Delhi, the National Urinal
Amit Sengupta |
So what was wrong when a Dutch embassy official said that Delhi looked like a garbage dump? Why did our patriotic instincts get so aroused that we almost condemned this frank, free speech? Delhi is a non-biodegradable, backward capitalist, semi-feudal, patriarchal, uncultured garbage dump. Why shy away from that? Not only that, Delhi has turned into a vast, sprawling, ever, macho public urinal, a S H I T hole, a faceless ghetto, an architect’s black-hole nemesis, an octopus without a soul or belonging or sensitivity or civic sense. So what is so Mera Bharat Mahan about Delhi being a damned garbage dump?
Can’t you see it all over the place, from the posh, palatial south zones to the twilight zones of the east and west, with the demolished slums in between? Surely, even tinted windows of swanky cars are transparent, aren’t they? So why hide the gaze? And where do the women go? The mother, the housewife, the working women?
On the streets, in marketplaces, public parks, public transport, long distance roadways buses, flyovers, national highways —why are they condemned to hold on while men are all over pissing in stark daylight as if it’s a tide on a full-moon night. And where do you walk? The slimy, stagnant, fragrant pavements are full of pissers in full public glory. The roads and highways are full of pissers. Not only the nooks and corners, they are all over the ideal city-state. The entire city has become a virtual reality of a public urinal—the stench floating like a cliché. 
Except that the Centre and Delhi government, the MPs, the MLAs, the Opposition politicians, the ruling party politicians, the police, the mandarins in the municipalities, the Union ministers, the ex-ministers, the bureaucrats and babus, the elite— eyes wide shut, the page 3 party-types with colonial hangovers, the upwardly mobile and the middle mobile, the fourth estate, the real estate—no one is willing to see this masculine display of public patriotism. Mass urinals as a tourist delight—welcome to this machismo capital of the power elite, the special dirty zone of organised filth and muck and gaseous, fungus-ridden waste and dirty waters.
When the masses are against hygiene and aesthetics, and when the men have no shame, and when the government wears a sanitised chastity belt of cold-blooded ignorance, who can stop this great pissing nationalism of our nationhood defined, even while we put pictures of gods on walls, stairs, pavements, residential areas to stop people peeing and spitting?
SOURCE: http://sify.com/news/fullstory.php?id=14326928
Another eye opening article about India’s capital. I wonder what is the situation in other larger and even smaller cities. Over and above this is coming from an Indian source and the writter is an Indian. I don’t think Indians can deny this.
