Room No. 3, Advaitananda Bhavana, Ramakrishna Mission Vidyalaya, Narendrapur, 1991: Gifted a broom by one of the hostel seniors to clean it in 10 minutes. No, it was not ragging. it was my first brush with what people call Swachh Bharat Abhiyan nowadays.
Charity begins at home. So cleanliness should also begin at home. Yes that was the mantra we learnt when I was in the first year of my long hostel life in school. And, learning came with reward also. Every Sunday night, the "best room" award used to be announced in which the roommates of the best clean room were given a lozenge each.
Besides the "best room" contest, we also shared our duties every week to keep our campus clean. I vividly remember one of our friends, the son of a wealthy businessman of the city then, was given the duty of surrounding cleaning. As the tell-tale name suggests, the boy — with long broom in hand like what we see celebrities use for photo-ops these days — was supposed to clean the hostel surroundings along with five of his friends. He was not very keen and our warden just used the broomstick on the kid's back several times to make cleanliness, and responsibility, a habit! Such was our grooming unlike millions of Indians outside the 15ft wall around us.
Department of English and Other Modern European Languages, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, March 10, 2000: We took up brooms as our collective responsibility towards cleaning the department. It has been a decades-old tradition in Santiniketan when its founder Rabindranath Tagore began cleaning the ashram in honour of none other than Mahatma Gandhi, who was a visitor to Gurudev's abode of peace. Even today, ashramites gather in their respective places for a mass cleaning exercise on March 10, christened "Gandhi Punyah" by Tagore himself.
Gandhi's influence on people — from Tagore to Narendra Modi — seems immense so far as cleanliness is concerned. Even 10 years ago, I saw several posters on railway stations with Gandhi's message: Cleanliness is next to Godliness. Nowadays, even railway officials hardly try to pass on this message to either the passengers or the junior officers. Time has changed but not the indiscipline attitude of people towards cleaning their surroundings. Which "ness" is to be blamed for that — awareness, laziness, carelessness, callousness, fearlessness of law or obliviousness to our values?
Department of English and Other Modern European Languages, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, March 10, 2000: We took up brooms as our collective responsibility towards cleaning the department. It has been a decades-old tradition in Santiniketan when its founder Rabindranath Tagore began cleaning the ashram in honour of none other than Mahatma Gandhi, who was a visitor to Gurudev's abode of peace. Even today, ashramites gather in their respective places for a mass cleaning exercise on March 10, christened "Gandhi Punyah" by Tagore himself.
Gandhi's influence on people — from Tagore to Narendra Modi — seems immense so far as cleanliness is concerned. Even 10 years ago, I saw several posters on railway stations with Gandhi's message: Cleanliness is next to Godliness. Nowadays, even railway officials hardly try to pass on this message to either the passengers or the junior officers. Time has changed but not the indiscipline attitude of people towards cleaning their surroundings. Which "ness" is to be blamed for that — awareness, laziness, carelessness, callousness, fearlessness of law or obliviousness to our values?
I feel angry to watch people spit on the streets and litter around roads. Do they behave at home like this? Do we need a Prime Minister to cane around us to teach us about cleanliness? Do we need a Bharat Ratna cricketer to record a video of broom in hand to teach us what cleanliness is all about?
Most probably, yes.
