New Delhi, Oct. 25 -- Best of the Week is a weekly newsletter by Siddharth Sharma/Shravani Sinha. Subscribe to Mint's newsletters to get them directly in your inbox.

Every year after Diwali, I wake up hoping for that magical winter sunlight-but what greets me instead is a grey, choking haze that turns the city into a gas chamber. As a Delhi-NCR resident, I've lost count of how many times my phone's weather app and the government AQI portal have fought over how bad the air really is. One says 400. The other says 1,200. My lungs tell me it's worse.

It's not that either is wrong-it's just that the systems are different. Some use 24-hour averages, others measure in real time. Some stop counting after 500, as if the air can't possibly get mo...