The Great Unwashed Masses
Last week, the great unwashed masses saw the #MyCleanIndia campaign sweep across the nation like a white strip in a Tide ad. Our government reminded us that we needed to clean up after ourselves. We were like the puppy that got it's nose rubbed in it's own pee puddle as a reminder to grow up.
Building more toilets-the valid and most sensible solution-cannot be the only measure. That's like opening more beauty parlours in the country hoping that people will be born good looking. Not to mention the crores of toilets that even today do not exist on the ground but only on paper. These paper toilets are an intriguing idea. It sounds like someone somewhere is making elaborate paper origami toilets and leaving them around.
There's a HUGE gap in representation vs.reality. As the adage goes, you can take the horse to the water, but you can't make it wash it's bum with it. The MAJOR change will have to come, unfortunately, from us.
As middle class Indians, we have the classic "someone else will take care of it" mentality. We imagine that once we empty the garbage out of our windows onto the footpath, and defecate on the side of the road it is magically swept away into Narnia where it disintegrates and turns into fairy dust. As if workers do not stand knee-deep in feces and plastic packets when we commute every day. There's always someone lower than us in the food chain who will do the work, or someone higher than us in the food chain who we can blame when that work does not get done.
The #MyCleanIndia campaign recognises this. The attitude is clear, when the Prime Minister has to "challenge" celebrities to post pictures on Twitter of themselves cleaning up. As if they're being asked to scale the Kanchenjunga while simultaneously reciting Russian poetry. But we love our little tokenisms. Nothing better than to make cleaning "cool" and consumable to our unwashed masses. My few humble suggestions.
1. Maha-bumper-super episode of Bigg Boss: Salman Khan spends the entire episode cleaning up after the contestants. Hopefully, Salman Khan does not jump on top of the first broom he sees and go cackling into the moonlight.
2. India's Got Talent: a man chewing paan resists the urge to spit 5 whole minutes and gets a standing ovation. The judges are moved to tears.
3. Chetan Bhagat's next book be titled something that has a pun related to being Clean. "2 STATES of Garbage - Dry Waste and Wet Waste, or "Dirty Business - How I Came Cclean."
They say that "Cleanliness is next to Godliness" so it surprises me every single time when I see my building turn out enthusiastically for festivals, pandals serve food to revellers from simmering vats of food all day but no one stays behind to clean up. When I volunteered to help clean up, they smirked at me, "Please, it's ok, someone else will take care of it." As I walk upstairs to my house the speakers blare "Sone ki chidiya, dengue, malaria, gud bhi hai gobar bhi, Bharat Mata ki Jai."