I could not believe my eyes. How dare these people call themselves educated ?? I have completely failed in all my attempts to convince the gardener, watchman or the horrible neighbours who bully these people to burn the wastes. It is even worse to watch my otherwise patient father get agitated when they don't listen to him either. All I could do was to hopelessly shoot this video on my cellphone hoping I could show it to some authority. I don't know to whom, yet.
I thought my father's habit of packing all the grass off to nearby cow-sheds was a great idea, and he did this job quite diligently for a while. Not any longer, thanks to the new orders our gardener has. I'm now sure our neighbours thought they were doing us a favour by co-operating, because I still see absolutely NO reason for them to suddenly go back to their old ways of burning up wastes. How lame and cheap can people get?
The fire goes on for about an hour, and the smoke for atleast 4 hours afterwards. Needless to say, the whole building is smokey by then. There are about a 100 flats in my building. No bugger comes forward to say a word. 'Pollution' and 'global warming' seem too far-fetched to them. They treat it like some text-book crap they memorised for exams and forgot about, later. My building loves fire. Every year, on 31st of December, they set the 'Old Man' (a stupid hay-stuffed baffoon) to fire, watch and applaud cheerfully. What's worse, they make small children (aged 5-15) collect money for the same. Like it was some useful donation for some charitable purpose. Again, pointing out things like 'pollution' to these kids has never worked.
Coming back to this fire incident, I felt sure that it would be unlawful to set wastes to fire in a residential area. I later found out that I was right. Problem is, the BMC does not enforce this law.
I feel absolutely helpless. If you have any idea of what I can do, please share it with me. I know that this incident will happen yet again. I still have no idea how to prevent it. The only thing I can think of now is to call up the fire engine when this happens again (in the hope that they'l have some kind of fire-accident prevention funda).
All that might be needed, I think, is for some authority to come and warn these guys. My father or I are not the voice that they will listen to . The BMC will not come. They're the ones who find it convenient to deal with garbage in the form of ashes(reduced mass) than in their entirety. (The gardener told me so.) Please drop in a word if you have any idea/suggestion.
How dare these people celebrate 'Republic Day' (as they did today), salute the flag and even feel proud of their 'patriotism'.
3 comments:
Well Im as unaware of the rules as you are, but would filing an RTI in the name of the authority that is meant to clean up the garbage help? Once you get the reply then maybe you can follow it up with the timings for cleaning it and stuff.. i am skeptical about this but its worth a try.
1) Wait till the soot adorns the building walls. Each resident must shell out a lot of money more often that before to repaint the walls. Point this out to them.
2) Secretly install hyper-sensitive fire alarms in clandestine locations. If nothing else works, this should definitely do the trick. People will be driven mad by the shrill sound and no one will be able to locate the alarms to turn them off.
P.S. Listen to Ashwini Bhide's Nayaki Kanada.
Thanks, Deep.. I am trying to find out what kind of an RTI query will be most useful in this. I did not think of RTI.. thank you for suggesting it.
Varsh - They're not people who analyze or wonder what caused the soot. Suggest something more/something else Vashma..please.
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