Swachh Bharat: A Dream or Reality

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?

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. 

'Death Be Not Proud'

Some people leave a mark on this world, on our lives; others just pay a small visit. As the dark clouds covered the Kalimpong Stadium on August 16, i was standing under an umbrella to watch the final of a school-level soccer tournament along with some local friends. Suddenly, a reporter of a Hindi daily told me that an Anna Hazare supporter had been shot in Bhopal amid the arrest drama in New Delhi over the Gandhian's fast. I asked him who s/he was but he could not give me details then. After a few hours as i came down to Siliguri that evening, i saw 100-odd people brave the heavy rain to take out a rally with posters and candles with pro-Anna, anti-corruption slogans. A lady's picture on one of the posters took me by surprise. She was Shehla Masood. By then, the web world must have been flooded with her pictures and news of her murder in Bhopal.

My communication with Shehla dates back to 2009. That was the time when a lot of like-minded activists of the country started various online campaigns on a whole lot of issues from Binayak Sen to RTI to NREGA among others. Shehla, a former model, was by then known for her campaigns — both real and virtual — across a large section of the society. Her interests also included ecological imbalance and protecting tigers. As i write this piece, no concrete evidence has till been found why Shehla was killed but one point is very clear to all of her friends and well-wishers: her mission did not end in the murder but her killers showed us how a braveheart takes bullets to fight for causes. Hours before she was killed, she re-tweeted: "'It takes a great deal of courage to stand up to your enemies. But a great deal more to stand up to your friends' - A. P. W. B. Dumbledore." That says it all about her 38 years' existence.

A few years back, now-defunct but highly intellectual Bengali magazine, Dhrubapad, brought out a special number, "Dosh jon onyorokom Bangali (10 different Bengalis)". A lady painter was portrayed there as one's next-door granny who is not only caring but also loves cooking, and moreover breaks into laughter like a child if her guests are found enjoying her delicacies. But Shyamali Khastagir was more than an artist. With several others in JOAR (Jharkhand Organisation Against Radiation), she gave Jadugoda a new strength to fight uranium radiation among impoverished innocent villagers. A lifelong fight against uranium depletion and other issues took her across several countries.

Daughter of pioneering artist Sudhir Khastagir, Shyamali'di even once courted arrest while protesting in front of the White House; she was also instrumental in stopping to flag off a car rally from the Santiniketan Ashram area. During my stay at Santiniketan, I saw her from close quarters; on many an occasion she asked me to arrange shows for films on several subjects like the US invasion in Iraq, how marine ecology was threatened during Gulf War, how people were slow-poisoned by uranium radiation. Doors of her real abode of peace at Santiniketan's Purbapalli were always open to all. People were treated with home-made ladoos or even muri! She used to live a simple life, true to Tagore's ideal. Besides an environmentalist, she was also a friend of the underprivileged. Some years back, i was going to Santiniketan and on the train, i found Shyamali'di sitting pretty by the window. Soon after the train pulled out of Howrah, a hijra — who i knew for several months then — came to ask for alms. As i told the hijra, Kavita, not to beg like this but try to find a private job, as Kavita was a graduate unlike many other hijras, Shyamali'di gave Kavita a hug and invited to meet her at Santiniketan so that Kavita could be given a job, at least vocational training like many others financed by the septuagenarian lady.

Women like Shehla and Shyamali'di are true-life inspiration to me, and of course many others. In their deaths, they made us more responsible to make this planet for a healthier and better tomorrow.