“Very fortunately the Great Wall of China was not in India; otherwise this splendid man made structure visible even from space would have been tarnished by the sobriquet, ‘The longest urinal of the world’.”
This sentence was uttered in sheer exasperation by a venerable acquaintance of mine who slipped on the poop of some doggy on the newly tiled footpath at the riverfront. This elderly morning walker could luckily get away dirtying his shoes only without breaking any bone.
He also enlightened the host of people who rushed to his aid by sharing his overseas experience of people carrying a bag to put the poop of their pets by discreetly lifting the filth with a spatula and keeping the walkways free of hazards for jokers like him.
The wit and humor displayed by this sporting person made my esteem for him soar and rang many bells in my head to ponder over the collective and personal hygiene of Indians. Only recently the learned people in the railways started to think that railway tracks are not meant to be littered with the wastes of the toilets in the trains. As for the general population, the tracks were eternally the open-air sanitary ware for their nature’s call.
However, the brightest of people are recruited into Railway Services through some of the toughest exams. Yet it took more than seventy years after the British left to realize that the British trains do not spew the human excretions from the trains’ toilets onto the track below. Better late than never saner senses have evolved to put up boxes now to collect the wastes from train toilets for proper disposal (hopefully). Fortunately, the Guinness records did not endeavor to find out the longest shitty rail track in the world in all these years.
Irrespective of the privileged or the underprivileged people in India there is a wide gap in collective and personal hygiene. High personal hygiene can be seen in immaculately kept homes and other establishments; some even giving an antiseptic impression of the interiors.
But the moment we hit the street we may be greeted with anything from obnoxious smelling walls or poop of pets on the footpaths or piles of kitchen wastes that could have easily come from the elite homes around; thus exhibiting a poor sense of collective hygiene. This very trait of keeping one’s premises within the boundary walls spick and span and an utter lack of concern for the cleanliness beyond the boundaries of the property can be seen among a sizeable educated populace of India.
The onus of diminishing the yawning gap by elevating collective hygiene lies on the privileged class. As the adage goes examples are better than precepts, the elite can start by carrying a poop bag when they take their loving doggy for the “walk”. Gradually extending their efforts to educate the underprivileged to refrain from painting the walls red with betel nut and paan extracts or directing the person in need to heed nature’s call to the nearest public toilet can definitely better the tag of the elite to responsible citizens on their backs.
Ancient India can boast of one of the finest cultures of practicing hygiene and sanitation. Renowned architects and town planners vouch that the civilizations of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa possessed the best of sewerage and drainage systems. It is indeed a matter of intrigue how the offspring of people belonging to such enlightened civilizations are learning the use of toilets and the practice of sanitation all over again today from scratch. It may be difficult to pinpoint the reasons as India was ruled by several dynasties from that ancient period of teaching hygiene to the world till this present day of learning good sanitation habits.
One aspect which many years ago a learned judge pointed out to me still makes a lot of sense in this context. He opined that India is very well an independent country but the minds of Indians are yet to be independent. Independence meant a sense of belongingness to the country. Citizens of an independent nation must get the feeling of owning every property in the country. During the Raj, Indians developed a sense of alienation towards national property through movements of discarding anything British or damaging anything made by the then government. Anything for public use was not regarded as one’s own; properties of railways, municipalities and other government departments were damaged at will.
Unfortunately, even after several years of independence from the British, this poor legacy has passed onto generations and many amongst us are yet to accept the public property as our own. The day we all realize this, our urge to urinate on a wall, litter the roadsides at will or dirty the sidewalks through our pets will disappear and our minds will be truly independent to develop and protect the national property as our own.
This learned judge was none other than my father Late Golok Nath Borah, Barrister-at-Law.
(The author is a retired technocrat. The views expressed are his own. Email: tridib23borah@gmail.com)