When breathing is injurious to health

Pollution has rendered the government’s anti-smoking legislations infructuous. It has made all those relentless campaigns to ‘kick the butt’ quite irrelevant too. After all, the latest data shows that simply going for a supposedly healthy morning constitutional could be the equivalent of a perambulation around a gas chamber — or a sojourn in an airport smoking room. Nor is lurking indoors a viable solution as that dreaded PM2.5 — particulate matter that is, at the most, 2.5 micrometre across (one micrometre is one thousandth of amillimetre), for the few who remain uninitiated into pollution-speak — sneaks in to the most secure crannies with an ease that criminals would envy. Even drinking a glass of water has become a hazardous activity. Experts say drink only bottled mineral water and go for that morning walk in the afternoon. But what is to be done with mounds of empty plastic water bottles? And how many are free to go traipsing around at that time of the day anyway?

Pollution has achieved what even the most compelling of sedentary electronic games could not do: turned many urban dwellers into cowering couch potatoes, surrounded by a protective phalanx of air purifiers, RO filters, N99 respirators and pots of depurating Sansevaria plants, popularly known as Mother-in-law’s Tongue. Now that even breathing and drinking water have become injurious to health, where should the warning signs be posted?