Forget marshals, we all need anti-dirt Harrys

We, the affluent Mumbaikars, are the greatest filth creators

The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation wants to position civic marshals on the city’s streets to monitor your hygiene habits. It is not a bad idea at all. Dirty Harry cleaned San Francisco of scum in 1971, in Don Siegel’s tour de force of vigilante worship. Mumbai may be closer in wealth and cosmopolitan character to San Francisco today than it was in the 70s. But many Mumbaikars need to be harried, even today, away from dirty tendencies like littering, spitting, and bladder spluttering.

The clean-up war can succeed only if the civic body and the city’s influentials purge their minds of a mean-minded misconception: only yahoos drop rubbish and body fluids in the open.

A few days ago, I was enjoying a quiet drink with a friend who prowls on the higher branches of an FMCG company’s top-cat tree. Midway between his second drink, he remembered that he wanted an accounting detail from his immediate subordinate. That ‘junior’ was an Ivy League graduate who drives a Corolla and Condor-watches in the Andes. When my friend called the junior on the cellphone, the latter boyishly reported that he was relieving himself on a south Mumbai wall and would call back when he was lightened by a few millilitres.

And to think we mindlessly attribute the city’s stench to illiterate boors, that is, anyone who does not pretend to know the difference between Chardonnay and Charles Sobhraj.

Further, we think it is fashionable to vilify the government for any new regulation that affects our routine. The vilification becomes viciously frothy if, can you ever imagine, the regulation presupposes our follies and civic inadequacies. We already hear the screams that unintelligibly argue that the marshals will be driven out in days. Other doubters are blubbering with dark disdain that government ought to create better garbage-collection chains and build better public lavatories. That contention does have a case, but it seems too simple minded to presume that the government has nothing to do but to pick up after us and mop up the stains on the walls.

One of the reasons why we do not have a decent system of public urinals is that the business houses, which take corporate social responsibility very seriously, think that sponsoring toilets will stain their image. So they invest in roundabout shrubbery on major traffic intersections and stake their company logos on the grass. They don’t realise that just across the road, an overpaid corporate chieftain is soiling a wall.

If we want a clean city, we must come clean and admit that we all fail to fulfil our part of the responsibility. We, the Mumbaikars, need to keep ash-trays in our cars, and a small garbage carrier in our bags while we travel on trains for those empty chakna packets. The government should recognise that without an efficient waste-disposal system, even the most well-meaning clean-up initiative will end up in dustbins. And corporate Mumbai should jettison its squeamishness and include urban sanitation in its beautification plans.

In the end, our city’s wellbeing rests on what the most prescient Greek lawmaker, Solon, called eunomia, or good order. He declared that a city becomes strong not just because of competent governance but because of eunomia in everyday life and behaviour. Without eunomia, Mumbai will be divided into two population sets: the marshals and the urinators. Now, that would be something straight out of Jonathan Swift’s imagination.

Email:raghu@dnaindia.net