Honestly, I wish this piece could be a breezy romp with a few laughs thrown in — our Sunday due — but alas, what with this mantra pouring out of our ears we are a long way from breathing in the fragrance of an orange blossom. Swach Bharat, drilling a drone that goes nowhere. Deluging, reeking garbage proprietarily mapping out into our roads, piling up in hillock-high heaps with an army of flies blissfully buzzing overhead, oblivious of the rarified levels of oxygen that may not warrant well for their lungs, given the stratospheric altitude. Swach Bharat? Where is it?! Look high and low, and it’s nowhere in sight — unless you take Indira Gandhi International Airport or the Malls of the Emporio genre as the reference point — and yet, akin to a Stockholm Syndrome, we continue to chant the slogan, while in the same concurrent rhythm bung out our McDonald’s burger boxes and Cola cups from our speeding cars without a toss of a thought.
Heartening in theory that we, Indians, have finally been able to break the hamster-wheel rote of being litter bugs, cross that out litter monsters but a little need for a reality check, the truth tattoos our faces leaving one guess-checking where might be ones nose or chin, it so meshed up. The David Beckhams and Angelina Jolies of the world have yet to check on this tattoo business! Operation Clean-Up more of a Photo-Op where our Netas and Bollywood Stars and Arm-Chair Environmentalists take to the roads armed with jhadoo in hand sweeping up an acid rain of plastic bags and its accompanying Malba to a rapturous applause. Words such as biodegradable, non-biodegradable are fashionably afloat but what about rolling up one’s sleeves and going down into the trenches to commence the beginning of a real Swach Bharat?
Titans of Technology, we definitely have become binding us as one indivisible desh with poor urchins sheering their limbs sore in dhabas, fishing out their phone at any opportune moment to upload the latest film and wing it on Share It to anyone and everyone — a definitive feat, considering that sprogs have never set foot in a school but in the same garbaging breath remain Titans of Trash where it is perfectly normal, acceptable to junk kachra on the speeding highway. Ditto, for the household mullock to be cast out of the gate, on to the sidewalk or next to the adjoining neighbour’s landscaped patch. Or if your abode is in a housing colony, then flinging an empty plastic cup or gooey paper plate down the staircase, is an in-reflex matter. Two evenings back while returning home, I was left pausing to ponder for a longish while, way after my car raced by. Capture this: a small make-shift kiosk, orange in colour I think, manned by what I would reckon a lad with zero-second’s attention span dressed in a uniform of the same orange-ish hue, backed by a placard broadcasting Jio, Life Goes Digital, serving as the spokesperson’s backrest. At an arm’s length, was a throne-high pile of garbage that would dispose out an entire borough. While applying soulfulness to his digital platform, it’s doubtful that the stench reached the Jio guy, digitally safeguarded plague-proofed 4G Liyo to Jio. Besides translated Jio means Live. Long Live Jio.
Post demonetisation, our fresh-off-the-rack currency notes bear in all in its denomination the Mahatma, but of course, but this time around some marketing maverick factoring in Bapu’sspectacles for the citizens of Bharat to view the country through his pristine clear eyes.
There has been a blanket ban on plastic bags in Himachal, with cops on red-alert, but what about the plastic Cola bottles.
So viola, India in a knee- jerk reflex becomes clean as a whistle psychically, physically and in whatever ways plausible. Despite the shed-load, lessons taught hands-on by Bapu (do view or re-view Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi, if not in entirety but dish-up a few attentive moments to witness the latrine scene) we Indians, by and large, continue to cringe at cleaning our own pots, read toilets. And before sweeping on, it would do us good as a nation to stop senselessly debating on how and why, an Angreez made a film on Our Father of the Nation! Why ever is it considered a dirty, rather alien job, for one to think that it is someone else’s responsibility to clean the toilet one has been repeatedly peeing and defecating in? And initially one takes two steps back when the cleaning maid informs you that scrub-to-a-glean the toilet’s wash basin she will, as well as mop the floor but no, she swishing a brush to make the pot Harpic unsoiled does not fall under her domain. Offer her a few more 100 bills and her succumbing to the freshly minted money still a 50-50 situation. Speaking of bills, last November on one of my trips to Simla, the constant chorus in gentrified and non-gentrified work places left me mulched. Sample this: “If the man behind your desk does not sign your file, no fear, bring in Mahatma Gandhi!” Call me dense, but it took me a while to comprehend that the reference was to the currency notes bearing Gandhiji’s face and an envelope stuffed with rupees presented under or over the desk would do the needful. Blatant bribery invoking the name of Bapu and Bharat is Swaach spotlessly laundered, squeaky clean. Time is closing in, yet have to cram in one final matter. For many years there has been a blanket ban on plastic bags in Himachal, with cops on red-alert, nabbing anyone carrying one, but what about the plastic Cola bottles, tetra-packs its innards lined with a cling film of plastic co-partnered with floss-your-teeth plastic straws, and a dozen more etceteras chucked down the mountains menacing to become one itsel— an alp of choking rubbish. An enigma: why these policewallahs are unmindful of the unbridled hooliganism running amok right under their collective plastic inhaling noses. No noose for them?!
Swach Bharat, a curated concept or stretching out beyond an un-seeable horizon?
Dr Renée Ranchan writes on socio-psychological issues, quasi-political matters and concerns that touch us all.