Else, we risk this cleanliness drive becoming another social fad that will be forgotten when the novelty wears off. Of course, infrastructural improvements, such as new treatment plants for solid, sewage, industrial and agricultural waste, are required. New sets of indices, whether they be measures of cleanliness or density of dustbin distribution, too are needed. Laws and fines have their place as well. All that is indeed the government’s job and it will be judged on it. However, all this will come to naught if we Indians don’t change our mentality about what is my space and what isn’t. The country is yours. You obviously can’t clean all of it, but you can be aware of at least a little bit of area around you. If every Indian has a concept of ‘my 10 meters’, or a sense of ownership about a 10-metre radius around him or her, magic can happen. Ten meters is just 30 feet around you. Given the number of people we have, we can achieve a lot if we all get together. So it should not just be ‘my home should be clean’, but ‘my home and the surrounding 10 meters should be clean’. We have some of the smartest people on earth. World chess champions, software geeks and Fabindia-wearing intellectuals we have them all. We probably have too many smart people in our country. But allow me, with my moderate intellect, to make one more assertion we also have a lot of …show more content…
On the one hand, we want our kids to take up science subjects in school. Exams to get into top engineering and medical colleges in India are among the toughest in the world. Our students get top scores in science and mathematics, pushing cut-offs higher and higher. If some alien from, say, Mars were to see this, he would think that India is a land obsessed with science. And yet, in many ways, we are completely unscientific. More superstitions exist in our country than in any other. I am sure many of you have been fed curd and sugar right before a science exam, as a sign of luck. As if some audit department of God above is noting the kids who ate it and hence marking them as deserving of a simpler exam. astrologers, horoscopes abound. Temple visits are associated with guilt, and often include some sort of a transaction. Place some money in front of the idol and in return some luck will come your way, implying that that is how God thinks about us. Religious ceremonies spill out on the road, leaving behind a trail of filth and noise pollution. As if that is what God above wants make the city filthy, bother others, because traffic jams, make parents reach home to their kids later and then I will be touched by your love. We also have gods for rain. If a crop suffers due to lack of rain, it is obviously an act of the rain gods. It is not the fault of the irrigation department, which may have had decades of funding but