Mumbai man puts N95 mask on air monitor, sparks online buzz
A video from Juhu Beach, Mumbai is doing the rounds on X and Instagram. It shows a guy covering an air-quality monitor with an N95 mask—the AQI reading drops from around 191 to 37, then jumps back up to 201 when the mask is taken off.
The clip, shared with the caption "India soon to be a Masking Nation," quickly caught people's attention.
Why did this go viral?
The video's simple before-and-after made it super shareable, especially since it dropped right when India was seeing hazardous AQI levels—Delhi-NCR even hit the mid-400s that week.
People saw it as a visual link between wearing masks and fighting pollution.
What are people saying?
Comments fell into three camps: Some said masks really do help them breathe easier in Mumbai.
Others may interpret the experiment as simply altering the monitor's reading, rather than actually cleaning the air.
And many compared Mumbai's AQI (around 200) with much worse pollution up north, sparking chats about personal fixes versus bigger solutions.