do with the muck? Simple. Throw it out of the window. That’s what windows are for, apart from letting in air and light.The scrupulous cleanliness of us Indians is attested to by the assiduity with which we expel all forms of rubbish, garbage, junk and litter from our homes and places of work and dump such offending and offensive matter where it rightly belongs: on our public streets and thoroughfares.

This is what less anciently civilised communities can’t understand about us: the cordon sanitaire that we draw between our pure, pollution-free personal space (our homes, offices, etc) and the public space of the outside world at large (i.e. anything and everything beyond the sacrosanct confines of our homes, offices, etc) which we rightly use for the purpose it has obviously been designed, namely to be the natural receptacle of all our filth and rubbish. That the ‘outside’ of our public space is unmitigatedly dirty and squalid only testifies to the fact that the ‘inside’ of our personal domains is squeakyclean and spotless. There is a profound chasm, not just cultural but spiritual, between us and societies and individuals who are obsessed about ‘outside’ (and therefore irrelevant) cleanliness at the expense of ‘inner’ salubrity. It is this basic misapprehension of the uniquely Indian concept of sanitation that causes outsiders to trash us. Which they are once more planning to do at the forthcoming G8 meet where the US and Japan will try to armtwist India into accepting emission norms for industry.

This western phobia about carbon emissions is incomprehensible to the Indian mind. Carbons are dirty things, right? In which case why are people so hung up about emitting them (i.e. getting rid of the darn things, like chucking garbage out of the window)? But people like Al Gore carry on something fierce about carbon emissions and how horrid they are (all the more reason to be shot of all that nasty carbon and dump it where it properly belongs: in the global public space known as the environment).

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is proposing to go to the G8 summit, where presumably he will try to educate the US, Japan and other misinformed parties about the right and proper manner in which to deal with industrial emissions and all that rot. Will someone open the window, please?