Waste of a Good Idea

7 Jul

THIS post was part of the TimeOut Mumbai cover story of the June 17-30, 2005 edition, “Local Heroes: Small people making a big difference.” See my other post in this story here.

Juhu Beach, Mumbai

For eight years, George Gopali “picked up the broom” and kept Juhu Beach clean. Four years ago, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation decided to replace Gopali’s efforts with beachcombers, or beach cleaning machines. While the machines do help in clearing human-created waste, ecologists complain that they also pick up small crabs and other creatures, disturbing the beach’s eco-system. Gopali describes his experience of working with the BMC, and his disappointment at being dumped at the altar.

“I wanted to do something for the city that has given me so much. My father was a manager in the BMC, so right from when I was a child, he would tell me that BMC employees don’t work because they know they’re going to get paid anyway, but private companies deliver. So I said to myself, when I grow up, I’ll do something different. I saw that we had beautiful beaches, why not keep them clean? It’s easy to complain, but no one wants to pick up a broom. I picked up the broom.

“I have a housekeeping business, George Enterprises, which cleans the premises of building societies. In 1992, I wrote to the municipal commissioner Sharad Kale, who liked my idea of cleaning up the beach. But he said that the BMC could not pay me directly, since the union would have objected. He told me, ‘There are 15 hotels around the beach, they are direct beneficiaries. Speak to them.’ So I asked the hotels to give me one room’s rent per month as payment. This added up to Rs 90,000 a month. Initially, I invested my own money, but two years later, the BMC gave me three hoarding sites, which I rented out to advertisers.

“I used local boys as labour—drug addicts, boys who came to Mumbai to become film stars but slept on the beach, boys from the slums nearby. At first it was a struggle, but the BMC supported me. However, the hotels withdrew from the scheme after four months. Yet, I headed the cleanup for eight years, from 1992-2000. Then, BMC officials started thinking that I was making millions out of the cleanup, so they tendered the process. I got name-fame, so they didn’t want to pay me anymore. They floated a global tender with a minimum deposit of Rs 25 lakh to clean the beach with machines. So only big people with big money could bid for it. Now if I want to bid for a tender, I’d have to invest Rs 50-60 lakh. I’m not going to do that—the BMC are not good paymasters.

“The BMC has been thinking about getting beach-cleaning machines for the past 15 years. After my grand success, they began thinking, why not? I say, why? We have so much labour. Even the sieving of the sand was done with jaalis that we made ourselves. If you have that much money, put it into dustbins, benches and amenities for children and senior citizens! Plus there’s a high level of corrosion in the machines, so they don’t even last.

“We all say, ‘mere Bharat mahaan,” but we Indians are not proud of our country. People spit, the BMC head office stinks. I even sent a proposal to clean the BMC office because it stinks. The Juhu beach cleanup benefited the hoteliers, the public, the kids. One man can make a difference. You just need someone dedicated.”

As told to Jayati Vora

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Sweet Smell of Success

7 Jul

THIS post was part of the TimeOut Mumbai cover story of the June 17-30, 2005 edition, “Local Heroes: Small people making a big difference.” See my other post in this story here.

Name: Rahamim Jacob Chariker
Claim to fame: Subedar Road used to be called “Sandas” Road till he came along.

Trash litters the coast of Mumbai

Trash litters the coast of Mumbai

There were mornings when residents of Subedar Road in Worli would hold their noses to avoid inhaling the stench of excreta and garbage rising off the streets. The neighbourhood, a mix of slums, low-income buildings and posh housing, had a clutch of underutilised public toilets, and roads were used as commodes as well as garbage bins.

“The gents and ladies used to perform their morning duties on the road,” said Manohar Gokhale, a long-time Subedar Road resident. “The area was so much-ridden that the municipal corporation had stopped sending their trucks in here.” The stench was derogatorily called “Sandas Road” until four-and-a-half years ago, when Babuji, a former government employee, stepped in, got down on his knees and cleaned shit himself to set an example.

Babuji’s effort is especially commendable given Mumbai’s enormous sanitation crisis. The municipal corporation says that 71 percent of the population has access to sewerage services, but a walk by the city’s coast any morning makes that claim questionable: the rocks are occupied by tens of thousands of people using the beach as their toilet. The city of approximately 13 million people has only 1,300 public toilet blocks. When a senior municipal official spent the day outside a public toilet in Mahalaxmi’s Dhobi Ghat recently, she found that each seat served 917 people—in conditions she described as “stomach-churning.”

A Jew whose children live in Israel, Babuji’s real name is Rahamim Jacob Chariker, and as he is fond of reminding you, his real name has the cadence and magic of Amar Akbar Anthony. Chariker has used his name as a connector to plug into the various communities that live in the neighbourhood—when he meets a Muslim, he calls himself Rahamim, he’s Chariker for the Maharashtrians and Jacob for the Christians. He first decided to act on the stench that hung outside his window when some guests from Israel whom he had invited for dinner reached his building, took one whiff, and rushed back to their hotel.

Chariker hired a bunch of workers to clean up the roads, but when they refused to touch the human waste, he grabbed a shovel and set to work himself. He started persuading the adults through their kids: he would bribe the children to clean up the roads by handing them chocolates and bottles of phenyl. When the parents started quizzing the kids about where they were getting the chocolate from, the line of inquiry led to Babuji. The next step was to start cleaning the garbage. Chariker hired a 25-member team to remove upto 550 loads of garbage, with some help from the BMC’s dumper trucks. Over time, he has also managed to persuade the residents to start using the toilets and stop defecating on the streets.

Chariker claims to have planted close to 90,000 plants and trees in the 10-km radius from his home, using money sent to him from Israel. Today, the area bears no trace of its earlier, stinky avatar. Subedar Road is clean and is lined with trees bearing bananas, cherries, coconuts, sugarcane, mangoes, badams, tomatoes and Ayurvedic plants. “I bought whatever looked good,” Chariker said. He sends fruits from the trees to officials in the municipality. “They say, ‘It’s difficult to get fruit to grow even in an orchard, but you manage to coax them out of the footpath.”

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Mortality Combat

8 Jun

MANISH Jha first imagined a world without women after he read a report about a village in Gujarat that was inhabited only by men—the result of unchecked female infanticide. He later found a Ministry of Health and Family Welfare report estimating that 35 million females have been killed at birth or in infancy over the past century. “We talk about the decreasing tiger population, but what about the disappearance of 35 million women?” asks the 26-year-old filmmaker. His agitation fuelled his creativity. Soon after, Jha wrote the script that has become the acclaimed film Matrubhoomi: A Nation Without Women.

The film, which Jha also directed, has received a mantleful of awards at film festivals, including the International Critics’ Prize in Venice. Two years after the film was completed, it is finally being released in India—though after several censor’s cuts.

The film is set in a futuristic rural Bihar, where decades of killing female babies by drowning them in cauldrons of milk have eliminated women from the population. In the woman-less village depicted in the film, men copulate with cows and the elders cry in nostalgia as they watch women in pornographic films. When a 16-year-old girl, Kalki, is discovered, she is married off to five brothers, each of whom claims her for one night a week (their father gets the remaining two nights).

The allusion to Draupadi’s character in the Mahabharata epic is clear, but Jha is more inspired by fact than by myth. He was made acutely aware of the cruel treatment of women when he was eight. A woman in his native village Dhamaura had been burnt by her husband because she didn’t bring in enough dowry. “I saw her lying on the ground, her body covered in 90 percent burns, completely naked because her clothes had been burnt,” Jha remembers.

After he graduated with a degree in English literature three years ago, Jha came to Mumbai, but found that the big city wasn’t any more large-hearted to women, especially homeless women. His five-minute short film on homeless women, A Very Very Silent Film, was widely acclaimed at international festivals, and scooped up the jury prize at Cannes in 2002, prompting two French producers to commission him to direct a film. The script for Matrubhoomi emerged in one breathless week while working as a chef in Iceland. In that country to work as an assistant director on a film that never materialised, Jha had to earn his keep. Back in India, Matrubhoomi was wrapped up in a 28-day shoot.

“What attracted me was the script,” says Punkej Kharabanda, co-producer of the film (along with the French company Ex-Nihilo). “It was brilliant: you could visualise the entire film.”

Early responses to the film have included revulsion at the repeated depictions of sexual violence used in the film and criticism of the character Kalki, who, never even once, attempts to challenge her fate (see review). Jha retorts: “There’s a scene after Kalki’s marriage where you see two rifles in the room. Critics say, why doesn’t she just lift the rifles and shoot everyone? But realistically, what’s a woman going to do? If she’s thrown into a jungle of men, she can kill one, she can kill two, but there’s a larger world of hungry men outside.” But the film also has its share of converts. “A rich businessman who saw the film told me, ‘I hate myself. My wife is pregnant and two days ago I went to the temple to pray for a baby boy.’ It made him question his thought process,” Jha says. “You can love Matrubhoomi or hate it, but you can’t ignore it or the issues it raises.”

This article originally appeared in the June 3-16 2005 edition of TimeOut Mumbai.

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Works of Worship

8 Aug Sunset at Tanah Lot Temple, Bali (Photo courtesy Ed Mans)

JUST 10 minutes had passed since I had dropped from the edge of the boat and into the shimmering blue water that lapped at the edge of a cove. In that interim, I had fallen on my face, my side and my rear a hundred times.

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Wrong Coast, Right Place

19 Oct
Lighthouse of the Whales, interior: Courtesy bourget_82

Lighthouse of the Whales, interior: Courtesy bourget_82

DISCUSSING urine therapy with two construction workers was not what I expected when I thought about visiting the south of France. Then again, the places we went to were anything but run-of-the-mill. No celebrities sunning themselves on the Riviera, no international film festivals to attract the rich and the famous. Just regular people going about their lives in tiny, quaint villages in the most drop-dead gorgeous surroundings I have ever seen. When my friend Lulu, a newly-licensed tour guide, outlined our haphazard itinerary for the next five days, she wasn’t surprised to find that I had heard of none of the places. “They’re not big cities,” she explained. “But they’re beautiful. Trust me.”

Our first major stop was the Ilé de Ré. A minuscule island off the West coast of France, it is known for its salt pans, and the donkeys which wear culottes. History has it that when donkeys in the fields came back covered with mosquito bites after a hard day’s work, their owners, in an effort to make them more comfortable, stitched little pants for them, to cover their legs. I saw no suited donkeys, but bought an adorable blue-and-white trouser-sporting stuffed toy all the same. In the main town St Martin de Ré is the towering Le Phare des Baleines or the Lighthouse of the Whales, which is open to visitors. (Many whales have been washed up on the shore; the last one was in 1922, and its skeleton is displayed in the museum at the foot of the lighthouse.)

Heaving and puffing, we climbed the 57.10 m to the top, to discover the land and a blue sea stretching gently away from beneath us. On one side was La Tour des Baleines, the old lighthouse. Blue waves pockmarked by gusts of wind flirted with a pebbly beach made golden by the rays of the setting sun. On the other side, white houses with red roofs dotted the sprawling countryside.

The next morning, we headed for a different sort of town—Saint-Emilion. In the famous Bordeaux region, Saint-Emilion is home to a number of chateaux that produce some of the country’s finest red wines. Of course, going to Saint-Emilion without a dégustation (tasting session) and guided tour of one of the wine cellars is like going to Paris and not seeing the Eiffel Tower. I’m a white wine lover myself, but after one glass, I was tempted to switch loyalties.

Pleasantly high from all the wine, we made our way to our next pit stop, the seaside town of Biarritz. In the summer, Biarritz is thronged by families and honeymooners, but in the late September sun we found it blissfully tourist-free.

St. Jean de Luz; Courtesy Francis Larrede

St. Jean de Luz; Courtesy Francis Larrede

Our stomachs faintly growling, we strolled around until we found a bar that looked inviting. We had stumbled upon a treasure—a bar that boasted beers from over 20 different countries. From the Australian Fosters to the Irish Guinness, from the Basque Eki to the Corsican Colomba, whites, blonds and browns—it had them all. Naturally, it took us longer to decide which beer we would have than the time we had taken to decide which restaurant to eat at, and what food to order combined.

Biarritz, Saint-Emilion and Ilé de Ré were all great, but my favourite town remains St Jean de Luz. Very close to the Franco-Spain border, this três touristique town borders the ocean. It’s lined with cobblestone lanes and charming squares where you can rest your tired feet at a nearby café terrasse and watch the world glide languidly by.

Sipping Sangria and luxuriating in the shade, we were engaged in conversation by two men sitting nearby. They were curious as to my nationality and how it was that I was speaking French. Upon learning that I was Indian, they grilled me at length about the merits and demerits of urine therapy.
Somewhat disappointed that I was not an expert on the subject, they smiled politely and left us to finish the rest of the Sangria alone. A little later, we paid homage to the church where Napoleon married his second wife, Anne of Austria, and regretfully took our leave of St Jean de Luz.

 

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Don’t miss these regional specialities

• Crêpes, or French pancakes, with caramel made with the salted butter of the Ilé de Ré

• A bottle of powdered chillies or piments can be bought in most souvenir shops

• A glass of cidre (apple cider)

• Sample sinful French chocolate—no branded varieties here—at a corner Chocolaterie

• The Basque linge or linen embroidered with the rounded Basque cross makes for great aprons or table accessories.

• A pair of espadrilles or shoes made with cotton and jute. Buy a pair two sizes too small, since they stretch with wear

This article originally appeared in  The Indian Express.

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