As we mourn the loss of Lee Kuan Yew, his efforts to "civilize" Singaporeans has been a model of how a state can play a powerful role in teaching manners to its citizens. We celebrated the 100th week of our weekly campaign to "clean" Bagmati. Hutta Ram Baidya, who passed away at 94 in 2013, was a tireless fighter to restore Bagmati to its original health. People like Chief Secretary Lila Mani Poudel have been championing the cause initiated by Mr. Baidya, and the efforts are commendable.
Some of my friends, who grew up in Kathmandu, show me pictures of them swimming in Bagmati 25 years ago. We cannot fathom touching the water today. Every day, en route to my office, I struggle to breathe at the Thapathali bridge, the stench from the river is too powerful.
We celebrate Bagmati. I drank the water from Bishnumati during my years at Budhanilkantha School. We offer the water to Lord Pashupatinath in downtown Kathmandu, where the river is not a river at all. Bagmati represents our civilization, and its current state represents the state of our nation.
While the weekly campaign must be lauded for its efforts at bringing awareness among Kathmandu basis, we must look at the polluted river from our cultural perspective. A diplomat recently said that that her children gape in surprise when they see Nepalis throwing trash everywhere on our streets. Beautiful photos of Kathmandu and other places from the 1960s also show trash everywhere on our grounds. The culture of littering is common in our everyday life. With the exception of few schools in Kathmandu and other major cities, none teach our children to throw trash on garbage bins. And our children see everyone around them doing the act multiple times a day like it is our norm.
We love to keep our apartments and houses clean, but throw trash just outside our house premises. We love to keep pets, but take them to our own neighbor street and let them relieve. And this segment of population is highly educated and aware. So where and how did this culture develop?
One of the reasons is that we, as a society, have not developed a shaming culture. Acts of public littering should be a highly shameful act, and the public should react strongly towards such behavior. We should speak out against the people who knowingly behave in this manner. This is the only way we can teach our children to learn proper manners.
Secondly, we invest billions in building major highways, roadways and buildings, but we rarely plan on spending resources to maintain them. A lot of our dilapidated government offices and donor-funded project infrastructure tell the story of our negligence. Littering is also the continuation of that culture of pure disregard for public utilities.
98 percent of BRBIP has been completed, 'clean water in Bagmati...
Our understanding of exercising a responsible citizenship must be broadened and redefined so that we can learn to behave in the way that reflects our sophisticated and old civilization. The behavior of littering has to be tied to anti-God and anti-religious crime. Our God-loving fatalistic society will buy into the narrative fairly easily. A campaign to stop violence against women in India used a scarred face of Goddess Lakshmi very effectively. It gave people one more reason not to beat women, source of power and fertility as embodied by Lakshmi.
We are not new to everyday sight of people driving expensive cars along Bagmati, and dumping trash bags into the river. This defies our conscience, civilization and humanity. We have to defeat this mindset and start a public campaign to aggressively reject a littering culture. The Kathmandu Metropolis fines people dumping trash in Bagmati, but unless we all learn to behave properly, fines are not going to change our deep-seated mindset.
A friend of mine works in Kigali, Rwanda's capital. She describes the city as one of the cleanest in the world. If a country that came out of a genocide of unimaginable scale in the last decade, and a country that is chasing our GDP per capita can set such an example, we sure are capable of doing much better.
It is time for us to ask ourselves what kind of city we want to live in. The kind of behaviors we want our children to learn and the kind of example we want to set to the rest of the world. It is time for us to stop expecting the government to solve all our problems and look at within. Imagine what Kathmandu would be like if we all dump trash in the proper place, imagine what Bagmati would be if we stop dumping plastic bags full of harmful waste.
In the aftermath of the Korean War, then President Park Chung-hee built N Seoul tower in 1969, at a cost of 2.5 million dollars. The 236 meters tall tower, in the midst of poverty, hunger, and gloom, suddenly inspired that generation of South Koreans to imagine and work towards a prosperous South Korea within their lifetime. One project became a rallying cry to bring together the Koreans into nation-building.
A clean Bagmati can be our N Seoul Tower. It has the potential to inspire us to sincerely devote our energy and national will to do mega projects. This will boost our national confidence and defeat deep-seated low self-esteem to do grander things. To achieve economic, social and environmental progress that now seem distant and impossible.
Twitter: @subhash580
