For a country which has so many Gods, Goddesses and Deities it would be welcome if just one of them was dedicated to cleanliness. The people wear immaculate clothes but they surround themselves with ankle deep filth. They sit or sleep on the ground next to open sewers running a metre away from their homes.
The sheer volume of rubbish seen everywhere with the exception of some remoter areas, has shocked me. Peeing outside is commonplace. I saw a poster asking people not to ‘defecate in the open’. Yes, I even witnessed that.
On several occasions I felt sick, tearful and fearful for mankind’s future on seeing the rubbish filled polluted waterways and the complete disregard for the environment. Plastics, toxic and slow to degrade, lie everywhere. In a town famous for its temples, Rameswaram, I have never seen such filth in any other town in any country. Words fail me.
Yet how incongruent is this?... I was asked to leave my shoes outside of a grotty internet hovel (one dusty PC). A man standing at the doorway tore up paper and tossed it on to the street. When I chided him he seemed not to get the message.
Gandhi taught the importance of cleanliness to his people and said, “There is dignity in cleaning up our own dirt”. The message, I fear, has not stuck.
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