In 2015, when floods drowned Chennai, my family was trapped there. I was stuck in Delhi, cut off from them, watching a climate disaster unfold on a screen. The helpless dread felt like a brutal new reality. Yet we forget.
A few years later, back in Chennai, our apartment’s resident welfare association proposed something simple but vital: raise the building’s foundation to protect against the next flood. It was practical, urgent, and rooted in hard-won experience. But it failed because too many objected over “aesthetics.” That dizzying absurdity cemented a personal choice: my decision not to have children. Why bring a new life into a world that so quickly forgets how to safeguard it?
It seems my generation is leaving a deficit—dwindling resources, unstable jobs, a climate disfigured beyond repair. Working near the media has only sharpened this sense. In a country where battles against caste and religious discrimination rightly take centre stage, the slower, more elusive climate crisis often slips out of view—out of sight until it is suddenly, violently at your door.
These views are also shaped by my cancer diagnosis. Chemotherapy saves you by breaking you. In hospital wards, I saw suffering in its rawest form, in children’s faces. You can’t unsee it. And the links are clear: pollution embedded in our lungs, unrelenting stress, the processed food we rely on—all feeding a rise in illness that feels both obvious and overwhelming. Survival brings you back to a “debt-ridden real life,” expected to be grateful for borrowed time.
It’s all connected. The capitalism that demands endless growth, the political hesitation around climate action, and the healthcare system that runs like a business—these are not separate problems; they are parts of the same machine that has shaped a world I do not want to bring a child into.
Having a child has thus become a kind of luxury—easier for those with generational wealth who can buffer themselves with private healthcare, cleaner air, safer neighbourhoods.
In the end, my eco-anxiety is about the realisation that no matter how carefully we build a life, the ground beneath it is shifting. It’s watching society choose short-term gains over long-term survival, and accepting, with a heavy heart, that bringing a new life into that uncertainty is not an act of hope I can make—at least not now.