The new mantra in New India: get down to plogging, not slogging 

Congratulations to Narendra Modi ji on his award from the Gates Foundation for his Clean India Mission.

Bharat is now super-swacch. Or so I tried to believe, as I ignored the piles of garbage everywhere in my open-defecation free BJP-ruled state of Uttarakhand. Then to my immense surprise, the PM ji himself tweeted a video of himself “plogging”.

I have to be honest. I had no clue to what plogging meant. It did not sound very polite, but maybe that’s just me. Anyway, I gathered from the video that PM ji went for a morning walk on the beach last week with a giant plastic bag and then filled that plastic bag with all the plastic garbage he found.

This was quite shocking. Because wasn’t India clean? What else was the award for?

No one in the Gates Foundation had evidently seen that enormous mountain of garbage as you enter Delhi from Ghaziabad. Actually, it is so fantastic that tourists may possibly think it is some ancient monument within a wildlife sanctuary for carrion birds. Or it could be that the mountain is a figment of my imagination because the Clean India Mission has been a success.

Anyway, there was the PM ji walking in a straight line down the beach, outside the Taj resort, picking up garbage which was also in a straight line.

You must acknowledge that at least the sea at Mamallapuram was quite disciplined in the manner in which it returned plastic to land in a straight line for the PM ji to collect. The sea on the other side, in Mumbai at least, is very rowdy. It just chucks vast quantities of rubbish back on the beaches without any consideration for a walking PM ji with a plastic bag for plogging purposes.

The success of the Clean India Mission notwithstanding, the plastic bag thing was also confusing. Why was the PM ji carrying a plastic bag? Many types of plastic according to the Government’s Mahatma Gandhi Birthday Celebration Plan were going to be banned or were banned. Then it turned out that the plastics industry was not happy, so it is possible that some plastic maybe banned one day in the distant future. Be that as it may, if the idea of plastic is anathema, could not the PM ji have been given another sort of garbage collection device than a plastic bag?

The mind boggles or Ploggles. Whatever.

I know some anti-national people (not me, not me) want to know why the PM ji himself had to clean up Mamallapuram Beach.

Others feel that the PMji should have cleaned up the beach before the summit with the Chinese Premier ji and not after. Others feel that other Cabinet ministers, especially those who sweep the corridors of AIIMS in Delhi or outside Parliament should really have helped the PM.

And the most anti-national of all have gone and met the sanitation workers who actually clean the beach every day, and have not been paid for a month at least. What cheek. What do we have a PM ji for, if these other people try and steal his thunder and expect to be paid also?

PM ji has won an award.

That should be payment enough.

Since the Indian economy has collapsed as has our social fabric while hatred has gone up, since the Rupee has gone down, our foreign relations are teetering, and all we can do with the Rafale planes we don’t yet have is to put limes under their wheels, there is little work left for this Esteemed Government to do.

So why not wander around India with hordes of cameramen and pick up carefully placed pieces of plastic? So what, if it’s all a publicity stunt, say fans of the Esteemed Government, at least it’s setting an example.

There you have it.

Fake is fun as long as you pretend properly.

In other news, textbooks in Gujarat apparently ask school students why Mahatma Gandhi committed suicide. Given the garbage being propagated in his name, especially by those who belong to the ideology which murdered him, why is anyone surprised?!