Sandip Roy: The air we breathe cannot be a luxury

Whenever people ask me what I miss about San Francisco, a city I lived in for many years, I have some ready answers.

I miss the sushi at the Japanese restaurant I used to go to, the fish gleaming and fresh, the wasabi bracingly stinging. I miss the late-night al pastor quesadilla at the local taqueria, the smell of barbecued meat and cheese making my mouth water as it sizzles on the hot pan. I miss dim-sum coming by in little trolleys at a Chinese restaurant—trays of char siu buns, crispy yet tender pork belly with Chinese mustard on the side and sticky rice wrapped in leaves.

But this year when I arrived in San Francisco from Kolkata I realised what I had missed most of all was fresh air.

San Francisco AQI was 34. I had forgotten what a double-digit AQI felt like.

Last Sunday I stood on the Tunnel Top, a park built over the freeway looking out into the bay studded with white sailboats. The orange of the Golden Gate Bridge loomed in the distance. Flowers were in bloom everywhere—California poppies nodding in the breeze. I stood with my friends and their dog looking out into what felt like a picture postcard, every detail crystal clear.

Someone passing by called San Francisco the prettiest city in the US. And they might have been right. But I wasn’t just drinking in the scenery. I was breathing deep as if I could store AQI 34 in my lungs before heading back to India.

For a long time I would think of people who complained about air pollution in cities like New Delhi as privileged people whining about first world comforts. I remember how indignant many Indians were when Gardiner Harris, the South Asia correspondent for The New York Times wrote about how he considered leaving India because his eight-year-old son had to be rushed to hospital, struggling to breathe.

He remembered bracing for all the challenges of reporting from India: “insistent beggars, endemic dengue and summertime temperatures that reach 120 degrees.” But he had no inkling that “Delhi’s true menace came from its air, water, food and flies.” Even after his son’s breathing stabilised, tests showed he had lost half his lung function and he had to be placed on steroid therapy. The article set off an online furore. Many backed Harris. Some said it reeked of the expatriate privilege of those who could complain and leave while millions of Indians had no option but to live and breathe that air. Others wrote rebuttals explaining why they chose to live in Delhi, pointing out its many “wonderful and serene hangouts” like Lodhi gardens and Humayun’s tomb.

That was 2015.

A decade later a London-based Indian techie sparked off another online debate by urging people to leave Delhi even if they had to go into debt. Kunal Kushwaha wrote that having grown up in Delhi he would think how bad could the pollution really be. But coming to Delhi for a brief visit in 2025, he could “literally taste and smell the pollution”. He cut his trip short and flew out the next day.

Many responded saying that “leaving” even with debt was a privilege that most did not enjoy. And that the city needed a systemic solution rather than elite flight. But most agreed with the severity of the problem, one that left Kushwaha feeling like he had needles in his lungs. Yet as a friend told me last winter, she was amazed when she went to an open-air party and found she was the only one with a mask.

Delhi makes the headlines because it’s the capital city but Kolkata is not far behind with triple-digit AQI as well in the winter. Winter was once Kolkata’s high season, an excuse to bring out those sweaters and Kashmiri shawls and go to Christmas parties with visiting migratory NRI birds from London and New York. But this year it felt grey and dismal, the smog hanging over the city like a perpetual cloud of discontent. Many people had itchy throats, coughs and burning eyes. Friends who visited from abroad complained about a cough that lingered for a week or more even after they returned.

But there is still a sense of helplessness and hopelessness because despite the brief furores thanks to a Harris or Kushwaha, the government seems determinedly apathetic. We heard of sprinklers in Delhi spraying water near the AQI measuring stations. Government officials sounded bureaucratically evasive when they said the World Health Organization (WHO) air quality guidelines served only as guidance and countries needed to prepare their own data quality standards based on geography, environmental factors, socioeconomic status and national circumstances. The government said it had its own Swachh Vayu Survekshan programme and the Good to Moderate Air Quality days had actually risen in Delhi from 110 in 2016 to 200 in 2025. And there was even a National Swachh Vayu Divas to felicitate top performing cities. But to the average citizen, hacking and coughing, that sounded like a lot of hot air.

Last year after I lost my mother in her 90s, a friend dourly observed our generation who lived and breathed Kolkata’s toxic air would surely not live that long. There was a kind of resignation in her statement and I noticed neither of us were wearing masks. We had become the proverbial frogs in the pot of boiling water slowly getting cooked before we even realised our fate.

But coming to San Francisco was like a breath of fresh air. Literally. The city has many problems. Its economy hit a sharp downturn post covid. It’s trying to grapple with rampant homelessness though that is less visible on the streets than a couple of years ago. Businesses had fled downtown leaving it looking like a zombie city with armed guards in front of the Apple store and boarded-up malls. That is changing as downtown slowly comes back to life. In the afternoon people sit in the sun in the shopping square playing chess and listening to music. Non-profits have set up office in abandoned storefronts trying to infuse new life into the once bustling downtown. San Francisco friends are cautiously optimistic about their city taking a turn for the better.

All I could think of is how blue the sky was. Some would say comparing a city like San Francisco (population less than 850,000) with a city like Kolkata where just the city proper has over 6 million is unfair. The challenges faced by a teeming metropolis in India are monumental and governments have their hands full.

But the air we breathe cannot be a luxury, dismissed as an elitist concern. To do so is also callous, as if those who complain about air quality are somehow whiners. The real tragedy in many cities in India is not that the air quality is bad but that the powers that be seem to not deem it an emergency. Even odd-even licence plate schemes to reduce vehicles are sporadic and met with public resistance. But beyond those measures one hears little of high-powered committees trying to find systemic solutions. Instead, in Kolkata, the government blithely announces it wants to get rid of trams, a green mode of transport it has had for over 100 years because it wants more room for cars on its streets. And it’s sadder still that the air we breathe is not an election issue. It is as if cities like Kolkata and Delhi have far more pressing things to worry about than its air. That only behooves cities like San Francisco.

But being able to breathe should not be a first world concern.

Cult Friction is a fortnightly column on issues we keep rubbing up against.

Sandip Roy (@sandipr) is a writer, journalist and radio host.