ground holds more heat, and the water just runs off instead of sinking in.

We wait for farmers to stop burning fields and for the government to fix the air, while our own engines keep idling at red lights for no reason, and our own garbage keeps going up in smoke because the truck didn’t come. We don’t prefer to plant a sapling at our houses because it doesn’t match our aesthetics, or we plant a sapling just for social media posts and forget about it, and clean air keeps feeling like someone else’s job. Maybe the most dangerous part of all this isn’t the damage itself; it’s how quietly we get used to it. We’re good at accepting a worsening reality as long as it arrives slowly enough. Air that would have alarmed us a decade ago becomes just another Tuesday. Summers that once felt unbearable become normal, and we stop noticing.

This gap between what we see and what we understand became clearer to me through my own sister.

She has been studying in Canada and hadn’t visited home in four years. When she finally came back this February, she landed at Delhi airport. By the time she reached Amritsar, the first thing she said to me wasn’t “I missed home.” It was, “The air in Delhi felt heavy, like breathing through something thick,” and that her throat had gone dry within hours, the way it does in peak summer heat, except it was still winter. What looked like a thick blanket of fog rolling over the runway wasn’t actually fog. It was smoke trapped low in the air, the way it usually is in November and December.

It was a strange, quiet kind of shame, hearing my own sister describe our air like a stranger would. She wasn’t exaggerating. She was simply noticing something the rest of us have learned to ignore because we breathe it every day and have convinced ourselves it’s normal. What followed over her three-month visit was harder to hear. Instead of catching up with old friends or revisiting places she’d missed, a good part of her time went into hospital waiting rooms and doctors’ appointments.

Most of us have already had our version of that convoy, stretch of missing trees, or sister noticing what we stopped noticing years ago. The warning was never going to arrive as an alarm. There might be someone we already know among our family, friends, relatives, or colleagues suffering from breathing difficulties. The next warning is already happening somewhere, to someone, right now. The only real choice left is whether we treat it as one more thing to get through, or as the last chance to act before a mask and an inhaler stop being something we imagine for the future and start being something we simply hand our children.

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August 5, 2026