The image you are seeing is littered with waste pamphlets on a busy Delhi
Metro station. It is not a visual feast to see obsessively, rather the
sorry state of affairs of a city whose citizenry must awake from the slumber.
On one side, the government is on
missionary mode to clean India under Swatch Bharat Abhiyan, but no change seems to be apparent in the behaviour of some
folks. This metro station reflects our loathness and just imagine how
foreigners visiting this city as a tourists perceive this
behavior.
I am a resident of Delhi for the
last 4 years. Wherever I visit public conveniences
(toilets/ wash rooms) I find many of them in shabby conditions unless it
is a paid service. The roads, subways and staircases are with paan spits making
a nightmare for anybody.
You can write tomes if you move out on Delhi roads. In some way, our villages and small cities are much
better and decent in cleanliness. I
can't understand why we have a different approach when it comes to cleanliness
? Nobody could tolerate littering their own living
spaces, but some people are accustomed to simply throw the dust just outside their homes thinking
that it is not theirs. Majority of us think that outside our
homes come under jurisdiction of municipality and cleanliness of that area is
not our look out ! What the Swatch Bharat
Abhiyan is trying to change this notion !
Apart from cleanliness, responsible driving is also an important factor on
crowded city roads. But the city is a walker's
nightmare. In October 2013, Sunita Narain, an environmentalist was injured in a
road accident while cycling near the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in
New Delhi on a leisurely Sunday morning. In fact, she was going to Lodhi Garden from her house in Green
Park and when she reached near the AIIMS flyover, a speeding car rammed her
cycle from behind. Eye witnesses said that due to the impact, she fell and her
face hit the ground and she began bleeding profusely from her nose. The shocking
note is the car driver did not stop and luckily the occupant
of another car had taken her to hospital and saved her life.
A couple of my friends met with
road accidents and fractured their bones not due to their negligence but due to
rash driving of others. There seems to be no respect for walkers and two
wheeler riders come next. By seeing the spate of accidents, I abandoned the
idea of using my two wheeler to commute to my office and sold it off !
Another point that needs to be
seriously pondered is decency of public behavior. Both educated and uneducated/ semi-educated behave in
the same way. You could convince yourself with my notion when you see the
second image on the right side. Here the
tale is again the same. No responsible behavour while using public transport.
The maddening crowd tried to jostle into already crowded train and the door sensors helplessly made continue beep sounds. The locomotive pilot was forced to halt the train till
such time the doors are closed which delayed another train to come.
Everybody wants to go first whether
there is urgency or not. Such behaviour seems to have
distilled into their DNA. But myself, an odd-man out coolly stand behind such mindless crowd and wait for my turn, hopefully in the
less-crowded train !