Being a ‘Trivandrite’ comes with many a benefit. We can enjoy the beauty of several renowned tourist destinations that people from foreign lands consider as a once in a lifetime experience. The sun-kissed beaches, the lush green forests; the ever glazing hills are among just a few. We also enjoy moderate, cool, tropical climate all year long and the air we breathe has always been of the utmost cleanliness. I may have to tweak my first sentence as all of this were things of the past. Our beaches and other tourist destinations are becoming non-existent. Our climate is no longer the paradise that we hoped for and even more worrying is the quality of the air we breathe.
A simple statistic to be noted is that our beloved Thiruvananthapuram has an AQI reading of 104. For those who are not familiar with the term AQI, it stands for Air Quality Index which is a scale of how polluted the air of a particular place is; the higher the number, the higher the pollution content and right now the capital of GOD’s country has a reading higher than some metropolitan cities including Bangalore and Chennai. Needless to say, solving this problem at such a drastic stage is not an easy task by any means. Not unless we can halt every automobile in the district from entering the roads for a good six months and also shut down every factory and industry in the province. But we still need to survive and therefore some smart humans have come up with a nifty device called portable oxygen concentrators which help filter out the pollutants and ensure we breathe fresh air. Many of the citizens are not aware of such a creation, so the next time you see a sign that says ‘oxygen concentrators for rent’ in Trivandrum, do step in; it might just save your life.