Out of all the five elements of life, I find fire to be the most potent. My family shares a traumatic relationship with fire and for years I have feared it. Fire burns and destroys unlike water which only dampens your soul. Recovering from a deluge is far simpler than rebuilding after a fire. Last evening over 100 incidents were reported of fire across Mumbai.
I endlessly scrolled reel after reel on Instagram showing the fire outbreaks in the city. The algorithm soon understood my interest and horrible visuals greeted my feed thereafter. It was only after an hour or so that I started seeing smoke in my room. Was I hallucinating? Then I began to cough. It was real after all. I opened the window and peered outside. A thick plume of smoke was rising and I could see the glowing fire below. An adjacent empty plot (how that is empty remains a miracle) filled with debris and waste had caught fire.
By the time I ran the fire brigade and no one answered, the security guards and some local samaritans had doused the fire. It was not clear if this was the only fire in the area. There were rumours of another net (anti pigeon kinds) of a floor high above had caught fire. Instagram was full of fiery reels thereafter. I could not sleep much until the morning. I woke up to a thin layer of ash all over the kitchen and the bathroom and the floor. My soles were all dark by the time I brushed my teeth. The aftermath of a such a small fire was everywhere. I could not bear to imagine what had become of the other houses where stray rockets had flown in and exploded. The trauma of watching your belongings burn is hard to deal with.
Fire crackers over the years have become increasingly complex as they reach industrial grade combustion capabilities. The psychology of fire crackers is hard to decipher. You pay money to purchase something which will explode creating a loud noise, smoke and sometimes visual reactions in the sky. All that is amusing to a point but when it starts to sound like a warzone – what remains to be the point? I have watched people use crackers as a device to create content. Either it is the machismo of holding the explosives in your hand and casually flinging it or posing against the exploding patterns. In the pursuit of garnering views, folks have become even more daring and dare I say more stupid? The fail videos are also trending but they don’t seem to be instructive to the next guy.
The debate on religious freedom and expression has also continued to wage on. Where supporters feel ban on sale of fireworks is an example of judicial overreach and infringement on their personal rights. This debate is baseless. Human life when threatened should supersede all forms of human expression. Is it not the fundamental of basic rights? The fires aside, everyone in the NCR is right now dealing with the double whammy of air and noise pollution. When activities threaten a person’s ability to breathe – should they not automatically be regulated or stopped? There’s a reason why industrial areas are so tightly regulated for pollution — they are harmless.
Logic has left the chat, as the kids say.