Civic Sense or the lack of it

In the midst of big hue and cry following the CWG scam, there was another issue that went all over in
the media: paan (chewed betel nut) stains in the bathrooms and filthy toilets in games village. One of
the enlightened souls in the organizing officials even attributed this to cultural differences in perception.
He also needed to remind that an Indian travelling abroad easily assimilates this difference in perception
into his civic sense and quickly gets adjusted. But when hes at his home country he finds it irresistible to
spit on the walls, trash the garbage on the road. As much as these events try to jolt us to the reality
around us, they still remain a passing affair.
A common sight in my locality every day - I commute to office by bus and wait at the bus stop that is in
the market area adjacent to my house. Throughout the day the market place bustles with commercial
activity - swarm of people, shoppers, vendors, snarling traffic, honking cars and buses etc., all pass
through a narrow one-way road. End of the day the road is littered with trash dumped out of shops,
disposed bottles, half-eaten food, broken bags and plastic cups and bunch of other random garbage. The
garbage keeps laying around on the road helpless, rotting until morning when the sweeper comes to
clean. The garbage lays right there, off the sidewalk, where I and my fellow commuters wait for the bus.
There is no dumpster around (at least I havent seen any). This garbage creates considerable nuisance
with its stink and gives an unpleasant sight.
The commuters are visibly ill at ease with this Sight & Smell spectacle. Occasionally, cows or stray dogs
wandering aimlessly, on catching glimpse of it, seize the opportunity to rummage through the garbage
for feast. Fully enjoying this activity, they further scatter the garbage pieces. One could often catch a
glimpse of the underpinning of mens clothing laying in tattered conditions. At this juncture while my
overwhelmed senses are still recovering from this sight, I spot two women crossing me hurriedly,
carrying a container full of stinking trash. They empty the container, in full view, onto already reeking
garbage, and in the process disturbing a huge colony of cockroaches living peacefully so far but now
scurrying for cover. Sometimes passers-by also consider it their civic responsibility to give something
back to society by contributing to this mess, so they spit into it.
This illustration is not from any small town in India but from IT hub Bangalore that is proud of itself for
being called as Silicon Valley of India.
The barrage of reportage and accounts presenting a consistent image about India, that of a dichotomy
of a rising democratic superpower fuelled by growth of information technology, yet mired in poverty
and hunger, have blunted our senses to the point that we no longer get troubled by this civic mess
around us. Instead we have learnt to live with it and accept it, the same way we have accepted and
internalized corruption the usual mode of Indian civic life. The Condition of our cities and utter apathy of
its residents is a living testimony of this fact.