On 14/11/2007, Carvalho <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Getting back to the turd donor, no, I didn't look to > see whether he had a briefcase parked next to his > deposit near the Mandovi. The point I was making was > that he was quite well dressed and not a vagrant off > the streets. So this isn't about available toilet > facilities. It is infact, exactly what Rajan makes it > out to be; par for the course.
And since the devil is also allowed to quote scripture, let the person who had not peed in public cast the first stone! Selma's out of touch, and fails to see this as part of the reflection of the acute lack of public toilets and rest rooms in Goa. Or the collapse of infrastructure here, thanks to corruption, overconsumptiion (by the affluent, that Dr Oscar talks about) and probably even aggravated by our own sanctimonous blame-someone-else approaches of barking up the wrong tree. Selma, do you know of journalists who rush to Hotel Mandovi (and face the related embarassment) to visit rest rooms when they run into an "emergency"? Haven't we all, as kids, peed into fields in front of our schools? Tell me, what do you do when you're at a park or musical concert, and your kid feels the need to relieve himself or herself urgently? I'm not justifying a lack of hygiene and sanitation solutions. But there are no global standards. What you're used to in the West would probably not be attained even in our dreams here. So hanging someone caught on the camera might seem the apt thing to do, but is it? In what way are we superior to the migrants we take perverse pleasure in deriding? Sanitation remains a huge issue in India, important enough for a Gandhi to take it on. We need more Dr. Bindeshwar Pathaks here. See [http://www.sulabhinternational.org/] In Goa, we had our pigs. We are caught at the twlight hour between the death of the traditional way of doing things and the slow and long-delayed birth of 'modernisation'. Of course, I'm not one of those who keeps singing praises to the latter. Our pigs have gone; who will take care of the sanitation? Politicians like Shashikala Kakodkar, I recall, would raise the issue in terms of "pigs running through the temples". It's easy to score points, but we don't know the long term implications of our populist ethnic-based or communal-fractured gerrymandering. All of us need to visit a toilet; some of us are infortunate enough to get photographed; the others believe our sh*t don't stink! Comeon guys, can't you see how bull-headed and moralistic we are getting over this? Time to acknowledge that half of Goa gets its sh*t cleaned by the migrant poor. Let's not pillory them by judging them on the basis of standards we find convenient! By all means, we need better sanitation here; but nobody has a monopoly over fouling up the place in a situation where sanitation is lacking. FN -- Frederick Noronha http://fn.goa-india.org Ph 0091-832-2409490 12000+ downloadable, sharable hi-res photos http://www.flickr.com/photos/fn-goa/
