Beauty and garbage.

This morning, after Kym and I had chai at Nana Peth (we have decided it would be a new Amrutatulya every day) and I dropped her off for her training at the racecourse, I turned Battlecat III towards Kondhwa and let loose, riding through the narrow lanes abundant with speed-breakers, cattle, early morning traders of milk and newspapers, gym-goers, and people scurrying about in their finest (it is Eid) at the crack of dawn.

As the road starts rising, it gets freer, less crowded, and smoother. At the turn-off to Trinity International School, it opens up completely as the Bopdev Ghat starts. The turns are deceptive (you think you can take them at higher speeds, but trust me, you can’t) and steep, but there is enough width in the carriageway and because there is no traffic, the ghats are forgiving to the novice rider that I am, having taken up the pastime (sport?) once again after two decades of being off the saddle. I was cruising along until I reached the top of the hill and decided to stop somewhere so I could enjoy the quiet morning air and be at peace with myself and the machine. So, when I saw an opening, I pulled over.

The sun was rising in the East, just above the hilltops and there was a beautiful, lone, leafless tree hanging on to its dear life on the cliff just under me. I got off a beautiful shot with the motorcycle with my helmet on its right mirror just sitting them, hot from the climb, as the sun rose in the background.

That is what went up on my social media at half-past six this morning.

At the top of Bopdev Ghat.

But that is not the whole story. For that, I need to pan out a bit, to show you where I was actually standing. As you can see, it is a garbage dump. No, not an actual one, but simply a place where people have dumped their garbage.

Behind the scenes.

And off the hill, into the valley, that’s not a beautiful panoramic view you see; that is a huge mining site where some business is gnawing at the base of the hills, slowly eating them up to provide for building material for even more concrete dwellings for humans in the main city. The entire hill, as you can see, along with the surrounding peaks, is devoid of vegetation. Temperatures, even at the time I took this photograph, were just below 30°C, threatening to rise to over 40°C in another few hours as the sun shone on a naked Earth that was stripped of its green cover by humans in the quest for ‘development’.

Garbage on top and mining below.

That said, it wasn’t just the mining that was the eyesore. It was the entire stretch of road. And I realised that throughout my rides, I have seen the sides of our roads littered with garbage, a lot of which is plastic. There seems to be no place I have been, whether over the past few days on this motorcycle, or in the past decade anywhere since I returned to India, where I have not seen garbage in this country. And the countryside is no exception. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that while there are mechanisms to clean the garbage and take it away to a place to be recycled or disposed off in some way, there is no such provision in the rural areas, and the plastic simply accumulates on the roadside, in the ditches along the road, and on the fields, where it will stay for the next thousand years before nature can take care of it. And every day, tons of it is being added in every village and along every road in India. There is simply no escape.

Acres of garbage.

A littered road, like so many others.

I have seen this, especially in our country. Why do we behave in this manner? We keep our houses clean. We bathe regularly. A lot of our religious tradition talks of purity and cleanliness. We even have had Mahatma Gandhi speaking of it regularly and making a virtue of it, as well as a major government-led initiative for Swachh Bharat. We learn about this in our Civics class. We talk of it and all agree that keeping our surroundings and environment clean is important. But then, we throw our garbage on the roads, we spit with abandon, we chuck stuff out of our cars, buses, and homes without a care in the word? Why do we do it? Why are our standards for public hygiene so low as to make even those countries and civilisations Indians traditionally look down upon as poor or uncultured or backward much cleaner and hygienic than us? Why do we not understand that we are not only making things dirty, but making them look bad, endangering public health, helping spread contagious diseases, and endangering life on Earth? Why are we so cavalier about this? Is this to do with the belief in karma and reincarnation? Or is it to do with fatalism? Or has it to do with caste and varnavyavastha (because it is someone else’s job to clean our shit)? Why do we not care about Earth, even when this will end up killing us and everything we love?

Parking in the garbage.

Even more garbage.

Well, you see, this planet has survived for 4.5 billion years since its birth, with life on Earth having survived for 3.5 billion of them. And over the past 440 million years, we have had 5 major mass extinctions; we could very well be in the midst of the sixth. Nothing, as far as we know, has killed the Earth. It will survive till the Sun becomes a giant red ball 5 billion years from now and swallows this planet, taking everything with it before it dies and extinguishes this solar system. In short, the Earth is fine. We should stop worrying about the planet. What we should and indeed need to worry about is its ability to sustain human life. As humans, we need to remember that ‘…there is no Planet B’, as the former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon put so succinctly. If we are not careful, we will end up being responsible for our own extinction. Will we listen? Will we change our behaviour in time to avoid killing ourselves?

I don’t know. Douglas Adams, my favourite sci-fi author said, ‘Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.’

It’s funny. But also sad. Because it is true.

P.S: A related incident happened on my way back when I stopped for a cup of tea. I noticed that someone on the first floor of the apartment building in which this tea joint is located waters their plants (which are outside their window) with a ton of water in the mornings. This water then slides down the awning erected (perhaps specifically for this) by the shopkeeper directly below that house and involuntarily bathes everyone who is unfortunate enough not to know about this and standing at that location at that time. The owner of that house and those plants is not just unrepentant but also quite tickled by this. That’s the sense of civic sense we have in us.