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Showing posts from December, 2014

HOW CLEAN ARE OUR FORESTS?

The tolerance of us Indians towards dirt and garbage in public spaces is a globally known and acknowledged fact. Probably because it is not only “unclean to clean” but also “unclean to notice” in India, where a complete class of people had been invented to merely take care of our waste and rubbish, as V.S. Naipaul observed with precise acerbity in his 1977 book  India-A wounded civilisation . Apart from this incredible tolerance to the ubiquitous garbage and the freedom to freely wet and litter, are there any other cultural forces that so universally binds and unites us a nation?  Therefore I am unsurprised that the ‘ Swachh Bharat Abhiyan’ or the Campaign for a Clean India has been able to maintain steam for over two months in the print and social media where the ‘trending’ news shift every 5 seconds. Because India will never run short of celebrities willing to pose with brooms nudging the garbage carefully. And city news and city people will never get enough of their celebrities.