When I was younger, my favourite time every year was when you could smell that chill in the air. It meant one thing: Winter is coming. I would run and tell my parents, excited for the festive season to begin, for the sweets and treats that lay ahead. Now, I dread it.
Every year, I live in fear of that smell, of that nip in the air. It still signals the same inevitability, but with it now comes a host of uninvited guests.
LED lights, pollution, and worst of all, drunk Delhites take too many shots in the name of festivities. The city is high on the festive season, and it honestly shows in its behaviour. The traffic is a nightmare, more so than usual; just ask anyone living in CR Park right now. The so-called holding lights are migraine triggers. And smog turns the city into a straight-up dystopian nightmare.
Delhi winters are no walk in the park, nor are they for the faint-hearted. Those who just moved here, beware! Abandon all hope.
A gift-wrapped nightmare
The dilwalon ki Dilli goes a bit overboard every festive season, not with its hospitality but with its ostentatiousness. The once-romantic Lutyens avenues that twinkled with fairy lights and faint diyas shining on balconies are now bathed in fierce visual pollution. The lights are too ugly, too bright, too multi-coloured. Seriously, you can’t slap on an LED tube light on a string and call it a fairy light. Where’s the whimsy? There is a reason, after all, that sunglasses are now a part of the festive wardrobe.
In between dodging handsy uncles and the nosy acquaintances is the never-ending nightmare of parties, for which it seems the no-loud noises after 11 pm rule does not apply. Don’t get me wrong, I love an excuse to pretend I’m in a 2000s Bollywood film, but Delhiites’ complete lack of road safety and awareness reaches heights hitherto unknown.
But the festive dressing, lighting and sweets all hide the real ugly face of the season: Winter smog.
People in extremely cold climates often don’t see the sun for days, but it turns out you don’t have to travel far to experience that. For days on end, a thick blanket of dust, pollution, and cold winter air engulfs the city in its blanket of death, hiding the sun and all hope for salvation.
Year after year, GRAP after GRAP, the problem persists. Delhi Smog reigns supreme, and we remain its trapped citizens.
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The glory days
Those of us who grew up in the city remember the gilded age of Delhi winters. With clear skies over picnics in Lodhi Garden, the boat rides at India Gate, and an air that didn’t choke. Even the parties and traffic were better by comparison.
There is a reason Delhi winters are so idealised and romanticised. They were once great, magical even. The crisp winter air, the rush in the air, the excitement of the season. Now, we all wonder: how will we manage another year? Three weeks in Goa or Manali? Do I buy a portable air purifier? Will we be allowed to work from home?
But once upon a time, the only worry was whether they ran out of waffles at the German Embassy’s Christmas Fair. When will the Sundar Nursery Diwali mela be held? Or how much Kaju Katli is too much? (It’s never enough).
The city adopted Christmas, came alive at Diwali, turned fully Bengali for Durga Puja and was willing to try again at New Year’s. This was the Delhi I grew up in, for good or worse. It is still hiding there somewhere, but it is hard to find beneath the glare of the LED lights and through the smog.
Views are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)