A visit to the local dump yard.... why of all the places in the world, that can provide you with amazing entertainment, a good time, all the romance, do you choose to go visit a place at 7 O' clock in the morning with a good amount of chill still looming in the air?? Though I am tempted to say that it was at the insistence of our faculty, it need not necessarily be that. With the kind of context being created in the lecture room the visit was something I was looking forward to. With ample emphasis on the fact that you have to get an understanding of why you do what you do I felt the need to understand what happens to that I choose to discard everyday. There is enough that happens in the city of Mumbai the sea is the constant dumping ground for all the sanitation waste and none of the beaches are really conducive to entertaining water sports.
The landscape that invariably would encounter you when you close in on the dump yard is small hills with dry grass on top and a series of sorting factories on the way. These factories are collectors of various identical items (like same size PET bottles, same size plastic carry bags, same size plastic gunny bags... all the recyclable items). The dump yard closes in and the stench becomes unbearable you still persist for all the right reason and with all the nobility in the heart and then you the current dump yard. Huge hills of trash... nothing but crap collected from all over the city and dumped. Very reluctantly the thought that you choose to acknowledge is that what you discard simply out sight everyday doesn't just disappear, it reappears here on this hill and then continues to do what it was going to do in the city. You get a sense of the amazing amount of decomposition happening around you.
Not just of the garbage but also of the ecology and the human spirit. The spring nearby is laden with all the toxic emitted from the garbage and would become devoid of any capability to sustain any life form. Then you start to look around and realise that all the small hill around that have grass on top now were once one of these garbage hills. They were capped by soil from top and then a little vegetation forced to grow there. But the amazing state this vegetation is in forces you to think about what kind of life can you shit generate. Seems like an ecosystem is being destroyed. The image that immediately comes to my mind that of mutated creature walking about the face of the earth in a typical Sci-fi thriller.
The last thing on this list of mutated species is the mutation of the human spirits. One lone man walking about amidst our shit trying to segregate what is recyclable from what is not. There we have it the man asking other man to clean his shit. Somehow remind me of the discrimination of the Shudras in ancient
The city is definitely spic and span.........
