India is dirty because Indians are clean
Indrajit Hazra
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The Litter Truth: The Indian Litterbug is proud of being filthy; He'll dirty New Delhi but never New York
Like Nature, India abhors a vacuum. Which is a prettier way of saying that India and Nature have had a longstanding joint venture that celebrates filling and trimming spaces with muck and filth that folks in other less rank cultures and countries seem to have such a problem with. It explains why there is no mention of Vedic-era flush toilet technology. It also explains why when three members of the Rolling Stones urinated in public in 1965 making headlines after being fined by the police, Indians wondered what the hullabaloo was all about.Along with the proliferation of beggars, invasions of privacy and lack of silence, we are inoculated against public dirtiness by being literally inside the garbage dump. Having our streets and roads being extensions of garbage tips and urinals strike us as being as noxious to us as it's scandalous for a lady to be topless at Las Salinas beach in Ibiza.
There's been an explanation passed down generations to explain why we're so filthy: India is so dirty because Indians are so clean. For outsiders, that sounds zen-Upanishadic. But what it's supposed to mean is that our homes are moderately neat--if we don't live in a chawl or a home that resembles a chawl with tubelights, that is -and the world outside can go to the dogs. This explanation is usually accompanied by a description of how other cultures are totally apathetic towards personal hygiene -`How do you think the Arabs and the French invented the perfume?' `Have you seen British teeth?' `The Swiss actually smell of cheese.' `I was once trapped in an elevator in America...' Essentially , there's some theory about the worse your personal hygiene the better your public cleanliness.Which makes no sense at all for us who take a dip in the very public-cum-personal Ganga or local tubewell to cleanse our squeaky bits including our souls.
This theory , of course, is wet gunkoozing rubbish. We are a filthy nation because we're quite proud of being filthy. It's a way of declaring we're not namby-pamby and stricken with a fet ish for the antiseptic. We're capable of walking past a hill-sized heap piled with cabbage corpses mixed with detritus with smatterings of used sanitary napkins and dark fluids that look like leftover sewer, without gagging. We aren't coy about throwing out kitchen waste straight out of the windows `out there'.(A lot of us don't even do the chucking; our cooks and maids `with little sense of public decorum' doing the needful.) Cleanliness, to us, bears an elitist tag--despite the nice try by yet another Gujarati to tell the country otherwise.Roads and streets in Indian metropolitan cities--you really don't want to talk about the small towns, trust me--are zones that simply connect people from one point to another. These are no flyzipped zones, where if the pavements have rivulets of piss running down the gutter or bear all demonitions of litter, this is, well, India. Why do you think we like travelling abroad? We can walk about in public spaces that aren't as `colourful, full of aromas and life' (read: visually filthy , smelly and chaotic) without having to be marked out as being un-Indian. It's simply more pleasant to step out in Toronto or Sydney than in Delhi or Mumbai--unless you're a very , very rich ragpicker.
There's only one way we litterati, garbage-chuckers, public peebodies and spit-mongerers can stop what comes so naturally to us in our happy , filthy surroundings: By having our roads and streets become super clean. Even the dirtiest scumbag will find it tough to mess up pavements made of genuine slabs (rather than of glued-on tar and cement chowder), filthify walls with paan and worsen stains that don't grow lab fungi, and trash public loos that don't give us a sneak peak of narak right here in our Maha Bharat.
Because no one wants to throw a wrapper, to spit, to pee or chuck rubbish in an already-sparkling clean place. Not even proudly filthy people like us who gladly litter Kolkata but never Zurich.
There's been an explanation passed down generations to explain why we're so filthy: India is so dirty because Indians are so clean. For outsiders, that sounds zen-Upanishadic. But what it's supposed to mean is that our homes are moderately neat--if we don't live in a chawl or a home that resembles a chawl with tubelights, that is -and the world outside can go to the dogs. This explanation is usually accompanied by a description of how other cultures are totally apathetic towards personal hygiene -`How do you think the Arabs and the French invented the perfume?' `Have you seen British teeth?' `The Swiss actually smell of cheese.' `I was once trapped in an elevator in America...' Essentially , there's some theory about the worse your personal hygiene the better your public cleanliness.Which makes no sense at all for us who take a dip in the very public-cum-personal Ganga or local tubewell to cleanse our squeaky bits including our souls.
This theory , of course, is wet gunkoozing rubbish. We are a filthy nation because we're quite proud of being filthy. It's a way of declaring we're not namby-pamby and stricken with a fet ish for the antiseptic. We're capable of walking past a hill-sized heap piled with cabbage corpses mixed with detritus with smatterings of used sanitary napkins and dark fluids that look like leftover sewer, without gagging. We aren't coy about throwing out kitchen waste straight out of the windows `out there'.(A lot of us don't even do the chucking; our cooks and maids `with little sense of public decorum' doing the needful.) Cleanliness, to us, bears an elitist tag--despite the nice try by yet another Gujarati to tell the country otherwise.Roads and streets in Indian metropolitan cities--you really don't want to talk about the small towns, trust me--are zones that simply connect people from one point to another. These are no flyzipped zones, where if the pavements have rivulets of piss running down the gutter or bear all demonitions of litter, this is, well, India. Why do you think we like travelling abroad? We can walk about in public spaces that aren't as `colourful, full of aromas and life' (read: visually filthy , smelly and chaotic) without having to be marked out as being un-Indian. It's simply more pleasant to step out in Toronto or Sydney than in Delhi or Mumbai--unless you're a very , very rich ragpicker.
There's only one way we litterati, garbage-chuckers, public peebodies and spit-mongerers can stop what comes so naturally to us in our happy , filthy surroundings: By having our roads and streets become super clean. Even the dirtiest scumbag will find it tough to mess up pavements made of genuine slabs (rather than of glued-on tar and cement chowder), filthify walls with paan and worsen stains that don't grow lab fungi, and trash public loos that don't give us a sneak peak of narak right here in our Maha Bharat.
Because no one wants to throw a wrapper, to spit, to pee or chuck rubbish in an already-sparkling clean place. Not even proudly filthy people like us who gladly litter Kolkata but never Zurich.
