Commentary/Dilip D'Souza

Cities across India wallow in filth and squalor, in depravity and pollution

Late one festive night, I was on my way home after dropping a friend off in a distant suburb. It was Navratri, when many of us wear pretty clothes, grab sticks to rap sharply against others' sticks and dance the night away, rapping sticks all the while. My memories of that half-hour trip, as my autorickshaw buzzed through the streets, are a series of flashing tableaus, a montage of colour and squalor, dance and misery, light and dark.

In a well-lit enclosure on the side of the road, hundreds of dancing bodies are caught in the freeze frame that speeding past induces. Hundreds more stand on the edge, dark shadows watching the dancing. Dancer and spectator alike are oblivious to the truly massive pile of garbage that lies less than ten yards away. About a dozen dogs are not oblivious. They scratch at the pile, spreading its aromatic bounty even more uniformly across the road than it is already.

Later, a large cloth and bamboo arch, coloured wildly, stands at the entrance to a lane, welcoming Navratri dancers. Lined with bulbs, it brightens the surroundings no end. I have no difficulty seeing the inches of mud that it is erected on. I can also see, by the swathe of light it casts on a young boy nearby, that he is squatting to defecate.

I don't know how many hundreds of thousands of rupees are spent on the decorations that are everywhere in October and November, the time of some of our most joyous festivals. For a few days, they transform neighbourhoods in our cities. But that's only as long as you do no more than glance at them. If you look more closely, you will see the blight the decorations try hard to cover up. Dirt, poverty, garbage, thorough misery.

As I sped past in my autorickshaw that evening, I asked of nobody in particular: why is none of the money, time and effort the decorations need spent on simply keeping the area clean? Why aren't neighbourhoods ever transformed that way? Why is it enough to erect rickety but colourful arches, or put up strings of lights, a few times a year?

Shiva Naipaul once wrote about Patna, the capital of Bihar, thus: '[It is] a junk-heap of peeling, crumbling buildings, of squatter colonies earthed in tracts of mossy mud... Stagnant, black-watered gutters reek. Inches away from these sewers, people squat, arms limply hanging, oblivious of the stench, staring as vacantly as the wandering holy cows... The disorder, the dirt, the ugliness is overwhelming. How do men manage to live in a place like this? How is it that they do not all go mad?' Patna will be renamed to Pataliputra.

With that one innovative step, all that Naipaul wrote, all the dirt and misery, the stench and mud -- all of it will just not be true of Patna any more. You see, Laloo is ensuring that never again can Patna be accused of any of that squalor, just as there is none of it in either Bombay or Madras -- simply because neither city exists any more. It's a task quite easily done. You just wipe a city off the map. You just rename it.

Of course, Mumbai (ex-Bombay), Chennai (ex-Madras) and now Pataliputra remain squalid messes. But not Bombay or Madras. Or Patna. How's that, Shiva Naipaul? Garbage is still left to rot on the streets, whether it's Bombay or Mumbai. The stinking Cooum River flows thickly, putridly, through Chennai, just as it once did through Madras. Millions of people will continue to live, eat, play and squat in the mud and near the sewers of Pataliputra, as they did in Patna. As they do in Chennai and Mumbai too.

But we think we have restored some ancient glory by bringing back the old names.

Speaking of cosmetics. The newspapers advertise or report still another fashion show or beauty contest nearly every day. There's Miss Mumbai, Miss India, The Look Of The Year, Mr Adonis and more. There was the biggie: Miss World, that subject of innumerable angry words, both for and against, over the last several weeks.

To go with these shows, we have reports on wardrobes and eyeshadows, figures and workout schedules. They now warrant front-page placement in our papers. All these contests, most of which we had not even heard of five years ago, are now treated as major landmarks in the calendar. Their participants and winners are everywhere you turn, fame assured for the 15 minutes till the next contest crowds them off our attention span.

There are some who read much into all this. We produced a Miss Universe and a Miss World in the same year; now we have shown that we can stage a major international event. Therefore, India has 'arrived' on the world map. Just because we paraded 88 young beauties through a stadium in Bangalore, we have persuaded ourselves that we matter in the world, that we are a new, improved India.

Cosmetics, once again. Meanwhile, the hard work remains unfinished. Even un-attempted.

Shiva Naipaul wrung his hands over Patna nearly 20 years ago. Nothing has changed since. Cities across India, and particularly across northern India, wallow in an increasingly identical miasma of dirt, open drains, pollution and the depravity of slum and street living. Be it in Jabalpur or Kanpur, Behrampur or Bombay, millions of Indian citizens live filthy, brutal lives that disgrace our country. Elsewhere, millions more are left undernourished, illiterate and deprived of the most basic health care.

These are some of the pieces from the real picture of India the outside world sees. Another is our love for the trivial, the superficial, the cosmetic: Miss World, bright arches and finding achievement in renaming cities.

Some years ago, Sharad Pawar, then chief minister of Maharashtra, announced a plan to spruce up Bombay's international airport. Its untidiness and general air of seediness made it look, he said, like a 'bus stand.' It had to be cleaned up, or we would offer a pretty poor first impression to international visitors.

Two things didn't seem to have struck old Sharad, nor the newspapers that reported his observations. One, that our bus stands also look like bus stands, but nobody talks about cleaning them up. Two, that much of Bombay looks about as seedy, if not more, than the airport.

But of course, that's all academic now. We live in a new city today. Mumbai.