It’s always nice to put a blame on a soft target, knowing everyone around you will start believing it without rationally thinking. Something like this happens every year around this time but we, obviously, ignore it.
However, Diwali is still a couple of days ahead, and the air pollution across Delhi NCR has fallen to very poor – hazardous stage but nobody really seems to raise the alarm yet.
The actual alarm will only ring when the festivities have ended, despite the firecracker ban and yet it will be blamed for polluting the air, scaring the animals and many more allegations.
It’s like a trend to malign festivals with negative repercussions due to which, with time people stop celebrating them or following what once used to be just a fun activity.
A study conducted by the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi earlier this year had found Biomass-burning emissions rather than fireworks drive the poor air quality in the national capital during the days following Diwali.
But are we doing anything about it? No. Be it the Aam Aadmi Party in Punjab or BJP in Haryana, neither of the governments is taking steps to curb the ruthless stubble burning that is the real cause of choking air.
It’s easy to ban festivities, practices and pass rulings thinking a day of firecrackers could actually spoil the environment, but they will turn blind eye when during elections or sports events or marriages the same activities are done.
We do live in a hypocritical state, that is certain but for even the younger generations to depend on such unfactual biased, personally motivated and eye-catching allegations is sad, because you expect the youth to tackle misinformation and question instead of just blindly believing what is fed to them.
It might be difficult to say when people will understand the motives behind such naive decisions, but they sure can do the obvious ie comparing similar situations to other nations and anticipate if one day every year could really make that big of a deal that you restrict people from celebrating their own festival in their own ‘democratic country’?
