I recently happened to attend a conclave where Al Gore, former US vice president, Green Warrior, and recent Nobel Laureate delivered the closing address to a huge hall full of Delhi’s elite. A recent Oscar winner, Gore is no doubt a compelling speaker, but I was bemused to hear repeated applause from the audience while he explained the total indifference of his countrymen to environmental and global climate change issues, and the cynical disregard being shown by the US government for all international agreements which required the slightest change in the lifestyle of their own citizens.
When Gore called on India to show the rest of the world how to conserve the ozone layer and preserve polar ice, the clapping grew even more hysterical. During the Q/A session, someone asked him how he expected the poor and deprived to contribute anything to this cause when the rich were unwilling. Gore promptly replied that he wasn’t asking the poor to contribute; he just wanted the Indian government to heavily tax carbon fuels like coal and kerosene! Thunderous applause followed.
This left me wondering if our Page 3 people have an idea what kind of miracles a bottle of kerosene can perform in a mud hut or a plastic draped shanty on the pavement in a period of 24 hours. Hopefully, no one will suggest a tax on smoky cow dung too!
In Delhi’s glittering drawing rooms, one can envision how India ‘rises’ and ‘shines’ soon after sun-set, as the chattering classes foregather over a glass of Chilean wine, to marvel in animated tones at the new budget, and our 8.7 per cent GDP growth, and to gloat over Pakistan’s travails. Living in distant Dehra Dun, I happen to traverse the 320km that separates it from Delhi, by road or rail twice a month, and the journey provides a few hours of reflection as one contemplates the bleak vistas of rural and urban desolation. They serve to confirm, not just the co-existence of two widely disparate Indias, but also the ostrich-like capacity for self-delusion amongst our elites.
In their minds, mention of environmental pollution probably evokes visions of depleting ozone layers and the Kyoto Protocol. But would they want to dwell upon the piles of rotting domestic garbage and plastic that litters every single open space in every single Indian town and village? Or discuss the debasement of our fellow human beings whom one sees squatting every morning by roads, railway lines and open drains, because the Indian state has neglected, after 60 years of freedom, to provide basic shelter or sanitation for its citizens.
Enter a city or town, and you see pot-holed roads, cratered sidewalks and scattered debris reminiscent of a war zone. Chaotic vehicular traffic belches copious exhaust fumes as it wends its way through narrow roads shared with vendors, rickshaws, cyclists, and pedestrians as policemen preside languidly over this bedlam, and stray cattle wander freely dispensing dung everywhere.
One casts a furtive glance at the foreign traveller in the next seat, enticed into this trip perhaps by the photogenic charms of the ‘Incredible India’ campaign, which also dinned into him, India’s claims to be a great ancient culture, a rising economic giant and a modern IT superpower? Does it strike him as strange that the world’s 10th largest economy and sixth nuclear weapon state should not even contemplate ways to get beggars, cattle and garbage off its streets, regulate vehicular traffic, or provide enough public toilets for its citizenry? One is sorely tempted to ask the tourist: would he like to ever come back again?
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