Our lack of civic sense is trending again. A couple stopped on neat Canadian roads to throw garbage — brain drain or is that brain a drainage? If they were in India, they wouldn’t even stop. Then I saw a video of two guys peeing on a beach in Thailand. Thankfully, Hyderabad doesn’t have beaches — that’s why we pee everywhere. They say civic sense comes from empathy, that you should think about the person who has to clean. But in India, we think it’s somebody’s job to clean and our job to ravish this planet till it files for divorce. We’ve turned ‘Keep the city clean’ into a group project that we’d like to complete — but without participating.
We don’t have empathy, we only have sympathy. There are words for it — ayyo, paapam, bechara. But when it comes to empathy, there’s no word because we think it’s just sympathy with a better accent. That’s why we feel bad for the old lady cleaning the road but don’t think twice before throwing chips on it. Like ‘Yoga se hi hoga’ caught on, maybe we need ‘Kaun Banega Empathy?’ Or better, ‘Treat empathy like it’s your pati’.
I feel empathy should begin from the bottom — gutka. It’s the worst civic behaviour we have and also the one that needs the most empathy. The folks eating gutka are at the bottom of every pyramid, bell curve, excel sheet, and emotion. Even the stains are found at the bottom — on roads, lampposts, and footpaths. The highest I’ve ever seen gutka is on the 16th floor, behind a lift wall. I always wondered how it got there — then I saw the guy repairing the lift. Maybe it was the fear of heights he was trying to cope with.
I actually have some respect for gutka. As kids, we had a wall which was very far in our colony — if you hit the ball on it, you’d get 12 runs. No one ever managed it except my friend Karan, a gutka eater. His gutka was clearly doing what our Horlicks and Boost failed to do.
But gutka is illegal in India — so are drugs, but at least drugs don’t have Ajay Devgn and Shah Rukh Khan doing ads together. How do you quit when the road has gutka stains, the hoardings have gutka heroes, and TV has gutka jingles? You can sometimes say no to drugs, but you can’t say no to gutka — because when you have gutka in your mouth, you can’t really say anything.
We can’t quit Instagram easily; how can we expect a gutka guy to quit? It’s the same dopamine hit. At least he’s paying and buying a product — we’re the ones being sold. And these folks don’t have other escapes. They do the dirtiest jobs in the worst conditions. Still, when you ask a guy with a mouthful of gutka for directions, he’ll spit it out — something he prepared for five minutes — just to help you. Try getting that kind of attention from someone doomscrolling reels.
That’s why I feel if charity begins at home, empathy should begin with gutka.
Sandesh
@msgfromsandesh
(This comedian is here to tell funny stories about Hyderabad)
(The writer’s views are his own)