Issue October 15 - 31 And there are many of them.
PLASTIC CARRY BAGS: For everything from fruits and veggies to flowers discarded from a ‘puja’, to coconut, to newspapers and magazines, and clothes and toys. As if life could not go on without...
OVER-PAINTED GANESHA IDOLS: They flash synthetic colours, pollute the waters of the sea, and create noxious fumes that kill the fish as they dissolve. Down South, where Ganapati Puja is also quite a big thing, they make the idols out of tightly-packed clay, and in His natural colour and rough shape, there is a power and beauty that has the hand of Nature in it.
POLLUTING EXHAUSTS: White, kerosene-loaded fumes, black, carbon monoxide-loaded fumes, fumes from ill-maintained vehicles... They burn the eyes, sear the respiratory tract, and cause cancers with prolonged exposure. Yet nobody, least of all those most exposed to the dangers, like traffic policemen and autorickshaw drivers, seems to care.
SPITTING HUMANS: They make the roads unsafe to walk on, spewing their stuff, often loaded with ‘paan’ and germs and what not, without care.
They teach their children to spit before they can teach them to read or write, and seem to care nothing about the fact that they could be picking up someone else’s germs as they walk about even as they dispense their own. And as for those who spit from the top of double-decker buses...
LITTERBUGS: Sweet wrappers, cigarette packs, ticket stubs, fruit peels, tetrapaks, you name it — people fling them out oh-so-casually from cars, buses, trains... And then, there are those who sweep their homes clean and carry the rubbish across to their neighbour’s door and carefully deposit it there... Of course, chances are that the neighbour does unto HIS neighbour as he is done to. So?
ENVIRONMENTAL PIRATES: They rob the mountains of their trees, they cut gaping holes into mountain sides to rob them of stone, they dump waste into river and sea waters, and poison the air, all in the cause of selfish greed. And nobody cares.
‘CHALTA HAI WALLAHS’: They exist everywhere. In government offices, on the streets, in homes and even in police stations. If a man is murdered, or a home plundered, or a girl raped, it’s okay; it did not happen to them, so why worry? If the soil is dead, and the rivers run dry, if butterflies disappear and the tiger becomes extinct, if textbooks distort history and religions are twisted to advocate massacres, well, that’s life. Take it as it comes... ‘Sub chalta hai’, it’s their way of living and letting live.
THE TYPICAL INDIAN: He cares for nothing. He lives for the here and now. He does not worry that we are running out of resources, out of space, out of everything faster than we can create it.
For today, he has his carefully-harvested sons, his houses, his latest model television set, mobile phone, and wrist watch; his women have all the jewellery they can wear, and he loves his ‘paan masala’ and his dubiously-packed Scotch which keep him in a happy haze of contentment mixed with unknown yearnings for a better life.
A QUESTION: Are we beyond repair?
I SEE townships that are clean, where the same people who do all the things I hate, behave themselves, do not spit and do not litter. They stand in queues and talk softly. Where roads are spotlessly clean, and hillsides are tree covered, and litter sticks to bins... And I think to myself, if a Tirupati, and a Thane, can do it, why not Delhi? Why not Mumbai? Why not the rest of the country?
WHY not? I WONDER.
The Editor