When mayor took up sticks

dear mr mayor, i wrote to you last week, urging you to demolish roadside temples in the city, and didn’t want to bother you again this week. but the things you come up with! i see in the papers that you went and hit someone with a stick for urinating on a roadside wall. you sidled up to the man silently, delivered one blow, ran back to your car and sped away.well, well. that is vintage subrata mukherjee, though that is not going to stop public pissing in our city. what one would like to know is, are you going to stop there? or, do you intend to do something about it seriously? one blow with a stick has got you some publicity, but it’s not going to help your city, mr mayor. like the demolition of one temple on r.n. mukherjee road is not going to give your city a better look. you have got to pursue the matter. but i doubt whether you have the patience. urinating on the street is a penal offence though, according to newspaper reports, one can be fined only ten rupees for committing it. surely, that’s no deterrent. you know it and have commented on it. but quo vadis, domini? where do you go from here? are you going to forget about it and shift to smething else? kolkata has just too many maladies. if you tinker with one today, another tomorrow, we all shall stay in square one. i understand your impatience regarding urinating. it’s difficult to understand why we kolkatans have so little control on our bladders. walls to us are like lamp posts to dogs. any wall, any tree, any road intersection is good enough to leave our mark on. i am reminded of the state of the esplanade east crossing in the sixties and seventies. about a million people urinated beside curzon park every day. it was easily the biggest open-air urinal in asia. as a reporter, i sometimes had to spend hours in the area to cover demonstrations and cop-and-crowd fights. the stink has not left my nostrils yet. thank god the place has changed. while on the subject, what about our habit of spitting? we spit left, right and centre while walking. no stretch of ten yards of a kolkata road is free of sputum. admittedly, the climate makes us all vulnerable to frequent cough and cold, but does one have to spit all the time and everywhere? not to mention the coloured fluid spewed by paan-chewers. for that matter, many kolkatans do not spare their own offices either. corners of staircase landings are used freely for spitting. in one office building, i noticed a statue of ganesh in every such corner. i was told that those have been placed as the last resort to prevent employees from spitting on the wall. even fundamentalism has its uses. the state government was considering a legislation to prevent indiscriminate spitting, along with smoking in public. i don’t know what its present status is. but i’m sure it’s not going to serve any purpose. since you feel so strongly about it, mr mayor, why not start a campaign against pissing and spitting in public? as you know very well, legislation is not the answer to every problem. nor is one blow with a stick. try your skills, mr mayor.