On Thursday 11 Jun 2009 5:20:46 pm Indrajit Gupta wrote: > How did we manage to side-step the community so completely, and concentrate > on the individual so exclusively? Is it anything to do with our > philosophical systems, which concentrate on the individual almost > exclusively?
IG I don't think community was sidestepped completely - at least up to the 1700s I am guessing. With respect to the most offensive waste matter - human feces, there was always a separate and distant designated area. Other garbage was primarily organic waste from the kitchen and perhaps pottery and wood. No paper. No plastic. No metal. No chemicals. Most kitchen waste was consigned to the cattle who would eat the stuff. This practice continues to this day. I once found a mixed pile of kitchen waste ans plastic on the pavement outside a small eatery on RV road. I asked the owner what his problem was and he told me "The cows will come around and get it". The same story was given to me in another place. That leaves only cowdung - and you know that Indians who keep cows (and some others) harvest cowdung for drying and use as fuel. When urban settlements came - the wealthiest had designated areas for defecation from wheer feces was collected by oher people. You can call this a sense of community if you like. The feces was not left lying around, but was carted away by people. The idea of keeping your own front yard clean is widespread. Yards are washed and decorated every morning. But to my knowledge no records exist of where the rubbiish that was swept away was dumped. Was it swept towards your neighbor's house, or was is dumped in a separate designated spot? The act of defecating off the path is IMO an inability to cope with the absence of open spaces and lack of designated toilets in urban areas. Since I have worked on trying to change this in my local area I have come across two types of people. One type have genuinely not used toilets and use the roadside because they are itinerants with no fixed address and have no open spaces to visit. The worst hit are the women who must use the same areas before dawn. The other bunch are urban residents who feel that is is OK to relieve themselves wherever they like. There is a widespread belief in the power of lame excuses. " I am old", "I am diabetic", "No problem - after all he is a young child", "I am taking medicines". Any excuse will do. If you talk to people in the neighborhood, nobody likes this, but nobody is motivated enough to do anything about it, worrying that he or she is in a minority of one. Indians IMO suffer from a lack of motivation to change and correct other people - and any lame excuse is handy to avoid doing what needs to be done to instill civic sense on offenders. So the people who are offended (like you and me) also have a bagful of lame excuses for not doing anything: "We are like that only" "This will never change" "The person peeing outside my house will stab me if I talk to him" "The local Mafia craps outside my house" So you have both the offenders and the offended offering excuses. Only the offeders are quite happy, having "cleansed themselves" - the offended are only whining. That is why I have greaat admiration for the likes of Ramesh Ramanathan and a host of other social reformers who have the intellectual and moral courage to tell people what is right and what is wrong and to catch and point out the lame excuses. shiv
