You can rebook an Indigo flight. You can’t rebook your lungs

A reiteration of the obvious is never wasted on the oblivious – Percival Everett, Erasure.

I'm a man of contradictions, I'm a man of many moods
I contain multitudes
– Bob Dylan, I contain multitudes.

On December 6, I wrote a piece for Newslaundry explaining why India has been held hostage by a single airline: IndiGo. It went viral – not like the reels do, but about as much as a slightly nuanced, written take can.

The message of the piece was straightforward: when a sector slips into a monopoly – or even a duopoly – as India’s domestic aviation has, mayhem becomes inevitable.

And since then my WhatsApp and social media has been buzzing with messages from close friends, not-so-close friends, former schoolmates and college mates, acquaintances, and random acquaintances who have decided to get in touch after many years.

In their lived lives, many of them are the richie-rich or the urban upper middle class – the gated-community wallahs – who never miss a chance to remind us lesser mortals that it’s their taxes that keep the country running.

And they have been mad at what was happening in airports across the country – with everyone knowing someone who has been impacted by the thousands of flight cancellations carried out by Indigo.

Weddings, holidays, visa interviews, exams, operations, and corporate meetings have been missed. People haven’t been able to fly from point A to point B without splurging a lot of money. And, of course, the gated community wallahs – who, even in their deepest sleep, keep humming the free-market hymn – have been startled to discover that this is how the ‘free market’ actually works: when supply falls and demand stays the same, prices rise. Or, as anyone who has read basic high-school economics would put it, this is how market-equilibrium is achieved.

All this left me wondering: flight cancellations may have directly inconvenienced only a few lakh people, yet they have managed to anger many more. So, why is it that pollution – something that harms far greater numbers, and far more people directly – rarely triggers the same outrage, especially from the gated community wallahs who pay the taxes.

Indeed, like all societal level questions this is a difficult question to answer. Nonetheless, here are a few thoughts.

First, in the Indigo case, there is a clearly identifiable villain. The airline has been majorly responsible for this mess. In case of pollution and the climate change that it causes, there is no clearly identifiable villain.

Or as Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein write in Nudge: “For some threats, there is an identifiable perpetrator – a wrongdoer whose terrible deeds capture public attention…Climate change is faceless. It is a product of the actions of countless people – effectively all of us, over a very long time.”

So, Indigo’s cancellations allowed people to channel their anger against a clearly identifiable villain. Pollution doesn’t. It has dispersed causes and no single villain.

Second, the subject of psychology has a concept called: the identified life. Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling explains the idea beautifully in Choice and Consequence. He writes: “Let a six-year-old girl with brown hair need thousands of dollars for an operation that will prolong her life until Christmas, and the post office will be swamped with nickels and dimes to save her. But let it be reported that without a sales tax the hospital facilities of Massachusetts [a state in the US] will deteriorate and cause a barely perceptible increase in preventable deaths – not many will drop a tear or reach for their cheque books.”

Schelling uses this example to distinguish between a statistical life and an identified life. The sick child is an identified life; the unnamed people dying in hospitals are statistical lives. Because we cannot see or relate to them, we simply don’t feel the same urgency to act.

This idea helps explain why there’s so much anger over the Indigo cancellations, yet people carry on with their lives despite the pollution that surrounds them.

In case of the cancellations, the victims are obvious: the passengers who had places to reach, and were not able to make it. Their suitcases and bags being stuck at the airport only added to the already vivid picture.

So, there is a clearly identifiable victim and a clearly identifiable villain, which makes it very easy for the blame-game to start, allowing all the anger to spill over on social media. The same dynamic doesn’t exist in case of pollution.

Third, the factors that create pollution – driving, construction, diesel generators, firecrackers, loudspeakers, stubble burning, etc., – all have instant benefits; convenience, jobs, salaries, fun, and the achievement of social goals. The costs are distant.

When the benefits are immediate and the costs lie somewhere in the future, people almost always choose the “now,” however irrational that may be in the long run – especially for those with kids. What kind of world do they want to leave behind? That’s a question the gated-community wallahs aren’t really asking.

Fourth, the tragedy of the commons is at play. When a resource is shared by everyone – like clean air – each individual has an incentive to use it freely, but very little incentive to protect it. The costs of polluting are spread thin across millions of people, so no single person feels responsible or personally blamed. At the same time, the benefits of polluting – driving a car, running a construction site, bursting crackers – accrue to individuals or small groups.

This creates a mismatch: the harm is collective, but the advantages are private. And when the damage is distributed and anonymous, people don’t feel outraged enough to demand change. Pollution becomes everyone’s problem and therefore, paradoxically, no one’s priority.

The gated community wallahs get around this by adapting – air purifiers, masks, timing outdoor activity – instead of demanding systemic change. The abnormal becomes routine and they don’t need to bother.

Fifth, some of us like to think reasoning should be the main way we think about living a good life, and doing things that can make that good life possible. If you believe in that line of thinking, you would come to the conclusion that pollution is bad and that we should do something about it.

A bigger reason, though, lies in how we’re socialised to think about what a “good life” means. Indeed, as John J. Mearsheimer explains in The Great Delusion – Liberal Dreams and International Realities: 

a) From birth, children are surrounded by messages from parents and society about what is right, wrong and desirable. 

b) Because humans have a long, protected childhood, kids are exposed to intense socialisation during a period when they cannot think critically for themselves. 

c) By the time their reasoning abilities mature, a large set of values and assumptions has already been imprinted on them. 

d) This early cultural software shapes how they understand themselves and the world, and influences their behaviour long after childhood.

In the age of social media this leads to whataboutery. If you say that bursting crackers causes air and sound pollution, then someone will retort that it’s only for a few days a year, or ask why don’t you speak up about loudspeakers. If you talk about loudspeakers then questions are asked about firecrackers.

Or as Mearsheimer writes: “Reasoning is a time-consuming mental activity because it rejects spontaneous responses and instead requires careful construction and evaluation of arguments.” But then who wants to do that when quick, easy, and believable answers are available over Whatsapp?

To conclude, as I am often asked by the gated-community wallahs – raised on answering questions in exams with single right answers – all this is fine, but then what’s the solution?

As a society, we can demand and propose solutions — but the actual fixes have to come from governments, both state and central.

At the simplest level, we need more and better public transport. And that means running more buses – not just metros which are actually fairly expensive for a large section of the population – though not the gated community wallahs.  It also takes time to build a metro system that properly connects different parts of a large city. A good public transport system will discourage people from buying individual vehicles or not using them as much as they otherwise would, and cause lesser vehicular pollution.

But the moment more buses are proposed as a solution – politicians and bureaucrats start doing the math – about how more buses mean more losses for their governments. Nonetheless, the math goes completely missing when thousands of crores are spent on infrastructure projects which will take decades to make money, if at all they do.

In the end, pollution will never trend like Indigo cancellations because you can’t scream at PM2.5 on Instagram or tag an air purifier demanding a refund. Clean air has no customer care number, no airline staff to bully, no apology video to forward to your school and college WhatsApp group.

And so the gated-community wallahs will hunker down behind their purifiers, counting AQI like stock prices, pretending this is normal. But here’s the joke: you can rebook a cancelled flight. You can’t rebook a pair of lungs. And unlike Indigo, the air doesn’t care about how much tax you pay.

Of course, there is always the option of sending your children abroad and moving to the hills.

Vivek Kaul is an economic commentator and a writer.