Ageing in the Times of Pollution

Exhausted at the ISBF campus during the exam season, while it drizzled at the rooftop, we took time off to debate why does ageing exist and can we ever stop it? Ageing is seen as a problem in the modern world, where we come across lotions to make us look younger and creams that reduce the seven signs of ageing. Well here’s a hunch if humans wanted to go immortal, we would require to fight time and be stable and stagnant at our current “age” and stop evolving into “old age”, while time won’t wait for us, like always. To become stagnant at our age we must stop all processes that lead to cells in the body to decay, die and get replaced, that means no sweat to recycle your dead skin, no excreta to remove the leftover food in your system and no urine to flush the toxic water, subtler levels would include no breathing, but still somehow keeping the life in us alive. Oxygen in our each cell is essentially poison that makes the cell express it’s physicality while slowing killing it, and the same holds for the human body, we’re smoking oxygen and due to the “impure” combustion in a cell, impurities remain and cause us to age, no doubt the Delhi pollution has increased the ageing process.

The way out of this unsolvable puzzle is, either to make the oxygen in the air 100% pure or to make the human body not “combust” at all. Quite a challenge to achieve, I think it’s fair to say that ageing won’t stop but we can make it slow to aim towards immortality, and while making the Delhi air clean seems impossible, let’s narrow this down to make the human body “combust” at full efficiency and leave a minimum residue. Eating “healthy” food essentially means food that will leave the least residue and cause the least ageing in your system. Exercising is an effort towards making the cells in the body burn more efficiently, meditation and breathing exercises guarantee a more efficient burning of the cells. These are some measures that promise a longer life span, a lot more are pools of research.

While ageing is something that will always scare the human mind that’s unwilling to change, it’s a harsh truth that we can’t avoid, but maybe what we need to appreciate is the beauty of ageing and embrace the physical change in us. If you’re stressed out reading this – grab yourself some water, your brain cells are working overtime.