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Plastic Kashmir and general apathy of Indians

Plastic polluting the beauty of KashmirA man who cannot endure dirt, dust, stench, noise, ugliness, disorder, heat and cold has no right to live in India...
The Continent of Circe by Nirad C. Chaudhuri

A friend of mine took this photograph while on a visit to Kashmir. Kashmir is supposed to be the heaven on earth and the fact is that it is beautiful. But, are the doors and roads of heaven made of plastic. Can’t we humans leave anything beautiful? Do we have to perform plastic surgery on everything? We tend to close our eyes to all things ugly. It is in front of us and yet we don’t see it. We move around, enjoy the beauty, praise the splendor of nature and yet we litter away.
Our roads and railway tracks are like arteries spreading this disease of ugliness. Everywhere we go, we take our ugliness with us and yet we refuse to see it. May be one day we would wake up and realize that we all are living in a big garbage dump of our own making.

Many years ago an American professor, faced with asphyxiation after paying a visit to Sabzi Mandi of Delh on his first visit to India, said to Nirad C Chaudhuri:
“Mr. Chaudhuri, in the west we conceive of cities as the material bases for organized human communities and as the centers from which cultural influences spread over the whole country. But I saw something today which I cannot understand. It was all disorganization and confusion, and squalor.”
Nirad C Chaudhuri, who at that time was a resident of Mori Darwaza (which he translated to Gate of the Sewers), replied:
“ I am not surprised Dr. X. You are, because you do not know what Indian cities are, especially in northern India. They do not contain organized societies. They are formed only by the falling detritus of the stratified rocks in the villages, which are not only quarried and dynamited but are also breaking up of themselves through an economic and social weathering to which the geological furnishes no parallel.”
Read about a foreigner who on a visit to Kashmir valley got appalled enough to do something about the floating plastic filth of the Dal Lake. He hired a Shikara and went around picking the trash. The locals soon joined in, albeit took cash payment for their services, which the foreigner paid from his own pocket. Can’t blame them for taking the money, it's the general apathy of the Indian people. At least in this case Kashmiris becomes Indians, no argument.

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