A Letter to Dr. Dinesh Sharma, Mayor of Lucknow.

To:
      Dr. Dinesh Sharma,
      Mayor, Lucknow.


Dear Dr. Sharma,

I am writing this open letter to you for two reasons.  The first reason is the call by our Prime Minister for a Clean India.  The second is the ever diminishing space available to those who try to keep healthy by taking walks in the morning: I am a senior citizen and belong to this group.

I find Prime Minister's call for स्वच्छ भारत being interpreted merely as a call for not littering and for not peeing or defecating in the open.  However enlightened people like you would agree that it goes far beyond this.  I will illustrate this.  People in my locality are quite hygiene conscious and have engaged an agency, Chamaacham Lucknow, for garbage collection.  They come in a rickety thela rickshaw and take away the kitchen garbage and the recyclables.  Sometimes, if the garbage is voluminous, they protest and mumble about no or inadequate space allocated to them for dumping the garbage.  I do think that it is the municipal corporation that is finally responsible for processing and disposal of all garbage even if they don't collect it from each household.  Some open dumps used by these garbage collectors are in the residential areas itself.  There is one on the Picnic Spot Road leading to Kukrail forest too.  The garbage rots there giving off foul smell till municipal dumpsters collect them.  The garbage also attracts cows, pigs and dogs who feed off it.

But in this letter I would like to draw your attention to yet another class of garbage.  It is in the form of fallen leaves and plant trimmings and also littering on the road resulting from a habit that the PM is fighting against.  A contributing factor for such behavior is almost total lack of public trash cans too.

This last category of trash is swept into small mounds in the morning and then lighted up.  There is hardly any park in Indira Nagar where you will not find a smouldering garbage dump spewing dark smoke. This has made morning walk absolutely unhealthy and many people are thinking of either giving up morning walk, or to go for a walk before dawn and arrival of the sweepers, or drive to a faraway park like Lohia or Janeshwar Park.  These mounds of garbage emitting smoke can been seen throughout the city including the market areas.

The sweepers maintain that this is the only possible way of disposing this class of garbage and that even if they were to carry cartloads there is no place to dispose it off.

I wish to underscore that if the PMs Swachchh Bharat mission is to succeed, municipalities have to gear up and put in place arrangement for efficient collection and disposal / processing of garbage.  Without this arrangement in place, it is but bound to fail.

As the mayor of the capital city of UP and as a political figure who is loved by the citizens, you are just the right person to take a lead and blaze the trail for all other municipalities to follow.

We look forward to your initiatives to galvanize Lucknow Municipal Corporation into becoming a model for attaining the cleanliness visualized by our beloved PM.

Regards,

AK Upadhyaya
18/428 Indira Nagar
Lucknow - 226016.

Mobile: 9044275658.

A Letter to Fellow Indians

My Dear Fellow Indians,

Our hearts must swell with pride and eyes with tears of gratitude and joy as we watch the ever growing numbers of those whose prime objective is to become the prime minister of the country, purportedly for  serving us better.  They come in great variety - big leaders with small parties, small leaders with big parties, small leaders with small parties, big leaders with big parties that are afraid of them, et al.  Oh dear leaders, you have such big ambitions!  Well to serve the country better with!

We, the working people, know well enough what happens when you get a job that you are not equal to. Your health suffers, your family suffers, and you take to the job portals vehemently looking for a change. Most of our beloved leaders know well enough, or we so hope, that the job is much too demanding and not exactly a bed of roses. Of course, all this holds only if you intend to perform. They do know pretty well that they will be stepping into shoes so big that their eyes may be below lace level and their nose close to that stench left behind by the previous wearers / occupiers.  And yet, all this knowledge only seems to add fuel to their determination.

There is another variety who are so much afraid of this stench that they would forever keep away from this race and only look for someone else who can better put up with it and clean it up rather than add to the grime.  Dear old chap, if you wish to clean it, you have to step into it, with a broom like the one that Gandhi wielded when cleaning the community toilets.  Keep it up, dear angry young man, AAP sahi raaste par hain.

At times, I too feel tempted to jump into the fray.  After all, what would the nation, or at least my grandsons, say when they find out that I kept watching from the sidelines when the country needed me most!  

What say you?

Yours etc.

A.K. Upadhyaya

(Mee too)