Quotable quote

"Bombay is both the beautiful parts and the ugly parts, fighting block by block, to death, for victory.

Every morning, out of the window of my study, I see men easing themselves on the rocks by the sea. Twice a day, when the tide washes out, an awful stench rises from these rocks and sweeps over the half-million-dollar flats to the east. Prahlad Kakkar, an ad film-maker, has made a film called Bumbay, a film about shitting in the metropolis. He used hidden video cameras to film people shitting, in toilets all over the island city. But that was only half the story, he told me. 'Half the population doesn't have a toilet to shit in, so they shit outside. That's five million people. If they shit half a kilo each, that's two and a half million kilos of shit each and every day. The real story is what you don't see in the film. There are no shots of women shitting. They have to shit between 2 a.m. and 5 a.m. each morning, because it's the only time they get privacy.' Kakkar discovered this window into the bowel movements of Bombayites through his driver, who took a shit whenever and wherever Kakkar got out for an appointment. When Kakkar came back, he would invariably be kept waiting outside the car for the driver, who would run back, apologizing, 'Sa'ab, I had to shit.' The driver, Rasool Mian, knew where to go in any given place in the city; he had scoped out all the best places, a location scout of the digestive system.

The World Bank recently flew in a group of experts to solve Bombay's sanitation crisis. The beneficiaries of the bank's projects are now referred to not as poor people but as 'clients'. But in this case, it was not individual human beings, but the state - the Government of Maharashtra - that was the client. The bank's solution was to propose building 100,000 public toilets. It was an absurd idea. I have seen public latrines in the slums. None of them work. People defecate all around the toilets, because the pits have been clogged for months or years. To build 100,000 public toilets is to multiply this problem a hundredfold. Indians do not have the same kind of civic sense as, say, Scandinavians. The boundary of the space you keep clean is marked at the end of the space you call your own. The flats in my building are spotlessly clean inside; they are swept and mopped every day. The public spaces - hallways, stairs, lobby, the building compound - are stained with betel spit; the ground is littered with congealed wet garbage, plastic bags, and dirt of human and animal origin. It is the same all over Bombay, in rich and poor areas alike.

This absence of a civic sense is something that everyone from the British to the Hindu nationalists of the RSS have drawn attention to, the national defect in the Indian character."

-- Suketu Mehta, "Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found"