100 days of blue skies
I love blue skies. I think they make everything look better. They are one of my favourite things about Bangalore.
In November last year, I started a project '100 days of blue skies'. I posted a picture of blue skies on Twitter every day I could find blue skies with the caption 'Daily reminder to be grateful for blue skies'.
I finished the 100 day series in July.
This is what my ‘100 days of blue skies’ looked like. (Full album here)
I’ve always loved blue skies. But to be fair, like Ed Sheeran said “you only miss the light when its burning low”, I truly missed blue skies when they started disappearing from more and more places. Delhi has been the poster child of poor air quality and grey, dusty skies for long, but Mumbai (the city I was born in) still had the privilege of its famous ‘sea breeze’ that was literally and figuratively carrying it through. But that too changed over the last few years. 2023 was exceptionally bad.
As the Monsoon ended, and we went into October the air quality in Mumbai was terrible. AQI was crossing 200 on most days and the sky was covered in a film of grey. I had spent a few weeks in Mumbai and was rather disturbed with the dystopian grey skies.
Why are our skies becoming grey?
To put it simply, this is a trend that is playing out in most Indian cities and the main culprit is poor air quality. When the air quality is poor there is more particulate matter in the air. It affects the scattering of light that is responsible for the blue color and the sky doesn’t look so blue any more. Additionally, the particles, especially the really tiny ones, remain suspended in air, affecting visibility. It’s like looking at everything through a grey film.
How blue the sky looks depends on other factors as well, like altitude, temperature and humidity. Even with similar air quality, the sky will appear more blue in places that are at a higher altitude and will appear more blue at the same place when it’s colder. However, these will impact whether the sky looks more or less blue not whether it looks like it’s engulfed in a blanket of grey.
Why does air quality matter?
Air quality has a severe impact on our health and affects life expectancy. It affects respiratory and cardiovascular health, especially in children.
A study showed that poor air quality reduces life expectancy by 5 years on average in India and 12 years in Delhi! (Source: Study by EPIC, Univ of Chicago)
Why did I do the 100 blue skies project?
We desperately need to improve our air quality. Air quality is typically measured with a metric called AQI (Air quality index) - which is a complicated number made up of various different parameters. However, we can always feel the air quality in the air we breathe and smell and see it in how the skies look. It’s difficult to explain to someone why we need better AQI, but I thought it maybe easier to see why we need to preserve our blue skies.
So I started the '100 days of blue skies' as a way to remind myself and others how beautiful blue skies are and why we need to save them.
These were my 100 blue skies. If they made you smile, share it with a friend who likes blue skies :)
Beautiful thought behind the project, Sailee! Indeed, we must be grateful for blue skies and strive to improve our air quality index. The rapid deterioration of Mumbai's air quality over the last decade or so has been alarming.
The best blue skies are at the satrt of the monsoona nd the ending and is there is a cyclone somehwere in teh far horizon in Mumbai. Other wise - grey.