A few days ago, I was driving down Hatirjheel, admiring the sunset in the hazy summer sky, when you stopped alongside me at the signal. There we were, just the two of us, fellow Dhaka-ites, silently rejoicing the traffic-free roads of a Friday afternoon, when you did something I imagine you (surely?) didn’t mean to: You craned your neck out of your window, gargled and then lobbed a ball of spit … at my car.
Perhaps you underestimated your lung power, and didn’t think the projectile would cover the two feet between our vehicles. Then again, maybe you intended it to splatter on my car – which is white by the way – in a Pollockian fashion. We didn’t have a chance to catch eyes, you and I, before the signal turned green. But I’d like to assume that some corner of your brain registered at least a smidgen of remorse (did you know that paan, once dry, can only be scraped off with a steel sponge?)
As we start promoting Beautiful Bangladesh to the world, we need to grow a new consciousness as a nation. As we travel from Motijheel to Uttara or Agrabaad to GEC, we find the roadsides or public places littered with garbage, and people spitting and peeing in public places. This leaves us with a feeling that the whole country has been turned into a dump.
How have we allowed this state of affairs as a nation? It is truly a matter of concern. This is happening when Bangladesh has been rising with unprecedented economic growth rates for the last couple of years.
We Bangladeshis are personally very clean people. We brush our teeth and take a bath/shower every day, and wash our hands before we eat. We keep our houses speck-free clean. But when it comes to public places, as people we are simply unable to keep our streets, our railway stations, our hospitals, etc clean.
This is the state of affairs everywhere in Bangladesh, including towns and cities, as well as in the streets of the capital. We simply have very poor civic sense or social ethics.
What is civic sense? Civic sense encompasses the unspoken norms of society, which help it run smoothly without someone tripping on somebody else’s toes. Civic sense is all about having consideration for a fellow human being. It means being polite, showing consideration to others, driving in one’s lane without honking, throwing one’s garbage into dustbins, smoking only in designated places, not spitting in public places. The list can go on.
To know your enemy, they say, is to understand him. So in an effort to deconstruct this better, I went through the articles and publications by behavioral research firm Final Mile in India (they are in deep trouble in this issue). Co-founder Ram Prasad and his team have been doing field research on spitting and here’s what they’ve discovered: “No Spitting” signs are, not surprisingly, pretty ineffectual, and in fact do just the opposite, stimulating the body’s production of saliva rather than prohibiting it (the brain’s control mechanism kicks in with those of us who care, hence preventing the non-spitters among us from spitting). Secondly, when one thinks that he/she is being watched, chances are they’ll be less likely to spit.
Placing an image of a pair of human eyes or a stick figure on walls helps significantly, but here’s the kicker: It works only if the area where someone is spitting happens to be clean in the first place. That, of course, would require a municipal system that regularly cleans the filthier parts of the city.
A more efficient way to go about addressing the problem is to simply refrain from mentioning it. Ram Prasad adds that: “If a lot of people are spitting, the thing to do is not get into saying that a lot of people are spitting like the headline in the newspaper … one way of communicating it correctly is to say ‘less people are spitting now’ or ‘places where spitting has reduced’ – you have to choose the norm you want to communicate.” But again, that relies on external factors, like a particularly social behaviour-savvy newspaper editor.
We’re privately smart but publicly dumb. This partly explains why you, “Spitter,” lob one on someone’s car, on the street, in a stairwell, or in the lift, but will never ever do such a thing in your home. Also, in one corner is a weak regulatory system that doesn’t punish offenders severely enough and a total lack of self-regulation on your part.
So, what can be done? We could remove the safety net of knowing you’ll never be detected. This is easily accomplished by plastering the city with banners of shame – someone takes a photo of an offender, ie you, and spreads it via cellphone. Obviously, this would require the regulatory system to function efficiently, which fortunately for you, it does not.
Thus, Spitter, you see, everything is on your side to carry on in the offensive manner in which you have done so successfully for so many years. But while we dither about finding the best solution, you could try something a tad simpler (in case you wanted to be helpful): Just don’t spit.