A few rain-lashed evenings ago, while waiting for my driver to show up since our pot-holed roads submerge themselves in water enough to make floating boats of our cars or worse, submarines that may meet their watery grave, I came upon a news item, of how two pandas at the Edinburgh Zoo, borrowed from China, were unable to become parents, possibly on account of the high-visibility vests worn by the Staffers.
Yes, those neon greens and oranges that one can espy in the densest of fogs, so as to prevent any traffic mishaps. Tian Tian (Sweetie) and Yang Guang (Sunshine), despite artificial insemination on Tian Tian, was unable to carry the baby to its full term. Sunshine, on the other hand, has shown a disinclination to spending time with his mate. The culprit, it is concluded, is the distractive, insensitive to the eyes psychedelic coloured jackets. Thus a ban on such wear! The duo, after all, must breed before they are due to return to their homeland in 2021.
This piece was not intended to start off like this but since I am one averse to using an eraser shall try to get to the subject without further ado, hoping that the pandas peeved with high-visibility made for arresting read. Swachhta Diwas, again has come and gone—fifth year—and so we, as a nation, were once again on hyperdrive. October 2nd, previously known as Gandhi Jayanti rechristened as Rashtriya Swachhta Diwas, is a high-profile affair highlighted for days to the run-up as culturally nourishing news. The primary aim: to obtain open defecation free status for the whole of Bharat by 2 October 2019, marking Mahatma Gandhi’s 150th birth anniversary.
Was it not Gandhiji’s repeated refrain, “Sanitation is more important than Independence’’? He was aghast when at a Congress convention held in Calcutta delegates were relieving themselves on verandas—because of non existence of toilets—and after attending to the call of nature, leaving the dirtied venue to be shovelled up and washed away with buckets full of water slung from the spindly arms of sweepers. Gandhi rolled up the cuffs of his sleeves, folded knee-high his trousers (Western wear, yet to be abandoned for his homespun dhoti) spading the stenchy mounds of poop, to follow it off with a thorough scrub of the floor.
No latrines even at a political conference. This takes me back to over two decades—actually bordering on three—when as kids, my brother and I were travelling by night train to Delhi from Kalka. In the small hours of the morn the coach made a choppy halt. Jerky necks notwithstanding, the scene of swarms of half-clad people, dhotis, blouse-less saris knotted waist-high, poured into the grimy windows, sprinting across railway tracks with half empty canisters of water to make it to the open fields to defecate before the train traffic would take over. Open-skied lavatories.
Toilets, for one and all, the collective single-minded target of Swachh Bharat. The concurrent objective: clean streets, no littering anywhere. All Malba should be binned. So with this very viewable instructive manual flying into the face, like pamphlets shaped as yesteryear paper-airplanes, glided by little boys in fanciful flight, imagining themselves wheeling through the air; why is it that we remain a country of litter louts? Flies feasting over festering garbage, piled up in a vacant lot in the neighbourhood that we believe passes as a generous-sized, wall-free trash can. (By the way, despite our open defecation drive, the locomotive chugging close to Delhi and years on, the bustle to relieve oneself lives on with one exception: the shark-teethed canister replaced with plastic snouted containers.)
Now because of time closing in, to broom out some questions: Is Swachh Bharat Diwas just another eye-catching day, vigorously observable till the few, and dim-litted stars show up on our polluted skies making a lustreless, lightless appearance? Where celebrities come out in happy hordes, fresh from the salon with their faces readied after a good exfoliating massage and a shampoo followed by a hair conditioning masque with the crowning glory blow-dried, to patriotically take on the jhadoo, sweeping away the litter and smiling into TV cameras while providing towering sound bytes to an applauding audience? Does the same audience get a peep once the road-show is over, to how they whip out their wet wipes, and give their hands a good going over?
The thesis of how this cleanliness mission has not taken off its feet might appear steeped into cynicism…but the Abhiyaan has not worked, so far as temporarily, momentarily, brainwashing us. Is that not, with all the dirt, lining our open and closed spaces, patently apparent ?! Yes, statistics spout that four crore toilets have been constructed since the commencement of the drive, and that on the Father of the Nation’s 150th birthday, would have achieved our goal of, at long last, acquiring open defecation status? 2 October 2019, round the corner. Precisely, 360 days away and with a recorded population of 125 crores, the arithmetic likelihood of having each Indian, an arm’s length from a shauchalya, with a bucket of water, to flush down the excreta, a faraway feasibility, think one not? And by presenting Gandhi Jayanti in a New Avtaar—Swachh Bharat—is it not a way of pushing Bapu into the background?!
My driver carries a copy of his BA degree in his pocket, aspiring for a government job; gently ask him about Gandhi and he will knowledgeably take out a currency note and the buck stops there! Our clean-up act should not be reserved for a single day, do you not think, but stretch into the entire year, for all seasons, come rain and shine… Do I hear Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela turning in their graves?! And Obama, temporarily forgetting the Trump travesty, perplexed how Gandhi was losing ground on his own soil? Is it not high-time for high-visibility to take a back-seat and busy oneself in constructing workable toilet seats?