By Ratna Manucha
The well curated recently concluded Rajpur Nature Festival was a sight for sore eyes…but one thing stood out like a sore thumb. The round tables spread out on the lower ground of the MDDA Park for people to sit and eat had fairly big sized stickers smack in the middle, proclaiming ‘PLEASE USE DUSTBINS’. Yes, in capital letters.
Why were these stickers placed on the table in the first place? Don’t people have basic civic sense? Apparently not.
Turned out they had been put up by the Waste Warriors in plain sight, obviously because they had predicted what was going to happen (kudos to you guys, for the great work that you continue to do).
But guess what? Surprise! The tables were still littered with plates strewn around with half eaten food…circling the glaringly obvious sticker asking people to throw their plates in the bins which were liberally dotted all over the grounds …in fact some were placed right next to the tables. Now, there are only three things one can conclude from this –
- People can’t read.
- People don’t read.
- People read yet choose not to care.
Out of these three, the most dangerous is the third point.
Have we become so insensitive as a community that we have absolutely stopped caring about others? ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’ and ‘Do unto others as you want others to do unto you’, were the common sayings that we were all brought up on and which we practiced with utter conviction.
We have all the time in the world to stand at stalls, buy the food, carry it to the tables which have so thoughtfully been placed for our convenience, sit, talk and eat, and eat and talk at leisure and then, once we are done, walk away without a backward glance, leaving the dirty plates for someone else to pick up. For cleaning up the clutter we made there is no time…or no inclination?
What changed? When did the ‘Me First’ generation come into existence? Live for myself. Spend on myself. Keep my premises clean, or at least try to, yet I don’t bat an eyelid when I throw litter outside my neighbour’s gate or from the rolled down window of my moving car. As long as it is not anywhere near me, I don’t care.
Out of sight and out of mind are the new norms people live by, today.
Short of shaking people out of their apathy, there is precious little one can do. Laziness has climbed to another level. Wanting others to clean up our mess – both literally and figuratively is the new norm. And since everybody has climbed on to the same bandwagon, our surroundings, our state and our country as a whole is one large mess.
And life goes on…
(Ratna Manucha, author and columnist lives, dreams and writes in Dehradun, her happy place.)
