Most people who pass by the new bridge across river Cauvery hold a hand-kerchief to their nose and those who know my brother will have a comment like " Why cant he have this place cleaned up?" little realising that its all their collective garbage which is being dumped there by the village panchayath is what is creating the stink!! Talk to the members of the panchayath and they throw up their hands The land thats been allocated to them for dumping garbage is caught up in some litigation. A few months back, my brother asked them to stop dumping the garbage on the riverside and built a make-shift bench with a few bamboo poles so that he could deploy a watchman of sorts over there to keep an eye on things.
For a few days, everything was fine, the panchayath found some other place to dump the stuff, and there were headlines in the local papers about the garbage wars, But thats another story.
But before that, I was planning on visiting my brother the other day. While on my way there, I get call from him "where are you? Hurry up, there are some people here, waiting to meet you"
Before I could tell him that I will be few minutes late, he had hung up.
I landed up at his place fifteen minutes later, curious to see who were the people waiting to meet me, but there was none other than my brother. Then he tells me that the members of the village Panchayath had come to request him to allow them to dump the garbage on the riverside just for a few days till they could make alternative arrangements. He had replied that since I was the one objecting to the stink , they should get my permission as he was helpless, he had no say in the matter. He had painted me as such a harridan that they had left as quickly as possible so that they wont have to come face to face with me!
