Last night at the gymkhana I pressed the lift button to go down, the lift, however, had other ideas. It went up. I stepped out and immediately wondered whether I had accidentally reached the municipal garbage department.

The room was covered with paper. Not decorated with paper. Covered with paper.

For one terrifying moment I thought I had stumbled into a secret recycling factory. Then I discovered the truth. A housie game had just ended.

The players had vanished. Their slips had not.

The floor looked as if a paper cyclone had swept through the room and then settled down for a nap.

What amazed me was that dustbins stood nearby. Not one. Not two. Several.

They stood there looking lonely and rejected.

I could almost hear one dustbin saying to another, “Do you think we smell?”

The other replying sadly, “No. I think they simply don’t know what we are for.”

And that is often our national problem.

We know how to buy things. We know how to use things. We know how to break things.

But putting things into a dustbin seems to require advanced scientific training.

We throw garbage from car windows. We spit on roads. We toss plastic cups into drains.

Then we complain that the city floods.

Imagine throwing your dinner plate onto your living room floor every night and then wondering why your house resembles a landfill.

Yet many of us do exactly that with our streets.

The sad part is that when somebody protests, the reaction is often not gratitude but anger.

“How dare you tell me not to litter?”

“How dare you ask me to stand in a queue?”

“How dare you suggest I follow a rule?”

Poor Mr Dastur the senior citizen from Thane, who told a cabbie not to spit, and was thrashed. And maybe others like him who dare to object and very often discover that civic sense can be hazardous to their life.

But the outside world my friends is beginning to react.

For years we assumed that our behaviour was our private affair.

Not anymore.

People notice. They notice the noise. They notice the pushing. They notice the littering.

And slowly a stereotype begins to form of what Indians are like. Crass, crude and churlish.

The tragedy of stereotypes is that even those who behave well get painted with the same brush.

A few people throw rubbish and millions inherit the reputation.

Perhaps it is time we realised that civic sense is not a Western idea, an Eastern idea, or a political idea. It is simply respect. Respect for others. Respect for public spaces. Respect for ourselves.

Because no amount of charm, influence, clever explanations, or even a strategically presented box of Melody chocolates can permanently cover up bad manners.

Sooner or later, trash tells the story. And unfortunately, it speaks very loudly while raising quite a stink..!

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