The headlines are stark, almost biblical in their brutality: 45 degrees Celsius. Delhi. The poor. No shelter. A UK charity, wringing its hands from a safe distance, launches an emergency appeal. And so we are treated to the usual spectacle of liberal guilt, a digital-age morality play where we click, donate, and feel momentarily righteous before returning to our air-conditioned lives. But let us pause. This is not merely a humanitarian crisis. It is a symptom of a deeper rot, a decadence that would have made Gibbon weep.
Consider the geography of privilege. The wealthy in Delhi retreat to their marble-floored homes, their SUVs with chilled leather seats, their offices where the thermostat is set to a crisp 22 degrees. Meanwhile, the pavement dwellers, the rickshaw pullers, the day labourers—they bake. They bake under a sun that has become a tyrant, their only respite the thin shadow of a crumbling wall or the occasional splash from a municipal tap. And what is our response? An app. A text message. A few pounds wired to a charity that will, if history is any guide, spend a third of its funds on administration and marketing. The irony is almost too rich to digest: we use the very technology that separates us from their suffering to assuage our consciences.
This is not a new phenomenon. The Roman plebs were placated with bread and circuses. We, in our advanced civilisation, have replaced the circus with the spectacle of our own compassion. We watch the suffering of others unfold on our screens, and through the alchemy of digital currency, we transform our horror into a transaction. It is efficient, hygienic, and utterly hollow. The true tragedy is not that the poor in Delhi are dying from heatstroke. It is that we have become so adept at managing our consciences that we no longer feel the moral imperative to change the structures that create such suffering.
We live in an age of intellectual decadence. We pride ourselves on our sensitivity, our global awareness, our progressive values. Yet we accept, as a given, a world where a child can die from heat exposure mere metres from a hotel with a swimming pool. We accept it because to challenge it would require us to question the very foundations of our economic system, our energy consumption, our lifestyles. Better to donate. Better to tweet. Better to feel good without being good.
The UK charity, no doubt well-intentioned, is a fig leaf. It allows us to pretend that the problem is a lack of resources, a failure of logistics, rather than a systemic abdication of responsibility. Where is the Indian state in all of this? Where are the municipal authorities who have allowed the city to become a heat trap of concrete and asphalt? Where is the international community, so eager to lecture on climate targets but so reluctant to fund adaptation for those least responsible for the crisis? They are, like us, scrolling past the headlines, perhaps pausing to share the appeal.
We have reached a point in our history where the machinery of empathy has been perfected. We can feel for anyone, anywhere, without doing anything that inconveniences us. This is the true legacy of the Victorian era not the railways or the telegraphs, but the ability to moralise at a distance while maintaining a comfortable distance from the consequences of our own consumption. Delhi’s poor are not just dying from the heat. They are dying from our collective failure to imagine a world where such inequality is not inevitable.
The irony is that we have the resources. We have the technology. We have the knowledge. What we lack is the will. And that is the most damning indictment of all. So by all means, donate. But do not mistake your donation for a solution. It is a salve, a narcotic, a palliative. The real work, the hard work of building a society where no one is left to bake in the sun, that work requires more than a credit card. It requires a revolution in how we see ourselves and our obligations to one another. And that, I suspect, is a price we are not yet willing to pay.
