How it all began!!!


I am actually glad I have joined a group of active, young and vibrant members in connection with Swachha Bharat Abhiyaan. Its been 3-4 months in this team. We select a spot and every Sunday morning our group goes there to clean the area. Its something I look forward to starting every Monday. I wonder how did I end up in this team that is highly concerned with the cleanliness  and keen on changing the city to be a neat one(One of the many concerns for the nation). Well it was not an overnight happening. So how it all began?!!

Its a well known fact that anywhere you walk in this country, you are sure to step on some litter or garbage
spread around. Be it a vegetable mandi, road, outside school/hospital, railway station/train etc. Someone walking in front of you might just stop and spit backwards or an auto rickshaw driver would spit out gallons that proudly chewed ridiculous pudiya. I remember long back I read a news article where it spoke about people throwing garbage right out of their window on the road without caring/seeing if its going to hit someone. I had also written articles mentioning this concern earlier in this blog as well.

There was a time when I would also be a part of the crowd yelling and cursing the government cynically about not doing anything on this filth all around apart from various other concerns. That went on for quite sometime. Though with time I started to realize that I am also a part of the nation and instead of cursing the govt, I should do my part in building a better nation. But how?

Another major change came in me when I joined my job with a TATA firm. I really liked one of the working ideologies which said to return back to the society what you take from it when you are capable. I pondered over it for a while absorbing the depth and wisdom of working on this thought process. This surely had a potential to bring a lot of change around. But the question remained. How? I started inculcating habits that I am not wasting electricity. Not wasting water unnecessarily. Not wasting food. Ending my habit of littering around.

Then came a time when I started reading intensively on Gandhi/Bhagat Singh. I was curious how a person could move millions of Indians and more across the globe. Gandhi's book My experiments with truth explained about how he changed over time to fight with the evils inside him and outside around him. He did mention once that while he was touring across India to understand more of the country (before entering into politics), he traveled in dirty railway compartments where people had no importance of cleanliness. So I understand the problem of people making their own locality dirty is an age long problem and hence would take a considerable time and a huge effort to bring a change. His quote BE THE CHANGE YOU WANT TO SEE IN THIS WORLD was probably the last of impacts I needed to get myself ready for activities that would bring a change I want to see. So when an acquaintance informed me that there is a group of people who work for Swachha Bharat Abhiyaan in Kolkata, there was no way I could have denied the opportunity of being introduced to the group members. Pics will tell the rest.






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