What an unholy mess!
By Abu Abraham

LIVING in God’s own Kerala, it is easy to forget the dirt and squalor of much of the rest of India. Here cleanliness is an obsession. The women who come to cook and sweep the house and garden here at home and in the neighbourhood are spotlessly clean. They come dressed in fresh clothes and are well-groomed. Nobody in Kerala goes out of the house without a bath. Most people have two baths a day, morning and evening.

In respect of cleanliness (next to godliness) I think Keralites are close to our own North-East people or to South-East Asians. I was in Saigon in 1970 during the worst part of the Vietnam war. I wandered around the city quite a lot, and also travelled to nearby villages and to the port city of Danang. While the Americans kept bombing and destroying, life went on in South Vietnam as if nothing unusual was happening. The sweepers swept the parks and streets. Shops and restaurants served people at all hours. Plenty of fresh vegetables were available in the market places. But what astonished me was the cleanliness and quietness of the markets. Nobody shouted, nobody urinated in public. It’s a totally different culture from ours.

I find it difficult to understand why we as a people show little respect to our environment, let alone to our poor neighbour’s. Someone once said:"Love thy neighbour, but choose your neighbourhood first." This is true of our rich and well-to-do middle classes. Once they find their own congenial neighbourhood, they ignore their fellow beings. If not deliberate callousness, it is wilful selfishness.

The Hindu way of life, it seems to me, is almost totally preoccupied with personal salvation. For this no amount of prayers and pujas are sufficient. Our swamis are daily asking people to devote their whole life to devotion. ‘Total surrender’ is what they recommend. It is, therefore, not surprising that some of the dirtiest places in India are our holy places. Instead of cleanliness being next to godliness, our national motto seems to be ‘other-worldliness is next to godliness.’

‘Indians defecate everywhere’, wrote V.S. Naipaul in his famous book, An Area of Darkness. Indians were deeply hurt. So were a lot of Indians in the USA recently when CNN showed a documentary on Indian society chiefly about the caste system. It included an interview with an untouchable woman whose occupation was to carry shit, euphemistically called night soil, on her head. There was a flurry of e-mail indignation. Our NRIs were asking CNN, ‘What about the way you treat Negroes?’ ‘What about the slums and poverty in your country?’, with the usual arrogant boast about our ancient culture.

If Naipaul were to write a sequel to his first book on India, I suppose he could call it ‘Expanding Darkness’. If anything, the area of darkness of forty years ago has only increased. More and bigger slums. More illiteracy, more filth in our towns and cities.

Meanwhile, I was glad to notice that Tavleen Singh of India Today has written a column on the abominable state into which some of the once elegant towns in UP have fallen. With Naipaulian anger, she writes under the title, Ugly India:

‘The road I took led to Maneka Gandhi’s constituency Pilibhit. It was one I had not travelled since the 1991 election. It took me through the towns of Moradabad, Rampur and Bareilly in that most real Indian province of all, Uttar Pradesh. The horror began in Moradabad. I remember it as a disorderly, typical Uttar Pradesh town whose claim to fame has been its prosperous brass industry. In the past ten years that Moradabad has disappeared beneath a vast, terrifyingly crowded, urban settlement which seems to rise out of a sea of uncollected garbage.

The garbage spills out of the town and lines the national highway so that along miles and miles of it you see pavements that seem to be made up entirely of human faeces, rotting food, plastic and industrial waste. On this particular day it was raining heavily. These pavements made of garbage became mobile and spilled into the roadside restaurants, licking at the legs of the tables and chairs. Oblivious to the vile smell and filth, people sat and ate their meals, clearly reconciled to the fact that squalor was a way of life and to expect better was madness.’

Throughout our beautiful land, I notice a stench of decay and decadence. Our brilliant scientists and brave jawans have not done much to improve the situation in this sea of backwardness. The poor don’t have enough to eat, the rich don’t know what to do with their riches.

We blame the rise in population for our state. But then what did we do for the poor and the illiterate when the population was only a third of what it is today? Population is only an excuse.