I just returned from a trip to San Francisco.
And I carry back with me the sounds of the city - the cable cars, the seagulls, the woman selling pot near the muni station.
CABLE CAR
POT Seller
Whenever people ask me what I miss about San Francisco, a city I lived in for many years, I have some ready answers. Sushi, Late night quesadillas, Dim sum.
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 or Air Quality Index was 34. I had forgotten what double digit AQI felt like.
As I stood with my friends and their dog on Tunnel Top, a park built over the freeway looking out into the bay studded with white sailboats, it was picture postcard perfect.
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.
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata
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 hospital, struggling to breathe. Even after his son’s breathing stabilized 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. Others wrote rebuttals explaining why they chose to live in Delhi pointing out its many “wonderful and serene hangouts”.
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.
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. Last year it felt grey and dismal, the smog hanging over the city like a perpetual cloud of discontent. Many people had itchy throats, lingering coughs and burning eyes.
But there is still a sense of helplessness and hopelessness because the government seems determinedly apathetic. Instead we heard of sprinklers in Delhi spraying water near the AQI measuring stations. Government officials sounded bureaucratically evasive when they said WHO air quality guidelines served only as guidance and countries needed to prepare their own data quality standards. To the average citizen, hacking and coughing, that sounded like a lot of hot air.
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. Businesses had fled its downtown leaving it looking like a Zombie city. That is changing as downtown slowly comes back to life. San Francisco friends are cautiously optimistic about their city taking a turn for the better.
All I could think of is how the 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. 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. 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 its sadder still that the air we breathe is not an election issue. It is as if cities like Kolkata and Delhi had 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.
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata for KALW