BENGALURU: Have you noticed the storm water drains in your street, or the main roads in your area? If you are living in Bangalore, or much of mainland India for that matter, you may notice that even where the roads are clean, the storm water drains get stuffed with all sorts of garbage. This includes everything from used disposable plates and cups from the nearby pani puri stall, cigarette butts and sachets of all kinds of consumables, water and other bottles, vegetable waste and what not.
Anything pretty much that people want to dispose, seems to get dumped into the drains wherever there is even the slightest opening, and there are plenty of them given the broken covers and the incomplete corners where nothing is covered. It might just be a little better in the Smart City roads where the storm water drains are well-covered and there are drains to keep away the waste from being pushed in.
Even where there are bins around, it doesn’t seem to change the behaviour - everyone just wants to keep the road clean enough to move on about their everyday business, and at the end of it, when the rains really come down, everything floods and it is one unholy mess affecting even things that had nothing to do with the dumping in the first place.
In our relationships too, we often do exactly that – shove what we don’t need or can’t deal with right away from our life, just so that we can go on with the tasks of everyday living. Do we feel our partner is being rude and nasty? Grit your teeth and push it away for now, dinner needs to get ready. Being gaslighted? Shove it away for now because it is Covid times. Feeling unhappy that there is no intimacy and barely any conversation? Brush it aside because there’s much work to do for the new flat you bought.
We seem to prioritise our everyday busy lives over the real health of that life. We let things accumulate and stuff what would have been healthy ways to deal with crisis situations, and then, because not all days are sunshine and roses, the most mere sign of trouble can get everything messed up.
Half of Bangalore now is going through a major rejig with the roads being cleaned up, sidewalks and scientifically designed drains being built in such a way that no garbage can get in and it is easily serviced. It is taking a lot of time and money to do these projects. It is still worth the trouble because in the long run we know it will save us a lot of grief.
What if the roads were built to these specifications in the first place? Wouldn’t that be a much better way to go about things?
Similarly, in relationships, why should we not establish these measures from the beginning? Do we have to let our lives fill with trash, get flooded and only then clear it? Can we have a Tender Sure for our relationships?
(The author is a counsellor with InnerSight)