24 February,2010 10:02 AM IST | | Anjana Vaswani
I started earlyu00a0-- took my dog And visited the Sea. The angry residents and BMC Came out to look at me
That's how American poet Emily Dickinson may have opened her poem were she to write it in Mumbai today.
Lucky for her, the US took a somewhat relaxed approach to dog poop back in the 1880s, else the self-proclaimed recluse who often stated that her only companions were the hills, the sundown and her dog, might well have turned out more like her depressed contemporary, Edgar Allan Poe.
Countering a different kind of madness, Shailesh Sheth and Vinita Mirchandani, South Mumbai residents and members of the Marine Drive Promenade Pet Lovers' Group, tell us why they strive to keep local authorities from banning dogs on Marine Drive. "In Bandra, dogs are limited to specified areas, while at Worli you are not allowed to walk your dogs at all. Most parks in the city have restrictions on dog-walking because either residents of the area are scared or they feel the litter is a nuisance. Strays, however, are free to wander wherever they like," Shailesh scoffs. It's hard to ignore the irony u2014 most pets would, at the very least, be vaccinated. "Obviously some of the litter problem can be attributed to strays," says Vinita, who adopted a stray 10 years ago.
Despite their pleas, Marine Drive still remains dust-bin-free, Shailesh says exasperated. "The BMC doesn't allow you to dispose doggy-litter in a dustbin anyway." When the group approached the BMC, one official explained that dustbins weren't being installed at the promenade because they posed a bomb hazard. That's a unique approach to deal with terror. Or perhaps the plan is to keep the city so filthy, you couldn't even pay terrorists to dock at our shores.
Twenty eight year-old Rajpal Valmiki, the oldest of four siblings, neither professes a special fondness for dogs nor cares particularly about Mumbai's hygiene. To him the BMC's norms merely translate into an additional Rs 2,000 every monthu00a0-- for saluting two BMC officials (he has to show them he is on the job each day) and walking from the Air India building to the Marine Drive flyover (A Ward) and back to his full-time job as a sweeper. In a country where the minimum wage is a trifling Rs 100 per day, the Rs 66 he earns for one hour of work, seems a good deal.
Valmiki is the private dog poop scooper hired by the Group to keep the area pet poop free with his hand-held plastic scooper. With dustbins missing, pet owners leave poop wrapped in paper by the kerb. Valmiki picks these up and deposits them at a garbage collection point at Churchgate.
We think Valmiki may be the first of a new breed of private sanitation officers.
