They say, whether a poor man steals bread, or a rich man does so, it's a crime all the same. What is not said, of course, is that a rich man has no reason to steal bread (he simply takes over the State and rewrites the rules!)
The debate on garbage is something like that. If you jump to conclusions, my views might seem like a defence of the Right To Be Dirty. Which it is not. What I'd like to say is that dismissing certain civilisations or countries or regions as "dirty" is a very easy task. Till you realise how politically biased such an endeavour is.... The problem perhaps is not just dirt. It goes far deeper. If you have 14 million people living in the city of Mumbai (more than the population of many European countries... in one city!) what kind of sanitation and infrastructure do you expect them to have? If we displace large village areas -- because of lack of employment potential -- and herd them into unkempt cities, do we expect hospital-like sanitation? Pause to think: why is it that so many Goan villages are actually quite clean? What suddenly happens to a town like Mapusa that makes it so dirty, it's buildings unpainted, and its citizens appearing to lack any sense of civic pride? Why do our clean villages get dramatically transformed when mining takes hold of the area, or there is a tourism or real-estate boom there? And what role do all of us play, as middle-men in mining, earning out of tourism, or buying a flat in Goa? Are our hands all that clean, simply because we leave behind no trail to the dirt created by our consumerism, greed of lucre or selfishness? In our younger days, in the 1970s, how did we dispose of garbage? We just took it in a weekly bucket, and dumped it on a hillside near the home. Much of it bio-degraded, the exception being some old rubber chappal that came floating down with the rains some months later. Can we do the same today when a single visit to the village supermarket has me ending up with 17 plastic bags in which every conceivable product is packed? Did you notice how rich people tend to look pretty or handsome? The same with dirt. It's easy, if you have the resources, to simply push it under the carpet! Or to someone else's country. Every Made in China product that comes over here, sometimes taken on a round-the-world cruise via the US, reminds me of how much our neighbours are polluting themselves for socialist China to prop up global capitalism and consumerism. Likewise, we might only see it via the barges in the Mandovi, but isn't Goa too simply denuding its interior badly to prop up Chinese and South Korean and Japanese steel giants? When I saw a calendar put out by Ciba Geigy focussing on the scenic spots of Switzerland, it just struck me how just the situation is. It reminded me that the Swiss keep their own backyards extremely clean, after exporting their very profitable, very polluting pesticides plants to places like Santa Monica (near Old Goa). And the name reminds us that land there was sold to the enterprise at 60 paisa a square metre, for which the Church rightly gets criticised, in times when we are more awake to issues like land and the environment. Of course, maintaining "cleanliness" isn't about just what we see on the surface. It's also got to with the dirt we create and hide. This book which I came across some years ago, is an amazing read on why we are dirtier than we think we are: http://www.amazon.com/Stuff-Secret-Everyday-Things-Report/dp/1886093040 FN PS: To Augusto -- do people fling their garbage into the yard once they lose a significant stake in "their" place? At what point does this come about? And why? -- Frederick Noronha :: +91-832-2409490 Writing, editing, alt.publishing, photography, journalism ANOTHER GOA: http://tiny.cc/anothergoa
