My late grandfather, god rest his soul, always said that the day mankind would begin selling the air we breathed, it would be doomsday.

Well, at that time, we all laughed his comment off as the ramblings of an old man, but something I saw the other day reminded me of him. I’m glad he didn’t live to see the day, but the in store catalogue I was browsing through had an advertisement for canned air!

I’m not kidding. There it was, in big, bold letters screaming at me from the centre spread – a true to life advertisement for canned air!

And pray why would anyone need canned air? The advertisement has a long and laborious explanation. It mentioned that we had been steadily polluting our atmosphere, living in some of the major metropolitan cities was akin to smoking two packets of cigarettes a day and the like. And at the end, it offered the company’s solution. Pure, canned air for the consumption of one and all. As if that weren’t enough, the advertisement also had a coupon that you could send in to sample the air for free!

Now being curious by nature and finding the entire idea laughable, I took advantage of the professed coupon to get hold of my very own sample of canned air. So, I sent it along and waited for the package to arrive from the canned air company.

While waiting, I happened to discuss the concept of caned air with a colleague of mine. What he told me piqued my curiosity some more. Apparently, canned air has been around for quite some time. Some of the earliest people to use it were mountaineers, especially those who scaled high mountains like Mount Everest, Godwin Austen and the like. Since the higher they climbed, the thinner they air got, they needed to carry canned air rich in oxygen with them. It wasn’t exactly canned air – more like air in a cylinder, but the principle was the same.

My colleague also told me about Japan where they apparently have oxygen and air bars. Just as you would go into a bar to down a couple of drinks, the highly stressed out Japanese has developed an addiction to pure air. They would pop in to these air bars to try out various new and exotic flavors of air!

Anyways, finally my own sample of canned air arrived. It was nearly weightless and filled in a translucent can. A detailed leaflet accompanying it extolled the virtues of the purity and oxygenated nature of the ar within. It also promised me a whiff of paradise. I placed the can aside and kept it that way.

If we were running out of air, I wanted to use my lungs to their fullest before I would begin buying and using air!

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