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Witerati: Take my breath away
It is the hottest acronym riding the crisp, cool November air that has made it not only to our lungs but also to garrulous gabs
It is the hottest acronym riding the crisp, cool November air that has made it not only to our lungs but also to garrulous gabs. AQI.
Festival season has long since become synonymous with all things fog, clog, smog.
The Diwali aftermath is one that tosses up much of math. Percentiles to fractions to additions get thrust down the throats, but mostly multiplication.
That AQI has pretty much become a fashionable talking point, for public discourse to living room chats to car conversations, was but evident during a recent ride post-Diwali 2022.
Sample this micro narrative.
An acquaintance, who was kind enough to offer to drop us on the way back from an excursion a couple of days after Diwali, did much of dropping. Dropping not just a carload of us, but also a mouth-load of the hot new vocabulary. AQ indices.
Of alarm bells & AQI
During this ride and shuttle, the trending acronym was dropped at every twist and turn. Of the tale she did recount. How her hubby didn’t let her step out of the house for a week after Diwali without constantly checking the AQI. How they couldn’t even cross the threshold to go pick veggies from the nukkad sabziwala in the smog-laden stratospheric status without the elders of the house getting cross. How this was her first outing after the festival since that day the air quality level seemed safer, less life threatening or life throttling, as the AQI had definitely dropped.
It’s another matter that by the time we were dropped, another thing had dropped. We deboarded with our jaw dropped.
This conversational interlude about the latest spoilsport in conjugal bliss, or hiss, her hiss vs his hiss, drove home the new reality.
AQI is the new oximeter.
AQI is the new post-pandemic ventilator pumping social discourse.
The way the coronascape saw the nation holding the breath at oximeter outputs, AQI has the nation tweaking that ‘Top Gun’ tune, “Take my breath away”.
As a nation, have we become so addicted to a staple diet of scares that the absence of a scare is a sure spoilsport for social discourse?
Or is it that as a nation we are so spoilt for scares – if it’s not this scare, then it’s that – that we scare ourselves into some social scare?
The curious case of Scare-less in Shuttle.
Of Mahabharat vs Maha Yudh
So be it. So AQI is the trending scare.
Such that the festive air has been rife with many a pollutant, even of sorts other than the usual ones.
Around the time of festival of lights, what showed signs of impacting air quality on home turf was an invite for a show under the arclights.
Not so much the show per se, it was its timing clash that caused one’s domestic air quality to decidedly deteriorate.
Certain sections of one’s kith and kin portrayed a propensity to skip Puneet ‘Duryodhan’ Issar-directed stage show ‘Mahabharat’, all for the sake of that other Maha Yudh, the India-SA cricket clash at Perth.
This reluctance rolled out an offstage mini Mahabharat.
Mahabharat Part 1.
The domestic air quality deteriorated on account of those behind-the-scenes pollutants – telling tension to taunts, simmering silence to sulkiness.
Perth play-day pollutants. Relationship pollutants.
Mahabharat Part 2.
Barely had one recovered from the first round of deterioration in domestic air quality, when along came Adelaide.
Whichever pollutants had not made it into the air on Perth play-day, now did vent and rent the air.
The deterioration of domestic air quality played out again.
Deafening bursts of not foul play but foul language polluted the air around LED screens. Expletives exploded in the domestic air at the India loss, louder and lustier than Diwali’s aloo bombs and seeti bombs.
The curious case of another AQI – Adelaide Quotient India.
