H1N1: A boon in disguise

I agree with Chinese philosopher Confucius that everything is governed by the law of unintended consequences. Mumbaikars are unwittingly witnessing the phenomenon all around, now more than ever.

Have you seen how several taxi drivers today desist from spitting all over the town and put a hand over their mouth in case they cough? While mantris and mandarins see the swine flu as a perilous infection to be deftly tackled, I see it having a sobering effect on Mumbaikars. Let me explain how.

Despite pretensions of a world-class city, certain section of Mumbaikars are the filthiest people when it comes to overlooking personal hygiene. Have you seen how blasé we are when we bite into that tantalising batata wada, little releasing that the vendor may not have even washed his hands after answering the call of nature.

Readers will probably turn their noses away in revulsion now, but I don’t see them do the same when their favourite fast food peddler dips that paani puri in green chutney after cleaning his nostrils or when their bhel puriwala mixes the ingredients with the same hand he has scratched his crotch with!

The railway tracks between Virar to Churchgate and CST to Ambernath should find a mention in the Guinness Book of World Records for being the largest open air toilet. In his memoirs, Soviet Union’s former premier Nikita Khrushchev jocularly describes the phenomenon of open defecation and how he thanked the then prime minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru about the “bottom parade”. Jokes apart, scores of commuters are indeed witness to the marvel daily. What has the administration done about it?

Not that the municipal administration hasn’t tried. In 2007, BMC instituted an ambitious drive to clean the Augean stables with the clean-up Mumbai campaign. More than a thousand marshals in uniform employed from private security firms, would issue on-the-spot penalties for a range of offences from spitting and urinating in public places, to feeding birds and washing cars.

Exorbitant penalties — to the tune of Rs20,000 — were intended to be levied for failing to dispose biomedical waste properly and deter litterbugs in the world’s most clogged city. The civic administration was grappling with about 6,500 tonnes of rubble and construction waste daily, a good quantity of which was simply tossed on to the streets. But the initiative met with jeers and vociferous protests from the civic councillors. Last week, the civic corporation gave the distinctive idea a silent burial.

But over the last week, one could see the city’s character changing. I’m aghast to see auto-rickshaw drivers, who normally wouldn’t think twice before spewing paan residue on the streets, now carrying a spotless handkerchief to cover their faces while sneezing. Only yesterday, I saw a strange sight outside Lower Parel station — a hawker sporting gloves was serving batata wada to his clientele. Can you imagine that? Well, may I say it’s an ‘ironical boon’ that the minuscule micro-organisms succeeded where clean-up marshals failed.