My husband, in his college days stayed in a hostel that was in a historical building in Delhi. Weathered and time tested though it was, it also was damp and quite unequipped for the modern day pollutants. I am talking about the early nineties, the pre "Inconvenient Truth" days. When Al Gore had not yet proved to the world how we are killing ourselves by polluting the planet. The days when Euro I, II and III standards of pollution control were still novel ideas in India, finally adopted only in the year 2000; the days when avoiding air pollution was not even seen as anything even worth talking about on our country; the days when asthma and bronchitis were not incidental to urban lives. Those were the days when lung diseases were just beginning to show signs of visiting our young population. Constant sneezing was the way it came to me. And to my husband unfortunately, it came as a full blown bronchitis at a very young age. He took a toll on his health and had to be rescued from the hostel by his dad in one occasion, in very poor health. He recovered and returned to his hostel, rejuvenated after a month's rest. But risk of frequent bronchial attack became his constant companion and bronchial attacks a frequent visitor.
The air that we breathe in today's post "Inconvenient Truth" planet is quite significantly polluted and now we know it. The urban sky is red in the night, on the horizon. Stars look faint and far apart. We drive air-conditioned cars with the windows rolled up to avoid the fumes from vehicles that crowd the streets, cantankerously chasing and honking at each other with unknown urgency and unimaginable quest. Probably the only fresh air we can breathe are what we take in, in our short vacations into bucolic surroundings of far flung resorts, set within verdant forests, with sparkling streams and ponds. The rest of our days are spent in reminiscing those pristine experiences.
Someone might offer that their homes are the haven for clean air too! Are you sure about that? It has been proven that indoor air is just as much at risk of being polluted as the outdoors and at times even more. Some of the contributors of it are:
- Pesticides, and we all use some of it in our homes, to fight against cockroaches, ants and mosquitoes
- Tobacco Smoke, if someone smokes in the house
- Pollen and molds, sometimes they just accumulate themselves in the hard to reach areas
- Hazardous building material, such are asbestos, formaldehyde and lead
- Gases such as carbon monoxide and excess carbon dioxide
Homes are vulnerable to all of this. Besides, regardless of the quality of ventilation in the house, our bed rooms in winter nights can still become stuffy and suffocating, unsafe to breathe in. I remember waking up in the middle of many of those winter nights, when I pulled open the french door of my bedroom because, I could not sleep in the stuffy air circulating inside the closed insulated room, my sleep disturbed and sometimes even completely interrupted.
I am familiar with indoor pollution because all of us in my family have some breathing related issue and I frequently vacuum the mattress and head board cushion in the bedrooms and sofa cushions in the living room, to get rid of dust mites. But my tryst with stuffy air has so far been unresolved with stuffy indoor air taking the better of both me and my lovely precious dreams. So I was quite relieved to hear that Eureka Forbes has come up with this interesting gadget called Dr. Aeroguard, which purifies the indoor air. I found this piece of news reassuring and a chance for me to get undisturbed sleep. It is worth a try!
And as I end this piece I find myself sniffing like the terrier dog for pollutants inside my house. Wait a minute, you can't smell them they are colourless, odourless and tasteless, just like the ordinary air we breathe.
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