Let us clean our Neighborhood

So everyone is taking up the cleanliness drive these days – from celebrities to politicians to sports personalities and even corporate houses. That’s a good initiative. But is it okay to take a drive for 1 day and leave it at that? I was going through some celebrity photos of their cleanliness drive and the only dominant element in their large bins of garbage were dried leaves!!! Now the question is  - do you just see dried leaves on the streets?? I see a whole lot of things – old clothes, stale food, wrappers, vegetable peels, scrap metal, dead rats and just about everything. Definitely much more than just dried leaves.

Our apartment community had taken a cleanliness drive in our neighborhood in Bangalore once to free our streets (the then pot holed roads) of nails and metal parts. Many of our residents had participated in the drive and there was an incredible amount of metal junk collected from a stretch of 2 km road! Think about all the cars that have been plying on the busy road. We went up against the odds and started this drive early morning on a weekend so that commuters didn’t have a problem. We could do that because we stood up. The corporation, municipality turns deaf and blind in these situations. But should we stop at just that? Isn’t it our responsibility too to take up the responsibility of cleaning up. We don’t have a problem in cleaning our own house, terrace or balcony. We only use the roads – then why can’t we help in cleaning them?

When we travel abroad we take care not to throw a gum wrapper or a coffee cup on the roads, we take care to throw them in the designated bin, but as soon as we reach our own country we don’t think twice to throw a coffee cup on the roads, or spit on the roads. We learn to do what we see around. No one is throwing a single thing anywhere other than the bins so we don’t litter. We behave like a responsible citizen as we step into London, Paris or Singapore. And back here we don’t mind throwing the cigarette butt anywhere – because everyone around is doing the same. Wrong. We need to learn to a responsible citizen in our own country first. What legacy otherwise will you leave for your next generation – a country full of filth (pun intended)!

Let’s drive a campaign to clean our neighborhood. Let’s be responsible citizen. Strepsils India has come up with this campaign to encourage Indians to speak up against all the wrongs that we see around us. #AbMontuBolega. Join the campaign and lets stand up against all the wrongs – harassment of women, or littering roads. Lets strive to make the society a better place to live.  Visit their webpage, FaceBook Page orTwitterHandle 

http://www.abmontubolega.com/

This post of mine has been written as a part of Indi-Happy hours  on Indiblogger in association withStrepsilsIndia #AbMontuBolega