Thoda sa Bill!

In Agra and in Hyderabad, in Mumbai and in Delhi, the water hoses are out on the streets as are the brooms and bottles of phenol. Decrepit little villages, with clogged duck ponds, are suddenly being given the beauty treatment so that Old Bill can be treated to a slice of the “real India”.

Drains that have happily bubbled and burped these several decades and more are now inviting the attentions of the cleaning squad. Pavements which had these past several months proudly displayed the rubble left behind by the telephone people and the banana peels discarded by the lunch-time fruit eaters, are being rendered bereft of their familiar burdens.

Roads that once appeared as if Godzilla had made its way through them, have been transformed into silken thoroughfares. And whether the honourable Minister of Social Justice and Animal Welfare Maneka Gandhi likes it or not, dogs and donkeys of every size and shape are currently being hounded off the streets that Bill may tread. Ditto, the 200 unlucky monkeys of Hyderabad who have been expressly prohibited from greeting Old Bill during his peregrinations through the country.

As for the country’s most precious heritage site, the gleaming mausoleum of Shah Jehan’s magnificent obsession, well, its outer walls are now to be shorn of their customary grime and graffiti and bits and pieces that have fallen from its historic doors are being carefully replaced for this even more historic visitation.

All of which may sound a bit over the top. Poverty cannot, alas, be banished by rounding up beggars and transporting them to temporary shelters, and roadside encroachments need more sustainable policies than that of dispatching a battalion of bulldozers to the site. In any case, this whitewashed, disinfected India is certainly not the “real India”.

But having said this, let it also be noted that anything that can shake the ageless ennui that marks civic sense in India is only to be welcomed provided it lasts longer than this much-hyped, five-day presidential visit.