Anxiety in a warming world: An air purifier no longer feels like a luxury, but a basic necessity

At some point in the last couple of years, buying an air purifier stopped feeling like a luxury and started feeling like basic maintenance. Now we check the Air Quality Index the way our parents perhaps once checked the weather, sometimes curiously, mostly anxiously. “Bad air today,” I text my sister. “Take a cab, not an auto.” We commiserate over the added cost of clean air, the added cost of life itself.

Coughing fits left me vomiting after work last winter; just a month ago, a cab ride to a theatre festival felt like breathing a smoked chimney. Masked and silent, those of us in the car seemed to share the same fear about Delhi’s future. I retched quietly, my heart drumming fast, distracting myself with social media as I saw posts about people talking of leaving the city.

Before the air inevitably turned a couple of months ago, I bought a second purifier, then another — one for each room. I told myself this was necessary, the price of living where I work. But it increasingly felt like someone, somewhere, had failed. I can afford this; many cannot. Our domestic help arrived sneezing badly the other day. We asked them to rest. They fell sick soon after. I sat down again to wonder. Like clockwork, the palpitations began.

A series of ineffectual governments have turned the language of failure into inevitability. In the world’s largest democracy, there is constant talk of rights. Yet the fundamental right to life, laid down in the Constitution, dies quietly every day here. Demanding this right in a city where elected leaders buy purifiers for themselves while insisting on television that the air is cleaner feels futile. FIRs have been filed against citizens protesting this poisonous air.

What can I do other than rant? Isn’t this what every ‘centrist’ asks — stop complaining, start offering solutions? They say it’s farmers burning stubble, or geography, or winter. Anything except a refusal to govern. I go round and round. Maybe the billionaires profiting from the booming purifier industry will figure out a way, with their endless tax cuts. 

If clean water can be sold as a luxury, perhaps it was inevitable that air would follow. A burning system teaches us that those who can afford must survive; those who can’t, must endure.

For now, my purifier hums gently. It flashes red, then orange, then every colour it can muster. The air outside thickens. I keep breathing. For now.

Isha Banerji is a commissioning editor for Harper Collins 

This article follows the theme of Anxiety in a warming world, a special edition of Down To Earth published January 1-15, 2026, featuring exclusive interviews with Dia Mirza, Kalki Koechlin, Kiran Rao, Nila Madhab Panda, Sajana Sajeevan, Tsewang Chuskit, Manish Mehrotra and others, as well as columns by scientists, activists and journalists.