Published in The Hindu Open Page
The
paan puzzle
Many
addicts may chew outdoors, but when it comes to spitting, they prefer indoors.
November 21, 2021 01:30 am | Updated 01:30 am IST
Paan -chewers are
people of few words. When the mouth is full of paan, the words don’t come
easily; it’s either chew or speak. Unlike chewed gum which can be discreetly
discarded, chewed paan, when expelled, marks territory forever. Perverse paan -chewers may chew outdoors, but when it comes to spitting, they
prefer indoors. In a homing instinct, they will locate a tall building, avoid
the lift, huff up the staircase and squirt their mouthful in a stairway
landing, precisely in the corner. Freshly white-washed walls are open
invitations for them to splatter them red.
One jugaad solution to this problem has been
to install glazed tiles with pictures of deities. This is not foolproof, and
only shifts the spitting a few metres from the nearest picture. We sneer at
pathetic signboards saying, “Please do not spit here.” We get angry with any
sentence that contains a “do not”, and so will do just the opposite, and teach
these instruction-givers a lesson. If a smart signboard said “spit here”, with
a sand bucket placed below, we hold back our mouthful. “Why should I spit
here?” we might snort, chewing paan spitefully, and
spit somewhere else close by, rebels that we are.
Indians have always been spitting at will,
and it is basically a cultural thing. If you have to spit, you spit anywhere,
anytime; it is not a big deal. When someone talks to you with a mouthful
of paan , the suspense kills you. Has the
critical mass reached inside his mouth? When is he going to spit, and where? Is
it time to jump out of his way? And so on. This enlivens the conversation.
For years, I had never been able to catch
anyone in the act of spitting of paan in the
stairways. Then one day, I saw it happen. It was a person sweeping the stairs
in the morning in an office building I was visiting. She came over with cheeks
bulging withpaan , and squirted the juice into the
corner of the stairs casually, before I could react and stop her. I choked
back my anger, counted slowly up to 10, and then asked her why she couldn’t
spit outside the building. She controlled her anger, and looked at me like I
was a visitor from Mars. She spat out the remaining juice in her mouth in that
corner again, and said it was difficult to walk out of the building every two
minutes, just for spitting. Mystery solved.
She had a point, I thought. What have we
done for the welfare of people who come to clean the common areas? Her only
sustenance and motivation is the paan ; and where is
she supposed to spit it out, as she works stair by stair on the third or fourth
floor levels? Can we provide spittoons at all stairway landings?
In the old days, in public buildings, there
were fire buckets, filled with sand. They were there for fire safety, but only
a professional weightlifter might be able to lift a bucketful of sand and fling
it far enough into a fire without tipping over and going along with it. So,
everybody used the buckets as spittoons and ash trays — an Indian adjustment.
That bucket focused the spitting effort into one place. With the gradual
disappearance of fire buckets, the world is their spittoon.
Apart from the sweeper, there are many others
whose motivation to spit in the stairways has not been analysed, since they
evade discovery. These spit-and-run types need to come forward, or even
anonymously email their point of view, and explain why they do it, why indoors,
why on walls, and what can be done to halt their routine. Those who suggest a
workable remedy (except asking for a dedicated wall on each floor for spitting
on) may be rewarded suitably — a step towards Swachh Bharat.
https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/open-page/the-paan-puzzle/article37596205.ece
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