I
retired from the government in 2010 after having rendered 35 years of
dubious service to the public, and settled down in a cottage in the
midst of thick forests near Mashobra, about twenty kilometers from
Shimla.
This
area being even colder than Shimla I had no T shirts, so when I had to
suddenly move to a different kind of jungle called New Delhi I was (what
would today be described as) sartorially challenged.
My younger son gifted me a T shirt: it had a picture of an intense looking honey badger on the chest with the caption in bold letters: DON’T GIVE A SHIT!
Now, honey badgers belong to the raccoon family and are about the same size.
They
are utterly fearless and have been known to make even leopards back
off: they will eat anything and can consume twenty five percent of their
body weight at one sitting; no sensible animal will tangle with a honey
badger, at least not a second time!
Therefore
the caption on the T shirt was spot on – the honey badger doesn’t give a
shit about anyone or anything. In short, it has an ATTITUDE.
Honey Badger challenges a lion – Photo by Mercury Press & Media Ltd
Thirty
five years in government had made one cautious and conservative in
expression: bureaucrats never call a shit – ‘shit’, we leave that to the
armed forces.
Therefore,
I was a bit non-pulsed with the T shirt’s assertive caption and, hoping
that the courage to wear it would devolve in the fullness of time, I
locked it away along with my Aam Aadmi cap and the faded photo of myself
as the seventh dwarf in a rendition of Snowwhite and the Seven Dwarfs
we had put up in nursery school many decades ago.
You
get the drift: all three were meaningful objects, but required a
certain boldness, a nonchalance, a sangfroid to be able to exhibit in
public, which I lacked.
However,
you can lock away a honey badger T shirt (or an Aam Aadmi cap) but you
can’t forget it. So the longer I stayed in Delhi, the more it weighed on
my mind.
There
was a niggling feeling at the back of my medulla oblongata that I was
missing something, that there was some message embedded in the badger’s
attitude, a De Vinci type of code, if you will.
Try as I might, my mind weakened by years of perusing the gibberish contained in government files, couldn’t grasp it.
And then one day, standing outside the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, I had my Eureka moment.
File Photo: Patients living in a toilet outside AIIMS
All
around me the pavements were swarming with families of patients going
about their daily chores – cooking, washing, defecating, breast-feeding –
while waiting for their turn in this Mecca of medical salvation.
There
was no other accommodation available for these people who had come from
all over India. The nearby bus shelters and under-passes were also full
of them.
The temperature was at least 40 degrees. Nobody gave this miserable flotsam of humanity a second glance.
Around
them the BMWs and Audis, the red beaconed VIP cars whizzed past, their
occupants – both corporate and governmental – planning how to make India
a superpower; a huge swathe of area had been cleared of all traffic and
people because Mr. Amar Singh had arrived to be lodged (naturally) in
one of the VIP wards (his kidneys having given up after years of his
wheeling and dealing), the hawkers plied their trade, the policemen and
parking attendants went about their extortion openly, the luckier
patients who had been able to see an AIIMS doctor (a mythological
creature like Bigfoot or the Yeti for most of those on the pavements)
lining up in hordes at the dozens of medical shops selling what the
hospital should have been providing, or perhaps what the hospital HAD
provided!
No one even glanced at the mass of forgotten humanity on the pavements.
In that instant the code was cracked! NOBODY GAVE A SHIT. The average Delhi-ite was a honey badger!
Start from the top of the ordurous heap that is Delhi and you will see what I mean.
The politician is so comfortably cocooned in his LOOTyen’s Delhi that he doesn’t give a shit how people survive outside it.
How,
for example, can we legitimately expect Mrs. Shiela Dikshit to give a
shit (no pun intended) about power cuts in Trilokpuri, for example, when
her own mansion is cooled by 31 air-conditioners and 15 coolers at
government expense (a recent report in the Hindustan Times)?
The
bureaucrat doesn’t give a shit about anything because he gets priority
in school admissions, hospitals, rail reservations; subsidised housing
and transport, membership of the Delhi Golf Club; and can drink himself
silly on subsidised booze at Gymkhana.
The
captains of industry don’t give a shit because they live on Aurangzeb
Road in houses financed by loans from banks (read you and I) which are
subsequently written off as non-performing assets (don’t miss the distinctly sexual connotation here – and you thought that bankers don’t have a sense of humour?!),
spend most of their waking hours rubbing shoulders and exchanging notes
(pun intended) with the commissars of government, and take their annual
vacations in Davos.
And
so it is down the food chain. The police don’t give a shit because they
have turned the rule of accountability on its head: having acquired
their postings by dint of loyal service to politicians or by spreading
the shekels among their superiors, the latter are now accountable to
THEM!
Likewise
the municipal employees. Others – lawyers, doctors, autorickshaw
wallahs, transport employees – have such a pernicious and all-pervasive
nuisance value – that they don’t have to give a shit about anyone, be it
the courts, the government or the general public.
No
one gives a damn about the environment – not the Forest Department
which sees its primary role as giving permissions for felling of
thousands of trees every year, not the PWD whose sole mission is to
destroy the Ridge as soon as possible, not the DDA or Jal Board which
cannot distinguish between a river and a sewer line, not the builders
pumping millions of litres of under groundwater without any approvals.
The alpha male of these badgers, however, has to be the Delhi motorist.
His
aggression, single minded objective of running over anything in his
path, refusal to give way to ambulances and fire engines, propensity to
shoot other motorists, contempt for rules and traffic policemen – all
indicate that this sub species is still evolving and may one day take
over the whole city.
At
the bottom of the food chain are the people who GET all the shit: the
humble, ordinary folks going about their daily chore of just surviving
in this jungle.
But
sometimes, say once in two or three years when they are pushed to the
wall, they revolt and attack in true badger style. On such rare
occasions they too don’t give a shit – burning buses and police
vehicles, facing water cannons, clashing with police, shutting down
large parts of this dung heap. The latest such incident was in December
2012.
And so Delhi is now the most polluted city in the world.
Of
all Indian cities it has the highest number of cases of sexual
molestation, rape and car thefts. Twelve hundred people die in road
accidents every year.
Sixty percent of its population lives in slums [which the government has abolished by calling them instead JJ (Juggi-Jhompari) clusters or unauthorised colonies].
It
has lost 25% of its green lungs – the Ridge – in the last fifteen years
to construction, mining and encroachment by the same Davos types
mentioned earlier.
The
Yamuna is, scientifically speaking, no longer a river but a drain –
only 5% of its total length lies in Delhi but this city contributes to
80% of its pollution: when the river leaves Delhi it is organically
dead.
It
is scientifically proved that species evolve to suit – and better
confront their external environment. That is exactly what the honey
badgers of Delhi are doing.
Delhi’s
environment has been continuously changing for the last thousand years
or so – don’t forget that today’s Delhi is the seventh city on this
site.
From
being the centre of Mughal culture, British imperialism and old world
gentility it has now become some kind of smorgasbord of the worst
qualities of its neighbouring states, the arrogance of power, the
corrupting influence of money, and the unruliness of millions of
migrants who have no stakes in the city.
You just can’t afford to give a shit here.
Next
month, to commemorate the completion of three years of my stay here, I
propose to take out that honey badger T-shirt and proudly don it (the
AAM AADMI cap will have to wait a bit longer).
I’ve earned the privilege of being a honey badger.
Avay
Shukla retired from the Indian Administrative Service in December 2010.
He is a keen environmentalist and loves the mountains.....he has made
them his home.
Dear Chinese media,
