Maybe more in the country had higher standards and expectations but I’ve come to lower all of them these days. Between rumors of bananas being shot with horse tranquilizer, bitter gourd being boiled green in toxic paint and carcass rather than fresh meat being sold, how are we still expecting for-profit business ventures to worry about the well-being of fellow strangers when rules and regulations are unheard of?
All the more so when institutes like the Department of Food Technology and Quality Control were virtually unknown to even exist to the plain public. After watching flies die in the boiling syrup of gulab jamuns and cockroaches invade a tray of barfi you have to wonder where the Department was and what they were doing while Kathmanduites served heaping platefuls at weddings and family dinner parties.
Some may consider media’s investigation valiant and the Department’s recommending the DAO to shut down and charge the sweet owners admirable, but it’s a surprise no one was throwing up on account of gudpak days prior. Perhaps this goes to prove the placebo effect or maybe it is evident of just how equipped humans are to cope with much more germ, bacteria and pure grime than we’ve come to believe possible.
And yet, neither of the two reasons are good enough excuses to feed public what the stores have been. It’s just not possible to stomach the details. Even more so, when blaming businessmen is rather unfair. They are doing business to make money, that’s not a secret and few in the trade focus on long-term implications.
Someone is guilty and I’m reluctant to pin the businessmen because the Department is the one truly responsible. They have been granted the right and authority to weigh, measure and test such businesses. Indeed, the very fact that they release and revoke licenses, can deem a practice legal or illegal, and sign businesses as safe or lethal all goes to show blaming Narendra Maske and his colleagues is a little bit off the mark.
Ideally businessmen would assume a moral base as much as a legal one. It would ease the strain on legal institutions and excuse plain consumers a headache, if they took it upon themselves to refrain from serving platters of sweets they would sooner dump into the Bagmati River than take home to feed their wives and kids.
Between rumors of bananas being shot with horse tranquilizer, bitter gourd being boiled green in toxic paint and carcass rather than fresh meat being sold, how are we still expecting for-profit business ventures to worry about the well-being of fellow strangers when rules and regulations are unheard of?
And yet that only proves why we need and have the likes of the Department in place. Forget generations past that engaged in subsistence farming and did not pay exorbitant amounts to consume the now trendy organic produce, even the days of the local sweet-maker or tailor or cobbler is long gone.
The idyllic village life is charming, or so we say, but everyday hundreds all over the world flock from the rural landscape to the urban outlets. And with the exciting cities that boast of the positives – nightlife, shopping malls, packaged goods and cement structure follow a longer list of negatives.
No one has explained the phenomenon that takes place between the small town rural and the densely populated urban better than famed Sociologist, Emile Durkheim. He coined the two terms that may perhaps shed light on the why and how of our gudpak fiasco.
‘Organic solidarity’ is tagged to the industrial world where a division of labor is the norm – where individuals engage in their specific task or role but wherein the society’s survival is based on the performance of each. ‘Mechanical solidarity’, on the flip side, is associated to a small community with shared activities, beliefs and kinship result in less division of labor but more shared interest.
There is a price to pay in going big - big as a city, big as Kathmandu. And with it are the implications of organic solidarity flooded. As each of us sweat over our specialized individual task, we are further isolated from the other. When Maskey nods approval at another batch of bacteria-laden sweets he can distance himself from the salesclerk who stuffs them into boxes for customers to carry away. If he were in a small (you know, a mechanical solidarity kind of a setting) he would not have it in him to sell the same to his nephew of in-law or soltini.
And this is precisely why in ways of organic solidarity we have established a system of checks and balances, of PAN numbers, licenses, audit reports and taxes. When Maskey goes to prison or pays the fine, the wrong guy’s been sent. The officers responsible for ensuing the sweets were safe should be penalized, because they are the ones we trusted and they were the ones granted the authority to patronize or punish the gudpak-wallahs.
Scurrying about town chasing other smaller sweet shops is too little, too late. The lack of satisfying quality control, that the state owes its citizens, surely extends beyond a few sweet shops. Businesses must only operate when they have guaranteed knowledge of standards to be met and customers must be assured of a resourceful complaint process.
Recent talk of opening a bird market is a step in the right direction. But, without clear guidelines disseminated regarding rules and regulations that both businesses and customers are privy to, there will be more gudpak fiasco yet. Like a friend recently said, “I don´t even want to think about titaura and momo meat and puchka pani.”
sradda.thapa@gmail.com