To pee is to be

That’s what we are, Hoo Ha India, superpower nuclear India, floating on public spectacles of yellow swimming pools of male piss, with condemned rivers of chemicalised filth and tonnes of garbage scattered like testimonies of greatness

Amit Sengupta Delhi

So what was wrong when a Dutch embassy official said that Delhi looks like a garbage dump? Why did our patriotic instincts get so aroused that we almost condemned this frank, free speech? Delhi is a non-biodegradable, backward capitalist, semi-feudal, patriarchal, uncultured garbage dump, why shy away from that? Not only that, Delhi has turned into a vast, sprawling, ever, macho public urinal, a shit hole, a faceless ghetto, an architect’s black-hole nemesis, an octopus without a soul or belonging or sensitivity or civic sense. So what is so Mera Bharat Mahan about Delhi being a damned garbage dump? Can’t you see it all over the place, from the posh, palatial south zones to the twilight zones of the east and west, with the demolished slums in between? Surely, even tinted windows of swanky cars are transparent, aren’t they? So why hide the gaze?

And where do the women go? The mother, the housewife, the working women? On the streets, in marketplaces, public parks, public transport, long distance roadways buses, flyovers, national highways —why are they condemned to hold on while men are all over pissing in stark daylight as if it’s a tide on a full-moon night. And where do you walk? The slimy, stagnant, fragrant pavements are full of pissers in full public glory. The roads and highways are full of pissers. Not only the nooks and corners, they are all over the ideal city-state. The entire city has become a virtual reality of a public urinal—the stench floating like a cliché.

Except that the Delhi and central governments, the MPs, the MLAs, the opposition politicians, the ruling party politicians, the police, the mandarins in the municipalities, the Union ministers, the ex-ministers, the bureaucrats and babus, the elite— eyes wide shut, the page 3 party-types with colonial hangovers, the upwardly mobile and the middle mobile, the fourth estate, the real estate—no one is willing to see this masculine display of public patriotism. Mass urinals as a tourist delight—welcome to this machismo capital of the power elite, the special dirty zone of organised filth and muck and gaseous, fungus-ridden waste and dirty waters. When the masses are against hygiene and aesthetics, and when the men have no shame, and when the government wears a sanitised chastity belt of cold-blooded ignorance, who can stop this great pissing nationalism of our nationhood defined, even while we put pictures of gods on walls, stairs, pavements, residential areas to stop people peeing and spitting?

And if you think this is because Delhi is flooded by the unwashed, the slum dweller, the landless poor and urban worker, the low-middle class uncultured vulture, and that it is a demographic paradigm shift that is polluting its geography, think again, and look back with originality, if not anger. That SUV, and not only with a UP or Haryana nameplate, its door half-open, its owner in a safari suit, doing it in the open courtyard of Pragati Maidan. Sometimes wife and daughter wait in the car till the man gives way to the basic looing instinct. This fascinating phenomena, truly, has broken all class barriers—the State has withered away and this philistine public piss joint is the only and ultimate utopia.