The Magic Carpet!
Thank you Bollywood for the pleasure of liking our beautiful village in Goa to come take a shit in.
We were happy to see the lines of trucks; grips, gear, vanity buses and star owned SUVs. It meant people were getting work again, that Goa was starting to earn some much needed revenue, also of course a film shoot always carries an air of magic — especially now that lockdown movie viewing is even more a ritual of home life. Our village community adjusted peacefully to its traffic bottleneck, toggling two-way movement using half a road, added with people driving a little slower than even the normal Goa slow for a curious glimpse.
It was when we left our house the next morning and saw a mountain, wait let me be fair, a hill, of large black garbage bags that we both frowned. Not having been picked up by the usually diligent cleaning men meant it was unsegregated garbage, the kind where wasted food and raita and cooking peels get smeared all over dry plastic and packaging. The kind we say eew to and look away immediately. The kind that is not only inhuman to expect others to clean up for you but genuinely impossible to separate.
Dumping garbage has been a very visible issue in Goa and it has been declared illegal with a fine of 5000/- (prohibitive perhaps for us regular folk, peanuts for a big film company) Unsegregated garbage is not picked up by the Panchayat as it cannot be processed at GWMC nor recycled. What happens with unsegregated garbage is it either stays there till eternity, creating unhygienic and unsightly dump sites, or it goes to a landfill. Tragic then that all this is only due to a careless disregard of not having 2-3 different bins at source where people throw trash separately. Even a 2-bin system of wet and dry is fine. That’s how simple it is! And thats how infuriating.
When I moved to Goa I participated in trash clean ups, both on the beach as well as dump sites. Beaches are mostly cigarettes, straws, washed up waste. But urban trash dumpsites are the stuff of nightmares. You cannot unsee the visuals. I have helped cleaners pick up garbage at Bambolim, Thivim, Siolim and it is unbelievable. If the early 20th century was about compulsory military training the 21st should be about everyone doing time on garbage dump sites, you’ll stop your own consumption by half. Human hair wrapped with onion peels, egg shells and wasted oily aaloo mattar of four days ago mix with washing powder and chips packets, combs, slippers, sanitary napkins, diapers; something has begun to ferment somewhere; in the heat steam releases as you pick up; a lot of it is blackened with mould, there are flies stuck in bunches and a sulfuric smell that doesn’t leave your mind long after you’ve bathed. What makes it worse is once it piles high, it is burnt which over layers and layers and layers you realise the soil itself has become trash.
The spot this new dumpsite was created at is next to our compound where 4 Panchayat bins lie. Behind it is a hill of meadows and green forest. The truck clears the site out daily. All of us leave only dry waste to be collected. Wet waste is busy growing our backyard plants and gardens or used to feed regular customers of crows, free roaming cats and a band of perpetually hungry indies. We spoke with one of the cleaning men and he confirmed this was thrown by the film people. There began the episode that I will recount as briefly as I can, its fairly standard city folk behaviour.
We complained to the Panchayat, they were fined (5K — must have laughed). As I drove by the next morning a man in a non-woven covid precaution gown {the next wave of waste that will hit our planet} stood taking a video of the site {which now was clear of bags} to show he had sorted out the mess. I stopped the car and asked the cleaners if all was okay, in response I got a quivering teary response saying ‘ma’am they have burnt the trash last night and along with it the plastic dustbins are also melted and burnt! You please go and see upper road where they have taken the remaining garbage and lots more all thrown hidden from you’ At this the production person walks up to this poor man and physically intimidates him shoving his forehead in his face. For that brief moment Goa left me and Delhi returned, which sent him scurrying back to his shoot site. I’ll never forget the cleaning mans look of helpless exasperation looking back at his bin zone saying “mein roz mehnat karke itna saaf rakhta hoon, kabhi itna ganda nahi hone diya” He was weeping because his work place had been arrogantly vandalized by people who thought they could buy their way out of anything. I drove to the other site immediately, it was ghastly. A bigger pile, and pouring out of it were plastic one time use thalis used for catering lunch. Till today {a week later} it lies there, with added PPE gowns and masks, while now the production claims they paid 1 lac to the panchayat to ‘deal with it’ so no longer their problem (!)
What amazes + angers me. Firstly that a production as high up the food chain as Dharma cannot plan trash management? To add insult to injury film star Deepika Padukone a self professed ‘cleaning OCD’ who stated in the press a few months ago she would love to be Swachh Bharat Minister {giggle} — and whom I actually had some regard for being from the cooler side of Mumbai film world — would be so oblivious {its a tiny set, she drove past dump daily}
Secondly that once we began sending out warnings and informing the authorities, the production got busier hiding (and burning) the body rather than fixing the problem! We didn’t ask to shut their production down, nor are we interested in extracting something, all we did was convey the ground worker’s request to this fancy movie production of Karan Johar, Deepika Padukone and local line producer Dilip Borkar {the worst offender on so many levels} “please sir hume sirf aap chhaant ke dijiye” How difficult would it have been?
Would you do this shooting in New York ?
Its 2020! There is no excuse. There is no pay-way-out-of. There is no being oblivious no matter how fancy a production you are. Perhaps Bombay people are used to living amidst garbage. The city is one big landfill now so nothing stands out. Goa on the other hand is a fragile coastal ecosystem. The garbage dump created was about 4 yards away from the sea shore — on a coastal road. This is vile, arrogant behaviour —and its literally shitting on a community and leaving.
In any other country you would have been in jail for this criminal offense, not just dumping but burning Panchayat property. In the end, we’ll scream, there’ll be articles, we’ll tag on social media and post this stuff all over. If it gets big enough they’ll notice and then begin wailing about how people are only out to get them — already Borkar has told press we are trying to malign their reputation — {lol} mate you did that work all by yourself. But mostly things will be the way they are, and we are now keeping a record of how long that site is going to stay there. Already GWMC has informed us PPE gowns cannot be accepted at the plant. Shame on you all.