Call it like you see it

We're in the middle of Bombay's second summer, with searing heat, and yet there's an image from the just concluded monsoon that won't leave my mind. I was standing outside a forgettable hotel in a forgettable grimy suburb of Mumbai during the lunch break, catching my breath and a bit of daylight after having delivered a training session in the basement of the hotel. The rain was coming down in buckets, filling the half completed concrete road dividers with water that then flowed over onto the street. Out of nowhere a family of four appeared, husband, wife, a three or four year old son and a baby tucked under the woman's left arm.
Three of them drank hungrily from the concrete divider, the adults reaching in with both hands and taking water to their mouth, the boy catching the overflow with his little hands. The woman dipped the edge of her sari into the divider and squeezed water into the baby's mouth. They drank with dedication, oblivious or not caring that they were being watched, their poverty absolute and somehow with their dignity and grace intact, less like humans in an imperfect city and more like animals at a reservoir.

Our kids have occupied the various work spaces in the house. School projects and university applications are underway and we have a third teen in the house for a week, an exchange student from France. I am listening to the just downloaded J.J. Cale album and could go thirty years back in time, were it not for the fact that we're the parents now, ferrying our kids from school to party to project and that it's the kids that are throwing up and passing out. Not ours of course, but other parents'...

Our omnipresent Prime Minister Modi has called it. We're a nation of filth, failing to provide proper toilets for sixty percent of the population, throwing the spoils of modernity, plastic wrapping and bottles, onto the street from our houses and our cars for others to sweep up after us. We're convinced that with material progress comes the right to have others clean up after us.

The Prime Minister called it from the ramparts of Red Fort on Independence Day and has repeated the message over and over again in other speeches and via social media: if we are to progress we will have to learn to clean up after ourselves. He has linked it to Mahatma Gandhi's 150th birth anniversary in 2019 and named the project Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan.

We're in the beautiful people phase of the project right now, with socialites, actors and business people trying to wield a broom for their photo op, helpfully moving leaves from one side of the street to another. School kids have been picking up the challenge, tackling parts of the city. Let's see whether the adults manage to develop their share of dignity and grace between now and 2019 and learn to clean up after themselves.