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| Edited By: Pooja Salvi |Source: DNA |Updated: Jun 10, 2018, 04:25 AM IST
It has been over ten years now that cartoonist and national-award winning author Aabid Surti has been running the Drop Dead Foundation from his ground floor flat in Mira Road. Every Sunday, the 83-year-old picks one housing society in the Mumbai suburb Mira Road, and accompanied by a volunteer and a plumber, starts from the top floor making his way downward, knocking on each door, inquiring for leaking faucets.
"Free plumbing service, ma'am! Do you have a leaking tap in your house?" Surti's voice rings out on every floor. Some invite him in while others refuse; the entire process taking at least three hours.
Back in his office-cum-home, Surti tells us how he started the foundation. "I grew up in an impoverished space in Dongri, where water was a luxury and people struggled for a bucketful. Most of the time, even after queueing up for hours, there was no guarantee one would go home with water," he solemnly recalls. This left him with little choice but to be frugal with water.
So, he found it quite unnatural, even unnerving, that people took water for granted. "I was visiting a friend's house when I asked him to repair his leaking tap. At the time, he promised he would. Six months later, he still hadn't done it! A tap that leaks once every second wastes about 1,000 litres a month! Imagine the wastage from hundreds of leaky taps! That's when I decided to just get a plumber on a Sunday and go around repairing taps," he says.
And so, in 2007, Drop Dead Foundation (DDF) came into being – "Save every drop or drop dead!" Surti exclaims. Within the first year, he'd visited more than 1,600 homes in Mira Road fixing over 400 taps. He has, since, received not just praise for his work, but also donations. With no capital funding when he started out, Surti has been a strong believer of 'where there's a will, there's a way'.
"Every penny I spent for DDF came from my pocket. A few years ago, when I had no money to take DDF forward, I received funds from Amitabh Bachchan (Rs 11 lakh)," he explains. When he received the Sahitya Sanstha Award, he invested all the prize money (Rs 1 lakh) into the foundation. "If your intentions are good, I believe that God himself will be your fund-raiser. That's perhaps the only reason I haven't run out of money," he chuckles.
Word of mouth, pamphlets, posters – Surti relies on the most modest of marketing tactics to get his message across. "Why is there a tulsi plant in every household, and around every street corner? It is because dharma tells you to. So, to spread awareness about my project, I made the use of dharma too," he says. He took to pasting posters with Prophet Mohammed's saying, 'Agar aap nahar ke kinaare bhi rehtey hai, tab bhi aapko pani ki boond gawaani nahi chahiye,' (Even if you live close to a well, you shouldn't be wasting a drop of water), on the walls of mosques around the town. For Hindus, he printed pamphlets with Ganesha.
Over the last decade, Surti has come across the same silly mistakes – showering instead of using buckets, opening a faucet all the way, and of course, leaking taps. But there is one thing that baffles him more than anything: 24-hour water supply. "New builders want to lure home buyers with their 24-hour water supply technique. But really the question is does every home require a 24-hour water supply? Our priority should be ensuring enough water for everybody in each home; not unlimited water supply in only a select few homes – we need to achieve this," he firmly advocates.
Having given a decade of his life to this initiative, Surti now wants more people to not only acknowledge water wastage but also take charge. "I am tired of doing it all alone. I hope some corporation comes forward and takes the reigns from me – I'd be more than happy to work with them; I just can't do it alone anymore," he laments, adding that he wants to give more time to his cartoons and literature.
