Adjectives which will never be stuck to the City of Light include: neat, clean, and tidy.
The air is heavy with dust and the ground is stained red with paan juice. Walking along the ghats means dodging piles of goat, cow and dog droppings and keeping your feet out of the toxic water that sluices across the path now and then. Backstreets become open latrines. Kids scavenge anything reusable, street sweepers valiantly mill around with brooms and hoses, goats nibble on whatever they can, but there’s still a vast amount of rubbish and, well, filth lying around. In the face of all this muck, this cheery penguin shaped bin at Dasaswamedh Ghat struck me as a brilliantly, crazily hopeful civic installation.
The next time I walked past it, a mouthful of paan juice had been spattered across the penguin’s plastic belly, making a mockery of this sturdy little receptacle’s function.
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