Need to build national character
It was June 16 and a Sunday. It was raining in Uttarakhand (UKD). It rained in Delhi as well. I was returning from a morning walk when I saw an elderly person walking out of his apartment carrying a black plastic bag in his hand. I stopped as he slowly made his way. I stopped because he stopped and looked towards my apartment. I assumed that the bag he carried contained kitchen garbage.
When the person realised that I had stopped and was watching his slow progress, he looked at me with with a bit of annoyance. It appeared as if I was blocking his way. Much to my surprise he dropped the garbage bag at one end of my apartment wall and rushed back into his flat. I was shocked stood motionless for several seconds. I decided to not confront the person as he is a senior citizen. But it made me think about the kind of society we are condemned to live in. It is fascinating to watch people take their pets out for a walk. The pets dirty the roads with their poop. People forget that there are other people as well who use the road. But then that is another matter.
Coming back to UKD, the cloud burst and the destruction that it left in its wake. I joined the Dalit Indian Chamber of Commerce & Industry (DICCI) chairman Milind Kamble at the Delhi airport to take a flight for Dehra Dun. As guest faculty, we both gave lectures at the IAS Academy in Mussoorie. The academy kept calling us to find out if the flight was able to take off.
They know the problem that rains in the region had created. But we were lucky, the flight took off on time and reached Jolly Grant Airport at Dehra Dun with no detours.
The academy had sent us a car. It took four and half an hour to reach the academy as there were massive traffic jams on the way. The road that had become un-motorable was paved only recently.
We had been to the academy some eight months back and had seen the roads being broadened. In other words, the road that was built less than a year back couldn’t last a year. What kind of engineers and what kind of contractors had been given the task of building itIJ
Back in Delhi, with the Assembly elections sometime this year, the roads in the Capital are in for an overhaul. The roads and footpaths that were broken and relaid during the Commonwealth Games are again being broken and re-built again!
In my opinion, the work that was carried out during the Games was much better than the quality of work that is being done today. Come next year, and the roads that are being relaid will need to be rebuilt again once the rains are over in the city.
Of course, it is not just the roads that are being built again. Some of the street lights are being replaced by better and bigger lED street lights. In some places the work is still in progress — the lights have been installed but they have to be operational. Therefore, the old ones are in service.
In some places the new ones are working but the old ones have yet to be taken out. Interestingly, these electric poles appear to be like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon — they were uneven — and so are these poles which have been erected with no precision or thought.
Meanwhile, a visit to Delhi’s wholesale chicken and fish market in Ghazipur will turn even the most hardcore non-vegetarians into eating vegetables. The filth in the market is enough to convert anybody. Visit the sabzi mandi at Azadpur and you may become a non-vegetarian.
If one has visited both, one may have to worry about the image that the country has in an increasingly globalised world.
One of the greatest challenges facing the nation is about the character and moral standards of an average citizens. I have seen people defending caste order on grounds that each caste has a duty to perform, and that, if Untouchables maintained hygiene, the upper caste won’t have a problem in integrating them into the mainstream society. What happens if this clean Untouchable fell in love with a non-Dalit girl and married herIJ Traditionally, India is society of double standards. For ages, people’s first loyalty has always been towards their caste — even family comes at No 2 spot. Caste above all is the mantra. With such an incredible history of loose morals, Indians are easy prey to social characterlessness.
Civil contractors in Delhi and UKD build streets and roads as if they are working for an enemy country. Visit town Bulandshahr in Uttar Pradesh or Shangli in Maharashtra, you may get the feeling that a municipality hasn’t been formed yet.
India is transforming. Its greatest evil Untouchability is on the decline, caste is weakening. The biggest challenge is the character and moral values that a citizen has in our country. How does one re-build India so that foreign visitors to the country go back home with one thought — Incredible India!