Air Crisis

India's escalating air pollution crisis is one of its gravest public health challenges, yet it remains strikingly absent from mainstream cultural narratives.

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While disasters like floods and droughts have inspired Indian literature and films, the slow violence of toxic air rarely becomes a focal point. A few creators have dared to explore this issue, but their efforts remain isolated, underscoring the need for a broader cultural reckoning. Some works have touched on the subject, offering glimpses of what storytelling could achieve. In the 2016 film Pink, a masked Amitabh Bachchan stepping into Delhi's smog-laden streets was a poignant visual, though not incidental to the plot. More directly, Nila Madhab Panda's Megha's Divorce dramatized a couple's breakup over whether to endure Delhi's unliveable air. The film offered an innovative lens on how environmental crises infiltrate personal lives, framing pollution as more than just a backdrop. Documentaries have delved deeper into the human and ecological toll of polluted air. All That Breathes follo