I am back from a  both awesome and awful trip to India. Everything awful was limited to:

• A traffic with an accompanying honking noise (Mumbai),
• Air-pollution (again, Mumbai),
• Over-population (felt the strongest in Mumbai),
• Seemingly total absence of any traffic rules and traffic lights – you should have seen a cluster f@#$ intersection I found myself in my second day in … guess where? Mumbai!
• And, finally, garbage on the streets all around India.

Awesome part can be summed up in one word – people. I am amazed how so many souls took time out of their lives to take care of me. I had a stranger giving me her time to walk me to a train station, to buy my ticket, to take me to a right platform and the right car (there are cars for men and there are cars for women) and to tell me “your stop is the very last one”. I had another stranger googling, making calls, writing down directions for taxi just because I happened to ask her “Where can I exchange dollars?” . The highlight of the awesome part was an Ayurvedic doctor I met in Varkala who shattered my world with his life philosophy and made me re-consider my diet and self-care regimen.

However, this post is about garbage or rather what is being done with it based on what I was told by owners of InDa hotel in Varkala, Kerala. I made a hotel reservation via www.booking.com to find out upon my arrival that the hotel was managed by a young Ukrainian couple. I also found out that a lot of guests in InDa are  travelers from post-Soviet countries. To  be frank, I avoid places like that because the first thing that comes to my mind is all-inclusive Russian-speaking hotels in Antalya, Turkey. Not here! The people I got meet were those who travel for 6 months in a row, work online, study yoga to be able to teach it in some far away Saint Petersburg, etc. In addition to post-Soviet folks I met Greeks, Italians, French, Germans, Spanish… the list goes on.

Now back to the garbage…. It is all over the place outside of the hotel like it is everywhere in India. When I dig  for a millionth time into logical reasons of  “why is it so dirty?” I learn from our Ukrainian hosts the following:

The government can not manage the garbage removal. Each hotel has to invent its own garbage removal strategy. In case of InDa hotel, for plastic, metal and glass waste they made arrangements with some Tamil guy who picks it up and sells it to someone else. Food and organic waste is picked up by another guy for his cows. Occasionally, a cow guy skips a visit and then the hotel uses its compost pit. What’s left is a non-recyclable garbage which is also taken away by someone for a fee.

Basically, what in a civilized country is managed by the government in this case is managed in a very civilized manner by the hotel’s management. This also explains why on the streets there is trash everywhere – well, the government has no resources to dispose of it.

One Saturday I saw an ad on the street for “Clean Varkala Day”. The same day I ran into a German guy who was cleaning a street outside of his homestay. We briefly spoke. He told me that he had been living in Varkala for 6 months going through a yoga training and yes, he believes that cleaning streets is something they (Europeans) must help with to keep Varkala clean and to show Indians a good practice. When I returned to the hotel I told our Ukranian hosts about “Clean Varakala Day”. They said, yes, the Europeans who live here organize such days. Only Europeans, sadly, participate in such initiatives.

I am thankful to live in a smaller country (30 million souls is a lot  easier to manage than a nation of 1.3 billion), thankful for our Communist past which put a lot of infrastructure in place, thankful for our Islamic heritage which values cleanliness, however, even in center city Tashkent which is known to be green and clean I often see plastic bags with trash along sidewalks while a garbage disposal bin is only 10 meters away. This makes me believe over and over again – it all comes down to people not caring about how they live.