The Mahatma’s Sadness… By Subrato Bagchi
A lot has been written and spoken about Gandhigiri after Lage Raho Munna Bhai… ;) I recently stumbled upon an article written by Subrato Bagchi of Mindtree Consulting. I re-publish it here FYI
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At first glance, our poor sense of hygiene seems to be rooted in poor education and poverty. It is not .
WHEN the Mahatma returned from South Africa, he was pained by the pervasive lack of cleanliness among Indians. The most talked about story is the one in which he was travelling in a train. A co-passenger who kept coughing would spit the phlegm on the floor of the train. The Mahatma took his handkerchief and cleaned the phlegm with his own hands. In Sabarmati, he started the practice of cleaning toilets, and insisted that ‘Ba’ do the same. Even in his writings, he expressed pain over the lack of sensitivity among Indians for hygiene and cleanliness. It would appear that the problem is rooted in poverty, poor infrastructure and education. The truth is, it is not.
1990: I was posted in California. My work included looking after Indian software engineers who came for six months to a year to work on projects. Typically, two engineers shared an apartment. Most of them were bachelors. One day, an infuriated apartment manager called me up and blasted me. She demanded that I come and see how my people ‘lived in a pig sty’. I drove to the apartment complex at once.
She took me to one particular apartment where two engineers had stayed. The tour began with the toilets. The tiles were covered with mildew and soap stains. The floor was black, there was hair all over. The mirror on the washbasin was covered with water stains and shaving foam. The basin made my stomach turn. She showed me the carpet - it had not been vacuumed since they had moved in. The sofa was littered with food. And in the kitchen, dirty utensils which had been used over several days were piled at the side of the counter.
I was speechless. Apart from the complete lack of sensitivity, I was dumbfounded by how the residents found living like that acceptable. After all, they came to the same place everyday and cooked, ate and slept there! A thought that crossed my mind was the poor allowances that were paid to the engineers. Back then, the RBI permitted remittance of $1,800 per person, per month as ‘living allowance’. Out of that, an engineer kept $900 for personal expenses and food, and used the balance to pool in with two others and rent a car and an apartment. For some time, I thought that the poverty of the mind began somewhere there.
2004: The Indian software industry has arrived. We do not have issues with how much we can spend on our travelling engineers. In every country where our people go, we pay comparable wages. Yet, the other day, a pained customer of an Indian software company brought to light a repetition of what I had witnessed in 1990. This time, the customer had to bear the brunt. He brought photographs of a place he had rented for visiting Indian engineers. The housekeepers who managed the place were exasperated, and refused to clean it any further. The gentleman had to ask for expert help to clean the place. The expert agency had one look, and said they would bring it back to shape if they were paid $3,200! Meanwhile, word had spread and locals there refused to rent to people of Indian origin.
In Japan, children who go to kindergarten are taught to clean their toilets. A child who realises that it is not one man’s job to create filth and another’s to clean it grows up with greater sensitivity. Years back, when I was working on Six Sigma in one of our earlier companies, a group of visiting experts from Motorola told me: “The day your toilets are Six Sigma, your products and services will become Six Sigma.”
We have created great educational institutions. But what value is an education that fails to teach us ambassadorship? What good is our reputation as software designers if residents in a small European town do not want to rent to us because we leave their houses in a defaced condition? When I was a little boy, my father taught me a simple message. He said: “Always leave the newspaper and the toilet the way you would like to find them.” For me, that was good enough. For the rest of us, do we need to make the Father of the Nation return again?
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I remembered this article, which I had read long back, when I glanced through today’s morning papers…Chennai Short of Dumping Space.
The article spoke about the over dumping that is happening in Chennai… Well written. ;)
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What I’m wondering is how, we people can live without even such basic self-hygeine. :-(
I hope that I have conveyed the intended message through this post.!
Your comments are most welcome. :-)
