I'm The Great Indian Litterbug

So, I’m The Great Indian Litterbug (TGIL). I get it that there is a campaign against me, which seems to be on me, but I really get it, coz I can dig sarcasm. I plead guilty as charged on all accounts that are exhibited in this video.

Well, may not be all since I don’t own a car and I cant remember ever puking out of it, may be I did, but as I said I cant remember. But, that’s not the point anyway. I do acknowledge the efforts behind making this campaign, and I’m all for it. At least the video is damn good. I never thought I’d look so good on camera doing all those things with all the slo-mo shots, my actions accompanied by a delicious voice over. I’m sold.

At times when I take a walk along the road towards my home, the place does have a lot of vendors on small wooden carts selling groundnuts cooked in salt water, that I’m a sucker to. Also, they taste great when I’m walking, so I buy them. I try to find a dustbin to throw away the remains, but I don’t really look for it. I get impatient after a while, look around and see if no one is checking, and leave it out on the road for the municipality guys to clean the next morning. After all, they have to do some work to get paid. Once I said one of them to clean the road properly, and he retorted me that I shouldn’t care since it’s not my father’s property. This action serves well for him, I suppose. So no one saw me littering. As I said I’m TGIL. No one can identify me.

Now, I got a loose bladder. Not one of my mistakes I reckon. I don’t always want an open space to let lose, but when I don’t get it, the first thing I do is, take my ID card, which hangs around my neck – I don’t like to use retractors – and hide it inside my pocket. I don’t want to represent my company when I’m being embarrassed. So while I’m in the act, I look around to see if anyone else is doing it along with me. We are brothers in arms, never acknowledged, never seen again, but we revel in each other’s presence. It’s a sort of comfort zone. I feel happy at first, since I have cleared my bladder, but guilty later, coz I know I shouldn’t have done what I did. The sad thing is I can’t undo it using Ctrl Z. I wish I could, though I probably won’t if I have to face the bladder problem all over again.

I have equally factious accounts of circumnavigation for other littering, and I’m sure you got the point I’m trying to make and would be bored to hell if I continue. I don’t want to present my side of the argument here. I pleaded guilty already.

As TGIL, I ask myself, does the video embarrass me? Hell yeah. Do I want to change? You betcha. When will I do it? Well, I’m planning for it. It doesn’t come easy to me, coz as they say old habits die-hard and these are the ones that are nurtured unconsciously. Now I have difficulties in getting a hold on the habits I developed consciously, so the redemption on the habits inculcated unconsciously will take their own sweet time. I’m not promising heaven tomorrow, I’m only taking the first step, it is conscious by the way, of acknowledging my part in the chaos, dirt and grime of our country.  The remedial measures begin right now.

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This post is written for Times of India The Great Indian Litterbug Campaign hosted by Indiblogger Happy Hours

Top Post on IndiBlogger

Ever since I first saw the “Top Post on IndiBlogger” badge, awarded to ten of the most voted posts in a 24 hour time period from the time the post is submitted to IndiVine, I wanted to have one. I was kind of obsessed about it in a sort of silly way, but I can be quite fussy about these sorts of things. I played the snake game on Nokia 1100 mobile all night, and was literally heartbroken when I could not break one of my friends’ records. I still remember being devastated at losing a game of chess once while I was in my engineering. It gave me so much grief that I stopped playing the game with others for a very long time. It took me a long time to have it on my blog, but this is one of those guilty pleasures I take immense satisfaction in.

I don’t think that this is any validation to the presence or the content of my blog, nor I consider this an endorsement of my social networking skills. I have seen many authors having this badge who do not even care about its existence, who will probably laugh their backsides off at my ridiculous analysis about the right time to post, days where number of votes required to win the badge would be minimum, weekend trends of voting and many such weird stats, but for me it was always something that I wanted to have, or worth throwing a tantrum about not having it. It is like wanting to have a funky cap at a fair, which can only be won by throwing a ring around it. It might take a hundred attempts, and you might end up spending more than what the cap would cost, but at the end of the day if you do not return to your home winning it, you feel sad. Sure, you can buy the same cap from one of the stores outside, but it’s not the same feeling is it?

There is a terminology inside IndiBlogger Forum called Shameless Self Promotion, which basically discourages anyone to go around and spam people to read their stuff, which would make their posts visible and guarantee votes. I never wanted to indulge in it, but when I came really close to getting the required number of votes for the badge, I could not resist myself from being shameless and promoted my post all over the place. I have been helped, rather gamely, by a lot of regulars on the forum like Knitha, Vijay, Ranjith, CyberKid, DS and some of my regular readers too, and I’m thankful to them for making my dream come true.

Other thing that I’m equally thankful about is that, this badge would give me one lesser thing to worry about, and concentrate on some of the stuff I have been planning for a long while. I don’t know if this has been weighing me down subconsciously, but going by the relief it gave me, I welcome this badge with utmost pertinence.

I’m quite heartless in disregarding my own achievements, just because they wont hold the same prominence for me after some time. I think the same future awaits this badge too, as it has been for the “Tangy Tuesday Picks” and “Spicy Saturday Picks” of BlogAdda. Note that I was quite obsessed with them too at that time when I didn’t have them, but only till I got them and got them out of my way. Those two were considerably easy, at least in comparison to this one, so this badge might be cherished for a while, and then again I might laugh it off and disregard it the first thing tomorrow.  Tcha.

The post that won the badge, a 55-word short story, in itself is not a great piece of writing, nor is it something I’m very proud of. It certainly isn’t the one, which I wanted to adorn the badge with, but it was in the right place at the right time. It is like throwing a blind one after all your concentration didn’t work, and voila, winning that cap. No regrets whatsoever.