Cooperation and development

In a certain state in a certain country, the Minister in charge of the environment came across a video clip showing a man and woman carrying out acts of an environmentally friendly nature. He therefore downloaded it to his phone and passed it on to the Minister for cooperation, an agreeable fellow who cooperated by watching the video clip in the House. This attracted the attention of the Minister for woman and child development - who very rightly considered it his job to investigate the state of development of the woman in the video. While the latter two were engrossed in studying the developmental and cooperative nature of the activities depicted therein (which taken to their logical conclusion might even have resulted in nation-building!) they were filmed by a TV crew. The rest is history, of a sort.

As explained above, the Ministers were only doing their job - and with exemplary dedication, given that some of the scenes in the video are said to have been stress-inducing. So all the fuss seems to be about nothing at all, but for one important point. These worthy gentlemen were showing disrespect to the legislature of their state at a time when it was discussing a serious crisis: the hoisting of the flag of a foreign country in Bellary, the historic city after which the surrounding district is also named. The flag-hoisting was presumably an act of sedition, so it certainly should have engrossed the Ministers. To be sure it was a confusing story, since it emerged that it was not people friendly to the foreign country who raised its flag, but people hostile to it. Maybe that's what made the whole matter very confusing to the Ministers, who decided to take care of their office work instead?

But they should have paid attention, since it's the most exciting thing to happen in a rather dull part of the country. The last time Bellary was in the news, it was about something genuinely boring: the illegal mining and export of iron ore, about which this long-winded report was eventually written. The report estimates the value of illicit iron ore exported during 2007-10 to be roughly 100,000,000,000 rupees, or 2 billion dollars. If I were ever to attend an assembly session discussing such a piffling matter it's more than likely I would prefer to browse videos, cooperative or otherwise, on my phone.

A pleasant walk from Colaba

If, like me, you enjoy getting directions from Google Maps, then I have something for you to try out. It happened to me by accident. I was trying to figure out how to get from my place of work at the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge to a housing complex called Beaulands Close. It's a half-hour walk and will be my daily commute when, at the end of March, I'm evicted from Trinity College and have to live the life of a common Commoner (rather than a Visiting Fellow Commoner as at present).

Now Google Maps offers the choice of driving directions and walking directions. When I clicked on the latter I didn't notice that my starting point had been set on this computer, by default, as "Colaba". So the website obediently spelled out the walking directions from Colaba, Mumbai, to Beaulands Close in Cambridge. Modestly starting with "Caution: This route may be missing sidewalks or pedestrian paths", it informs me that the walk of 9,705 km will take me 65 days and 22 hours. Evidently the algorithm doesn't allow for any resting on the way.

So here's how you would go, assuming you placed your faith in Google Maps. Starting in Colaba, you pass Hotel Landmark (I've never heard of it) and New India Cooperative Bank and head for Malet Bandar. Here you catch the ferry to Kandla. Upon disembarking, you walk briskly through Gujarat into Rajasthan, the directions being a series of "turn right", "turn left" with the occasional fascinating detail such as "pass by Shahid Bhikaram Petrol Pump". Not that a pedestrian would have any reason to stop there! Eventually, one of the left turns gets you onto "SH 40". Then you're asked to turn right and continue.

Though this is nowhere mentioned in the directions, you have just entered Pakistan. If you have not by this point been arrested or shot to bits (Google assumes you will handle this without their help) you walk through Umarkot and take Mirpur Khas road, passing rather close to Shahdadpur (where my father had once been a district judge). Then it's on to Thar Road followed by a quick 50 km stroll on Arror Bachal Shah Road which deposits you on Sukkur Bridge.

Pausing only to admire the Sindhu (Indus) river, though Google does not instruct you to do so, you continue past Shikarpur and, at Jacobabad, make a left and a right onto Quetta Road. 300 kilometres later you turn right onto - believe it or not - Brewery Road! It's not beer that's brewing around here, methinks, but possibly a global conspiracy or two. A right turn onto Sabzal Road takes you into Quetta, where you can visit the ancestral home of my mother's mother's family or at least view the rubble into which it must have collapsed by now given the earthquake-prone (and more recently, war-prone) nature of the region. A hundred kilometres on Chaman Bypass, and then it's time to take a momentous step which Google Maps breathlessly describes as: "Continue on to A75".

This is their way of (not) telling you that you've just entered Afghanistan. Soon you pass through Kandahar and then the streets have names: go straight on Darb-e-Kandahar Street, continue on to Paye Hisar Street and turn left at Chowk-e-Golha onto Jada-i-bank Khoon (جاده بانک خون). If some friendly soul is trying to extract your "khoon" at this point don't worry, you're already in the major town of Herāt, which according to Wikipedia dates back to Avestan times and was traditionally known for its wine. It was also described by Herodotus as the bread-basket of Central Asia. So just order a glass of claret and a buttered roll. Thus restored, off you go. You aren't anywhere near Beaulands Close, so don't take a nap yet!

After Herāt you turn left on to A77, then continue on to A388. The reason people are looking at you strangely is that you've wandered into Turkmenistan, where you should be speaking Turkmen rather than Dari and Pashto, the languages you had just managed to learn. There are almost no cities on this stretch, and Google's directions offer just a dozen "turn right"s interspersed with a similar number of "turn left"s. But soon some picturesquely named towns loom in the distance: Qoshkopir, Dashoguz and Konye-Urgench. The last-named is a World Heritage Site and for very good reason: it contains the unexcavated ruins of Khwarezm, whence came Mr. Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī, the mathematician once known in Europe as Algoritmi, the origin of the word "Algorithm".

From here it's a hop and a skip into Uzbekistan, where "continue straight" are all the directions you'll need for the next 300 km. No World Heritage sites, or cities of any kind, mark your unceremonious exit (and the end of your chance to learn Uzbek) as you find yourself in Kazakhstan, the country made famous by Sacha Baron-Cohen whose cousin Simon is a Fellow of Trinity College and whom I therefore sometimes see at lunch. You're not yet in Cambridge, but now at least you have a connection. Well, sort of. I don't think the gentleman who called himself Borat is a hero in Kazakhstan, for reasons you would immediately guess if you saw the movie.

This blog posting is getting rather lengthy, but you still have to pass through Russia, Belarus and Lithuania, and now Google Maps starts to become a little obscure, for example: "181. Turn left onto Автодорожников", and my favourite: "198. Continue onto Unknown road". But presently you get to Klaipėda, Lithuania, from where you catch a ferry to Kiel, Germany. From there it's a relatively short and scenic walk to Esbjerg in Denmark where you hop on another ferry to Harwich (pronounced "Harritch"), in the UK.

The smell of boiling vegetables assails your nostrils as you disembark, reminding you that you haven't eaten or slept for 65 days. But now it's a relatively simple matter to walk through various Church Streets and School Lanes, then on to Newmarket Road and Cheddars Lane, until a left on De Freville Avenue finally brings you to Beaulands Close. If you leave Colaba late next week you're likely to reach on a Sunday morning in April. In which case, feel free to take a quick shower while I make breakfast from Gits Instant Dosa Mix. My Telugu friends in York have promised to make Chutney-Pudi to go with it. This crunchy spicy substance, commonly known in South India as "gunpowder", is guaranteed to provide a delicious reminder of your journey.

Dining with dons

Nearly three weeks into my stay in Cambridge I've made the discovery that once things are going smoothly, weekends tend to be slightly dull. But only in a relative sense, i.e. compared to Bombay. Cambridge actually comes alive on Saturday morning, with hordes of tourists walking around, one saying to the other "that college we just passed was St John's" and the other replying "What? Where?". By 4 PM it starts to get dark, shops close at 6 and then there is a relative lull as people disappear off the streets. Around 11 PM they emerge again, having used the intervening five hours to become well and truly drunk, and hang out on the street (below my window, alas) engaging in rowdy behaviour until the early hours.

I had decided this Saturday would be my night to take the plunge - by dressing up and dining at the Hall at Trinity (as a Visiting Fellow I can do this whenever I like with advance notice) without any known person to keep me company. Before this I attended an organ concert at the neighbouring King's College, whose chapel is the size of a few dozen cathedrals. These concerts are open to the public and free - and last for just 45 minutes, which is about as long as one can sit inside a dimly-lit and freezing cold church, however spectacular. The attendance was sparse (I wonder what it will be like when really huge hordes of tourists arrive in summer!), everyone was a tourist and most could not care less about music.

The concert opened with a Bach Sonata (BWV 530, if you must know) and this is not anything like the only Bach organ piece I know well - the Toccata and Fugue in D minor, which fairly blasts gusts of wind out of gigantic organ pipes. This Sonata by contrast was muted and subtle, at times barely audible, with the smaller slightly squeaky pipes doing much of the work. The tourists (all English/European/American) were bored and chatted through this, which was distracting. Then came excerpts from "La Nativite du Seigneur" by the French 20th century composer Messiaen. His music is rather abstract and the first three excerpts were interesting but slightly hard for me to grasp at first hearing, though I did detect evidence of Messiaen's varied influences ranging from birdsong to Indonesian gamelan. These pieces also were muted and mostly made use of the small squeaky organ pipes. By this time the tourists were walking out. But then came the finale "Dieu parmi nous" and now that God was in the picture, the story changed as it inevitably must. There was a great deal of huffing and puffing by the monstrous pipes, which gave forth huge gusts of sound that swirled and resonated and reverberated around the enormous chapel. I swear you could almost see it, and it seemed to go on even after the music had stopped.

This part of the evening was easy. How would I deal with Trinity? I lunch there regularly but dinner is a much more serious business and I'd only done this once before, in the company of friends. Recalling what I had been taught, I walked into the parlour, a wee bit self-conscious in my pin-striped suit, admired the nicely burning coal fire (only it's not - I've been informed it's a gas fire burning over fake glowing coals), nodded at everyone (there were only two people there) and helped myself to a pre-dinner glass of Gewurztraminer. Then I settled down in an armchair and read the International Herald Tribune, waiting for the dinner call. Just as I was beginning to fear it would be a very quiet evening, who should walk into the parlour but Amartya Sen, accompanied by another distinguished economist, Luigi Pasinetti. I introduced myself and soon found myself accompanying them to the Hall. Here we stood behind our chairs, a gong was struck and Prof. Sen (as a former Master of Trinity) along with the Vice-Master recited alternate lines of the following:

A. Oculi omnium in te sperant Domine:
B. Et tu das escam illis in tempore.
A. Aperis tu manum tuam,
B. Et imples omne animal benedictione.

For those who don't know Latin, this means "thanks, God, for the incredibly tender grilled breast of goose that we are about to get, making this one of the best Trinity meals I've had so far". We then sat down and the conversation, as well as the 1998 vintage red wine, flowed pleasurably. It's not often I get to dine with someone I admire so much! I also sensed that Prof. Sen welcomed the opportunity to chat a little about India. I asked him for his take on the Anna Hazare business and and he said "well if you're a fan then you're going to be disappointed by my answer". So in the end we sort of agreed, though we didn't come to a conclusion on whether that movement had now run out of steam (he seemed to think so) or that it will rise again because it resonates with the middle-class (which was my view). Later we also talked about Sonia Gandhi where again we agreed on basics (he thinks well of her, as do I) but differed on how important had been the role of her Italian background (my view: growing up in the Euro-left bastion of Torino, a city deeply influenced by Antonio Gramsci who studied there and the economist Piero Sraffa who was born there, had a major impact on her thinking. Prof. Sen's view: that she became what she is by intelligently studying and understanding the situation in which she found herself. Actually both views could be correct, so again we did not really disagree). Prof. Sen did mention, by the way that he was introduced to Sonia-ji right here in Trinity College, on The Ave (the road with moss-covered trees that featured in a previous posting on my blog), by her then boyfriend Rajiv Gandhi.

Subsequently, over the rhubarb crumble and custard, I conversed with the person on my left, a genial professor of biology who among other things is Director of the Museum of Zoology in Cambridge. He cordially invited me to visit this museum. This happens a lot - at a previous High Table meal I had met the very kind Dean of the Chapel at Trinity, who invited me to attend Choral Evensong. Sometimes I feel I owe an invitation to these people in return. Since I'm co-organising a 6-month research programme on String Theory at the Isaac Newton Institute, I could of course invite these worthy Dons to see the Institute. But all they would find is a bunch of people sitting around drinking coffee. Perhaps I could pass it off as another kind of zoological museum...
 

Web of darkness

Pretty much every James Bond movie since the beginning of time has been about villains out to take control of the world. The villains usually do this by manufacturing a bomb with blue flashing lights all over it and a sign saying "Warning: This bomb will bring about the end of the world". They are foiled at the last minute by an immaculately dressed Bond floating/sailing/driving/flying/bungee jumping into the heart of the mess. But the problem with these movies, entertaining as they are, is the basic premise that someone would be able to "take control of the world".

Now that's all changed. Unknown to a lot of people outside the US (I was also only dimly aware until yesterday) there is an ongoing attempt to take over the internet. Which, in case you haven't yet realised, would be exactly the same thing as taking over the world. This awful piece of villainy is to be perpetrated using a bill called SOPA currently being pushed in the USA. As a result Wikipedia, a place I consider my second home, is offline today in protest (and therefore the link in the previous sentence is not to the Wikipedia entry on SOPA but to a video on the website of The Guardian). More precisely, English-language Wikipedia is offline though French, Italian and even Hindi Wikipedia are very much around. Please go check for yourself by following this link if you speak French and this one if you speak Hindi.

I can't tell you much about the consequences of SOPA, but can highly recommend this recent article from The Guardian. Meanwhile, if things get too bad then avid supporters of freedom of speech may consider getting into Onion Routing. Oops, you can't read about it on Wikipedia today. Try again tomorrow.

Bustle in my hedgerow

Two weeks since I got to Cambridge, the world has turned upside-down, twice. Strictly from my personal point of view. The first week started unpromisingly with lost baggage, failure to open a bank account, and a sniffly cold. Then, just as things were looking up again, I had a literally shattering experience - I dropped my Samsung smartphone and cracked its "unbreakable" gorilla-glass front. In the second week, by contrast, all is bliss (except for the poor phone, which is on its way to Samsung India for repairs). Britain is back to being Britain.

That is to say, sometimes cold and rainy, and sometimes even colder and sunny. I seriously envy them their weather - the mere fact that they have it, while we in India don't (for us, one day = the next day in most places at most times of year). On sunny days in the countryside (well Cambridge isn't quite countryside, but it's a five minute walk from there) the birds are twittering, rabbits scampering and a few hardy berries and winter flowers busy growing. Frost covers the fields like a fine sprinkle of icing sugar. Moss likewise coats tree trunks, making them look like gigantic "hara-bhara" kababs. (I'll admit it's dinnertime and I'm getting hungry.)

Moss-covered tree trunks on The Avenue, Trinity College

Meanwhile, and this is a key point about Britain, the hedges are tidy. One could not imagine Britain without its tidy hedges. All Britons are trained from birth to trim hedges, but since they spend evenings at the pub and mornings suffering a hangover, they must be doing this just after midnight. Because I've never seen anyone actually trimming a hedge. And yet the evidence is unmistakable. Like the 91 GeV peak that dramatically signalled the Z-boson, the trimmed hedges are convincing evidence that Britons crawl out of their homes in the dead of night, gardening shears in hand.

So important indeed are hedges to the national culture that the British rock band Led Zeppelin, on an album whose lyrics mostly went "gonna make you sweat, gonna make you groove", felt constrained to invoke their beloved countryside with lines like "if there's a bustle in your hedgerow, don't be alarmed now" and "in a tree by the brook, there's a songbird that sings". Now although songbirds are aplenty, there has never - ever - been the slightest bustle in any hedgerow I've seen. But that must be because I don't walk around just after midnight.

Each morning I cross the Great Court of Trinity College, followed by a half-dozen pairs of watchful eyes under bowler hats, all of whom simultaneously nod and say "good morning" whenever |x-y| < 1.5 metres. Of course Trinity has more than just hedges. Its Great Court is a rectangle made up of dissimilar buildings all mysteriously flowing into each other to form an incredibly harmonious scene. The only slight touch of discord is the chapel. Too long to fit in the Court, it therefore - almost literally - smashes its way past the Porter's Lodge and comes to rest on Trinity Street. Where I can observe it if I thrust my head out of my window. Newton's lodgings were at this intersection point and if he had ever, during his long years at Trinity, come running out onto the street naked except for a ridiculous wig shouting "Eureka" (or more likely "Natura valde simplex est et sibi consona") I would have seen him. Had I been here at the time, of course. As it is, I only get to see drunken people brawling at the spot.

And so to the question everyone has been wanting to ask. What about British food? What about it, indeed. Just as "tidy" sums up the countryside, "stodgy" sums up the food. Just think of the word "pudding". Say it over and over, slowly. Doesn't it sound like something leaden that will sit on your stomach all night and induce nightmares? Well that's true enough, but puddings are actually the best part of British food. What one needs to worry about are things like pies and stews drowned in the legendary and eternally mysterious "brown sauce".

They do try to be adventurous. At the Trinity dining hall (about which more another time) they recently served Thai Green Curry. I'm not colour blind and I could tell right away it wasn't green. I tasted it and discovered they had left out the crucial ingredient. To paraphrase Cambridge's most famous local band, Pink Floyd: "If you don't put in chillies, you can't make Thai Curry. How can you make Thai Curry if you don't put in chillies?". I'll try telling that to the bowler hats tomorrow, but my days of walking through Great Court may end sooner than expected.

And there's another part of Cambridge where the Gown ends and the Town begins. There you find rows of shops called "Al Amin" and "Curry Queen" and "Al-Casbah". Most of these are run by Bangladeshi ex-auto-rickshaw-drivers. They sit in the back counting their profits as gownless Brits pop in (I LOVE this phrase! Pop in. Pop in. Pop in. You try it now.) The customers eat the hottest curries ever and drink themselves silly. Then the good Bangladeshis go home where, presumably, a civilised Bengali meal awaits them. After that they sleep well and don't even bother to trim the hedges. I can understand.

Lenin and the Indian press

Today a reader posted this comment on my most recent posting about hygiene:

Hi Sunil,

I hope you don't mind if I raise a point unrelated to this blog post. Perhaps you are aware of the fact that Times of India is one of the biggest culprits in the paid news scandal. Here are two links that you may find interesting.

www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2011/feb/20/press-freedom-india

www.thehindu.com/opinion/columns/sainath/article2523649.ece

I have seen you referring to ToI articles in multiple blog posts, and this comment was prompted by such an observation. (However, I don't mean to say that we should be boycotting ToI.)

Regards.
Sayan 

By its own admission this comment is unrelated to hygiene (except quite distantly) but relates to concerns I've raised on this blog in the past and to some thoughts that have been forming in my mind of late. So I thought it's a good idea to quote it here to open the discussion.

The Guardian link above dates from February 2011 and recounts a "sting" operation on the Times of India group. The stinger, posing as the PR person for a private company, asked a company called Medianet owned by Bennett Coleman (who are also the owners of the Times of India) to help him buy coverage of his company's party in the Delhi Times. Medianet agreed to do so for a fee and said it could be dressed up as a news story if celebrities were present. It also offered help with purchasing celebrities.

The other link, from The Hindu, is an article by the respected journalist P. Sainath (about whom I've briefly blogged here in the past). It concerns a different paid news scandal, involving the former Chief Minister of Maharashtra, Ashok Chavan, and Marathi newspapers Maharastra Times and Lokmat (the former being the Marathi version of Times of India and therefore belonging again to our friends Bennett Coleman). These worthy journals, among others, carried full pages of articles purporting to be news items that lavished praise on the CM ahead of elections.  Sometimes identical articles appeared in different newspapers. Often the page was entirely free of explicit advertisements, contrary to usual practice.

Now the CM's own financial declarations show no payment having been made to these papers. So either  the press was being generous to the politician from the goodness of its heart (and rival papers were somehow producing identical articles), or else a cozy deal had been reached between the press and politicians. To investigate this question the Press Council of India formed a sub-committee that produced a report from whose preamble I quote:

The reader of the publication ... is deceived into believing that what is essentially an advertisement is in fact, independently produced news content. By not officially declaring the expenditure incurred on planting "paid news" items, the candidate standing for election violates the Conduct of Election Rules, 1961 ... Finally, by not accounting for the money received from candidates, the concerned media company or its representatives are violating the provisions of the Companies Act, 1956 as well as the Income Tax Act, 1961.

The Election Commission of India tried to probe this case but Mr Chavan fought back with a court case seeking to prevent them. This case was dismissed recently by the Delhi High Court. The Press Council sub-committee's report, by its own admission based on a lot of circumstantial evidence, was sought to be buried by the Council which replaced it with a censored summary of its own. But recently the Central Information Commission has ordered the PCI to publish the full 71-page report of the Sub-Committee and you can find this (along with the shorter censored Council report) on this page. Besides describing the cases I've referred to above, the long report also names certain private companies (Videocon, Kinetic Motors and Gillette among others) that are suspected to have paid newspapers/TV channels to have their products favourably described in a "news" segment. The full report is worth reading though the reliance on circumstantial evidence is something of a disappointment, as they themselves admit:

Though the phenomenon of widespread practice of "paid news" has been verbally confirmed and vindicated by politicians and campaign managers of political parties, there is no recorded documentation that would firmly establish that there has been exchange of money between media houses/advertisement agents/journalists and politicians/political parties. The problem in establishing the practice of "paid news" is simply one of obtaining hard proof or conclusive evidence.

If you take the above story together with past incidents such as the Niira Radia scandal (about which I blogged a year ago) in which the unethical behaviour of major mediapersons Barkha Dutt and Vir Sanghvi was umasked in their own voice in wiretapped telephone recordings, then a rather ugly picture emerges of the Indian press. However clearly it's a very divided house. I'm proud to note that the PCI report mentions the late journalist Ajit Bhattacharjea, who was married to my Masi these last many years, as an example of someone who has consistently pushed for better press ethics.

Today Ms Dutt and Mr Sanghvi have received no punishment and are totally rehabilitated, unlike some of the business people and politicians they seem to have facilitated. Companies like Medianet will perhaps continue to sell news pages and celebrities to private companies. At some level I wonder if the readership even cares. Lenin would have been pleased, for he once said: The press should be not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, but also a collective organizer of the masses. 

They're doing a good job.

The hygiene challenge

During a recent vacation, which offered time to muse and ponder, I found myself becoming more and more fascinated by the subject of good hygiene and its opposite, public filth. It started in Agra where I had to wait over an hour in a queue to enter the grounds of the Taj Mahal, in a narrow lane surrounded by choked sewers, cow dung and flies. A huge goat in a blue sweater (I'm not making this up, see below) stood at the entrance of a jewellery shop the whole time, decorating it with a shower of turd pellets which seemed to bother no one but myself.

By the time I was admitted to the relatively spotless grounds of the Taj, I was in no mood to appreciate the symmetry and tranquillity of Shah Jahan's monument to love. So I started to ponder over root causes. What are the reasons why India is so hygienically challenged? Government or people? Urban or rural? Modern or ancient? Is religion a cause of the problem or does it help? Poverty must be relevant, but exactly to what extent? How do we compare with other countries (or regions of other countries) where the economic situation is comparable?

I recalled that on my return to India about 28 years ago, I was assured by a few eminent members of the chattering classes that India was a "slovenly country" and I was making a mistake coming back to it. From then until today I've heard that type of distanced criticism about India a number of times and it is frustrating, since lots of tongue-clicking is not an answer to any problem. Nor is the standard explanation of the chatterati for every problem in India: that it's somehow down to corrupt or apathetic politicians. I've started to think, more and more, that the most interesting answers lie in other directions, and that the chatterers about whom I'm being so uncharitable are an important part of the problem. But more about that later.

Over the last couple of days I've spent some time surfing the net on the topic of India's hygiene problem. But there seems to be very little available in the nature of information or analysis. The standard search results tend to consist of "reports" making content-free statements like "India is the filthiest country in the world". A good example of what I mean is found in this article. It breathlessly announces that "According to the latest Global Hygiene Home Truths Study 2010, conducted across eight countries, India has topped most of the categories that reveal high contamination levels." It continues with this gem: "Dirt levels of refrigerators for world stood at 46 per cent, while India registered 70 per cent. Kitchen table dirt levels for world were 36 per cent compared to 75 per cent for India".

This seems to be a shining example of bad science. Most Indians don't have refrigerators or kitchen tables, so the "India" here really means middle-class India. Even if you suspend that particular objection, the concepts used and numbers presented are pathetically ill-defined (are they really making the comical claim that Indian kitchen tables are three-quarters dirt, whatever that is, and only one-quarter granite or wood??). So then I tried to head for the website of the Global Hygiene Council, the originators of this weird survey. It turns out that the Council is sponsored by Reckitt Benckiser, better known as the folks who make Dettol and a bunch of household cleaning products. At once it becomes clear why this survey focuses on kitchen tables and has all the makings of a "scare the middle-class" article. The good old profit motive.

A somewhat more informative recent report from the Times of India quotes India's rural development minister Jairam Ramesh on the subject of hygiene. A couple of years ago Mr Ramesh, then the environment minister, had famously said "if there was a Nobel Prize for dirt and filth, India would win it hands down". In the recent report, referring to the figures that 58% of India' s population, as against 4% of China's, practices open defecation, he remarked: "I consider these numbers a matter of great anguish and shame. We must make sanitation a political campaign like Gandhiji did. Kerala, Sikkim, Maharashtra, Haryana and Himachal are doing well but other states have to pick up significantly." He then promises to focus on "nirmal gram abhiyan" (which translates as "clean village campaign") and informs us that it has already worked well in 25,000 villages in India but needs to be extended to the remaining 600,000 villages.

Googling "nirmal gram abhiyan" leads to this page of Guidelines which is quite informative. For the first time I am seeing some analysis and some offered solutions. One of the observations in these Guidelines is that:

"The practice of open defecation is reinforced by traditional behaviour patterns and lack of awareness about the health threats posed by it. At the same time, there is little awareness about the potential health and consequent economic benefits of sanitation facilities... The safe disposal of solid and liquid waste is not accorded priority at either the family or community level. There is no planned effort in rural schools to inculcate good hygienic habits in children."

Then it starts to get a little polemical, and I sort of enjoy that when it comes from the GOI even if I don't agree with all that they say. Here is how it continues:

"One of the principal, though unstated, reasons why people have not come forward to join any sanitation-related movement is because it lacks social prestige (this may be due to caste, age-old beliefs, taboos and practices). The upper strata of society have not concerned themselves with this issue at all. They have preferred involvement in the national-literacy programme; the immunization programme; the family welfare programme; the girl child; the non-conventional energy programme; the welfare of the disabled; afforestation; environmental pollution (not related to sanitation) such as air and river water pollution; and now, the latest craze is to join the awareness campaign on AIDS.

An equally important reason is that the construction of latrines involves a monetary expense. People would prefer to utilize their money to satisfy other felt needs, such as consumer goods.

In the circumstances, there is an urgent need for awareness-creation for felt-need and demand generation for sanitary latrines- the link between sanitation, health and safe drinking water needs to be emphasized, and community participation ensured for the sustainability of the behaviour-change in the community."

Now all this is at one level quite irritating, the sarkar attempting to malign everyone except itself: Rich people want to work for celebrity-rich issues like AIDS while the poor spend all their money on mobile phones instead of toilets. And so on. But this is no different from the way the "upper strata of society" spends all its time trying to malign the government. And at least unlike the chatterers, the government has a fairly detailed action plan, including a list of target areas in the first phase, that you can read about by following the link above.

Once you get over the irritation, there is some content in the criticisms. While India's very poorest clearly can afford nothing except some occasional food, there is an enormous section of our society that is still quite poor but has a little spending money, who do not consider sanitation worth spending on - for example giving far higher priority to clothes, rituals and marriage celebrations. It is this class and their attitudes that one would like to see compared with, say, comparably poor people in Vietnam or Thailand. I strongly suspect people in the latter two countries perform better than us on hygiene indicators (and spend less on rituals and weddings) and I'm not speaking of capital cities but the hinterland where people are still genuinely poor.

Likewise the Indian urban middle class has tended to shun the hygiene issue as a problem of "other people". While criticising the proliferation of slums in cities as due to "politicians and their vote banks", we have tended to ignore that the people living in slums are after all fellow Indians seeking honest work and deserve a clean place to live. Not to mention the obvious fact that they are indispensable as labour in our homes, where they wash dishes for example. So even if middle-class people had no altruistic feelings, they could have shown some enlightened self-interest in ensuring that the people who work in their homes live in a hygienic environment.

Finally there is the elephant in the room, tangentially alluded to in the Guidelines I quoted above: the role of religion. The caste system has made us, forgive my bluntness, incapable of taking responsibility for our own shit. Or our garbage. Places of worship should convey to their followers a sense of responsibility for personal and social cleanliness, and I suspect that in India they fail miserably in this, particularly the social aspect. The notion of ritual cleanliness, fundamental in our country, makes things worse: people are deluded into believing they are keeping themselves clean when they are not.

If our temples (and schools) taught hygiene and nothing else, they would make a valuable contribution to society and we would not have so many sporadic garbage dumps comfortably sitting in backyards. Unfortunately this photograph, which I took in Jodhpur a few days ago, is not encouraging.