Look inwards to clean Mumbai

Can mind power and positive thinking help clean up Mumbai? WAYE, a youth initiative of Art of Living, certainly thinks so. In a four-day workshop partnered by DNA, WAYE’s instructors got 1,700 youngsters between the ages of 18 and 30, to “get inspired” and transform Mumbai. Instructors Khurshed Batliwala, Dinesh Ghodke and Kavita Khanna discuss how they plan to make sure young Mumbaikars internalise, and then act on, making their city a cleaner, more liveable place

We always start with the premise that every human being is born wonderful, with spiritual values. With time, these get clouded by stress and ignorance.

If we can find the tools to bring a person out of the daily stress, anger and frustration he feels, we can restore him to his natural, pristine self. This is the basis for our motto, clean on the inside, clean on the outside.

The idea is that is you are happy and have a sense of wellbeing on the inside, you will be much more willing to improve things in the environment around you. If you are filthy on the inside, you will not be able to see the dirt all around you, and will, subsequently, not have the desire to clean it up either. That’s probably how and why so many

Mumbaikars continue to make a life in a city rapidly going to seed. Responsibility of any sort, is a function of peace of mind; bring peace to the person, and he will be much more amenable and disposed to positive acts.

At the WAYE workshop, we want to ignite positive feelings in the young people attending the course, and then channel their positive energy into cleaning up the city. After all, society is all about people, so if you want to live peacefully in society, you have to make sure to bring peace of mind to all the others in society.

For our Mumbai transformation project, we plan to split these 1,700-odd youngsters into groups of 20 or 30 and assign a road to each of these groups. That is, give them a portion of a road in the city — maybe 100-200 metres — to keep clean.

They will work in stages; first they will pick up litter, then convince the residents of the area to try and green the street (even putting potted plants in their windows would help), and later undertake garbage segregation and removal.

Later, we also plan to employ rainwater harvesting in these areas and try to have farmers’ markets, a concept that we already follow as part of our 100 mile-lunch programme at Art of Living.

This implies that we can only cook and eat things produced within a 100-mile radius of a particular area, and this drastically cuts down on our ecological footprint. We have tied up with state government and BMC officials, as well as corporate houses; this will be a long-term project.

Mumbai, as a city, is, after all, all about the streets. If you clean up the roads, you clean up the city. While we do have courses with younger people — some of our youngest participants have been eight-year-olds — we decided to involve this age group in the Mumbai transformation project because not only are young people idealistic, energetic and rebellious, they can actually do things, as opposed to, say, school-going kids.

Moreover, we really rely on the basic, innate goodness of people. Because it’s only after certain things happen, that people become sceptical, cynical and put on a mask. When you are feeling good about yourself, you will want to do things for others.

And when we talk of being clean on the inside, we usually talk to these youngsters about saying no to drugs, tobacco and alcohol. And the tools we us to inspire them are very simple: yoga, pranayam and sudarshan kriya, which involves regulating your breathing and bringing it in sync with the rhythms of your body and the rhythms of the world outside. Because we believe if you transform individuals, you can transform the city.
dnasunday@dnaindia.net