Delhi,

So what was wrong when a Dutch embassy official
said that Delhi looks like a garbage dump? Why
did our patriotic instincts get so aroused that
we almost condemned this frank, free speech?
Delhi is a non-biodegradable, backward
capitalist, semi-feudal, patriarchal, uncultured
garbage dump, why shy away from that? Not only
that, Delhi has turned into a vast, sprawling,
ever, macho public urinal, a shit hole, a
faceless ghetto, an architect’s black-hole
nemesis, an octopus without a soul or belonging
or sensitivity or civic sense. So what is so Mera
Bharat Mahan about Delhi being a damned garbage
dump? Can’t you see it all over the place, from
the posh, palatial south zones to the twilight
zones of the east and west, with the demolished
slums in between? Surely, even tinted windows of
swanky cars are transparent, aren’t they? So why
hide the gaze?

And where do the women go? The mother, the
housewife, the working women? On the streets, in
marketplaces, public parks, public transport,
long distance roadways buses, flyovers, national
highways -why are they condemned to hold on while
men are all over pissing in stark daylight as if
it’s a tide on a full-moon night. And where do
you walk? The slimy, stagnant, fragrant pavements
are full of pissers in full public glory. The
roads and highways are full of pissers. Not only
the nooks and corners, they are all over the
ideal city-state. The entire city has become a
virtual reality of a public urinal-the stench
floating like a cliché.

Except that the Delhi and central governments,
the MPs, the MLAs, the opposition politicians,
the ruling party politicians, the police, the
mandarins in the municipalities, the Union
ministers, the ex-ministers, the bureaucrats and
babus, the elite- eyes wide shut, the page 3
party-types with colonial hangovers, the upwardly
mobile and the middle mobile, the fourth estate,
the real estate-no one is willing to see this
masculine display of public patriotism. Mass
urinals as a tourist delight-welcome to this
machismo capital of the power elite, the special
dirty zone of organised filth and muck and
gaseous, fungus-ridden waste and dirty waters.
When the masses are against hygiene and
aesthetics, and when the men have no shame, and
when the government wears a sanitised chastity
belt of cold-blooded ignorance, who can stop this
great pissing nationalism of our nationhood
defined, even while we put pictures of gods on
walls, stairs, pavements, residential areas to
stop people peeing and spitting?

And if you think this is because Delhi is flooded
by the unwashed, the slum dweller, the landless
poor and urban worker, the low-middle class
uncultured vulture, and that it is a demographic
paradigm shift that is polluting its geography,
think again, and look back with originality, if
not anger. That SUV, and not only with a UP or
Haryana nameplate, its door half-open, its owner
in a safari suit, doing it in the open courtyard
of Pragati Maidan. Sometimes wife and daughter
wait in the car till the man gives way to the
basic looing instinct. This fascinating
phenomena, truly, has broken all class
barriers-the State has withered away and this
philistine public piss joint is the only and
ultimate utopia.

That’s why they are pissing on the Lodi
crematorium walls even as the dead depart for
their final journey, inside public parks
post-Pranayam, outside schools even as children
cross the footpath, on the Yamuna bridge, car and
scooter waiting, as a mother walks away quickly
with her daughter; outside the gates of the
palatial homes of our MPs and ministers in
Lutyens’ Delhi, outside hospitals like the All
India Institute of Medical Sciences, where
harried patients and their equally harried
relatives wait for buses on the road under the
sun because the state has chosen to build no bus
shelters here since the last 20 years, on
flyovers, parking lots, pavements and bus stops,
talking on cell phones, bang in front of
thosewaiting for a bus, while the bus waits and
the pissers zip it up and walk into the ’ladies
only’ seats, proud and ugly like pea-cocks.

In any case, most clean, new pay-and-use toilets,
barring a handful, are loaded in favour of
advertisers in prime locations. Good planning, as
they say.

In any case, Delhi has no public space culture,
no benches where you can write a letter, no
open-air modest restaurants where you can read a
book and drink a black coffee or beer, no
footpaths or stairs where a young couple can hang
out and smoke. Delhi hates its women, unlike
Mumbai and Kolkata; women here are forever in
danger of assault, physical, invisible,
objectified, uncensored violence. Delhi is for
the obscenely super rich, male and female, in
affluent, sanitised, enclosed, air-conditioned, cocooned,
protected zones, here they don’t smell the
stench; Delhi is also for the male masses, lower,
middle, upwardly mobile, downwardly mobile, the
poor, the migrant, the exiled, the conquerors of
the golden city, the pissers of paradise.

A swank car stops at Nizamuddin crossing. The
door opens as a window rolls down, a prosperous
man puts his chubby face out, and out flows from
his mouth a huge chunk of red liquid, a paan’s
remnants, and runs like a Persian carpet on the
road. They are spitting everywhere, from bus
windows on bikers, from truck windows on
cyclists, from cars on pedestrians. If they
could, they would piss from the windows.

They throw beer and coke cans, wafer packets,
wrappers, plastic everywhere-the entire city is a
bin. The city belongs to no one. No one belongs
to the city. If you cheat me, I will cheat
someone else. Me, mine, myself, who cares for
Bhagidari? So why say, I love Delhi? Because
Delhi is a sucked-up lollipop. Delhi is
polythene, all over, on trees, dhabas, shops,
inside the choked-up intestines of our homeless,
holy cows eating polythene with glass, plastic,
leather, shoes, tin, aluminium, metal, used
crackers, matchboxes, gutka packs in the garbage
dumps. Gai hamari mata hai-the cow is our mother!
So who will ask the Hindutva Godse Genius, if
this is not cow slaughter, what is?

And where has the river gone? The pristine Yamuna
at Yamunotri in the Himalayas, its magical
origin, finds a magical metamorphosis at
Wazirpur, in West Delhi, and becomes a divine
nullah, a stagnant shitpot of millions,
poisonous, full of effluents, garbage and
chemicals. The river disappears, the dirty nullah
resurrects everyday, even as Delhiites stop their
cars and throw polythene packets full of
ritualistic Hindu flowers into the abyss of this
abysmal degradation. As I write this, thousands
of Biharis are jumping into the half-white foam
of this utterly filthy stagnation and
celebrating Chatt in trans-Yamuna. So where did
the crores of rupees spent on cleaning the river
disappear? And what reflection can a
narcissistic, consumerist, unaesthetic society
find in the waters when it looks for its
self-image? Shit. Our own shit.

Inside the water. Inside the ground water. Inside
earth. Inside the food cycle. Inside the drinking
water. Inside the intestines. Inside the mind.
Shit. Our own shit.

Across Delhi, the new, green garbage containers
designed by a genius dot the landscape like
memorials. Except that dogs and pigs have found
new homes, with the garbage spilling over and
people jumping over them, like long jumpers in a
nation with one Olympic bronze. So why spend
crores on full-page ads asking people to protect
themselves against the Aedes mosquito? The Aedes
factory is right here, breeding, State-sponsored,
all for free.

That’s what we are, Hoo Ha India, the superpower,
nuclear power capital, floating on yellow
swimming pools of male piss, with a condemned
river of fossilised shit and chemicalised filth,
and thousands of tonnes of garbage scattered
everywhere, like grand testimonies of a clean,
happy, healthy society. Like philistines becoming
reformers. Like reformers becoming philistines.
Welcome to the capital city of power and pelf. The ideal State’s public urinal