By Robert Clements
Trash..!
Last night at the gymkhana I pressed the lift button to go down. The lift, however, had other ideas. It went up. I stepped out and immediately wondered whether I had accidentally reached the municipal garbage department. The room was covered with paper. Not decorated with paper. Covered with paper.
For one terrifying moment I thought I had stumbled into a secret recycling factory. Then I discovered the truth. A housie game had just ended. The players had vanished. Their slips had not.The floor looked as if a paper cyclone had swept through the room and then decided to retire there permanently. If someone had told me it was modern art titled The Emotional State of a Bingo Player, I might even have believed them.
What amazed me most was that dustbins stood nearby. Not one. Not two. Several. They stood there looking lonely, neglected and deeply offended. I could almost hear one dustbin saying to another, “Do you think we smell?” The other replied sadly, “No. I think they simply don’t know what we are for.”
Poor fellows. Imagine being built for one noble purpose and then spending your entire life watching people throw rubbish everywhere except inside you. Dustbins must have the lowest self-esteem of any object ever invented.
And that, sadly, is often our national problem. We know how to buy things. We know how to use things. We know how to break things. We even know how to complain when those broken things aren’t replaced immediately. But putting rubbish into a dustbin seems to require years of advanced scientific research.
Perhaps there should be a three-year university course. Bachelor of Dustbin Studies. Practical examination included. “Candidate successfully identified the opening of the dustbin and deposited one paper cup without missing the target.”
Gold medal guaranteed.
Instead, we throw garbage from moving cars as though distributing free samples to the neighbourhood. We spit on roads with astonishing accuracy. We toss plastic bottles into drains and then express complete surprise when the first heavy shower converts our streets into rivers.
Every monsoon we stand knee deep in water asking, “How did this happen?” The drains would probably answer if they could. “You stuffed us with plastic for eleven months,” they would say. “What exactly did you expect us to do?”
Imagine throwing your dinner plate onto your living room floor every night. Your children add a few banana peels. Your spouse contributes empty snack packets. Grandma throws in yesterday’s newspaper. Then the entire family sits down and wonders why the house resembles a landfill.
Absurd? Yet that is precisely what we do with our cities. Roads, parks, railway stations, beaches and footpaths are treated as though someone else’s mother will come and clean them.
Many years ago I visited a country where people carried an empty chocolate wrapper in their pocket for hours until they found a dustbin. Nobody applauded them. Nobody photographed them. They simply believed that public places belonged to everyone and therefore deserved respect.
Somewhere along the way we have convinced ourselves that public property belongs to nobody. And when something belongs to nobody, we treat it like dirt. The saddest part is that when somebody protests, the reaction is often not gratitude but anger.
“How dare you tell me not to litter?” “Who are you to ask me to stand in a queue?” “Mind your own business.” Poor Mr Dastur, the senior citizen from Thane, discovered this the hard way. He merely asked a cab driver not to spit on the road. Instead of receiving a “Thank you, Sir. You’re right,” he was assaulted.
Imagine that. The criminal was not the man dirtying the city. The criminal became the man asking him not to. How upside down can a society become?
There are many others like Mr Dastur who quietly object when they see wrong being done. Some are abused. Some are threatened. Some decide that silence is safer than speaking up. And every time that happens, bad behaviour grows a little bolder.
Good citizens retreat. Bad citizens advance. That is never a healthy equation. Meanwhile, the outside world is beginning to react.
For years we assumed our behaviour was our private affair. Not anymore. People notice everything. They notice the noise at airports. They notice the pushing in queues. They notice the litter left behind after picnics. They notice passengers throwing food packets from train windows. They notice tourists carving names onto monuments and leaving beaches looking as though a cyclone had passed through.
Slowly, unfairly perhaps, a stereotype begins to form. “Indians are loud.” “Indians are dirty.” “Indians don’t respect public spaces.”
Nothing hurts more than being judged because of someone else’s behaviour. Millions of decent, thoughtful Indians pay the price for the carelessness of a few thousand. One careless act does not remain personal. It becomes national. Every wrapper thrown from a car window quietly tells the world something about us.
Every plastic bottle left on a beach becomes an ambassador of our manners. Every act of littering writes another sentence in the story others tell about our country.
The tragedy is that India has never lacked great values. Our culture has always spoken about cleanliness, discipline and respect for nature. Mahatma Gandhi repeatedly said that cleanliness was as important as godliness. Our scriptures teach us to care for the earth. Our parents taught us not to dirty our own homes.
Perhaps the next lesson is to realise that the street outside is also our home. The park belongs to us. The railway station belongs to us. The gymkhana belongs to us. The beach belongs to us.
When we dirty them, we are not insulting the municipality. We are insulting ourselves. Because no amount of charm, influence, clever explanations or even a strategically presented box of Melody chocolates can permanently cover up bad manners.
Sooner or later, trash tells the story. And unfortunately, it speaks very loudly while raising quite a stink..!
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