Swachchh Bharat

For the beginners, Rat was to spearhead the Swachchh Bharat drive in the absence of Cat and was thus reporting directly to Wolf these days. Though Rat wanted to give it a miss like previous occasions citing his presence before a Commission of Inquiry, he had reasons to stay back so that he could well utilise the absence of Cat and give Wolf a new hope which had been missing for quite some time.

My goodness, this 2^nd October, it was a bad day. I started at 6 am and it took me till 1.30 pm to take a breath. That's precisely one and half hours late as the deadline to upload the video on Swachchh Bharat Abhiyan onto You-Tube was fixed at 12.30 pm sharp. In between, the Rat had superimposed a confusion called the preponing of the live broadcast of the PM's speech, thus putting my PR-skills at toss. As employees of a Govt Undertaking, we had to watch it live and the recorded footage of the same was to be sent to our Corporate counterparts so that the same could be made available to the minister concerned by 4 pm of the day. In between, we had organised good number of programmes, such as shram dan for cleaning at public places and awareness campaigns. Despite it was Maha-Astami day of Goddess Durga, I had to be on my toes. Out of say 1500 people, may be 50-60 participated in all these programmes and were free once they are over. But, my job was extended till my Corporate counterpart received the email, till the newspaper fellow opened my press release, till the edited footage reached its destination, till some additional banners were done with the new logo in the twelfth hour.

But before I could complete my breath and start preparing my breakfast-cum-lunch, it was Rat on the other side of the phone. This time, Rat wanted eight more banners as the name of the schools under Swachh Vidyalay (read Toilet) Aviyan were changed by our Corporate Mahanuvabs. For a second, I could not understand how somebody sitting in heaven could decide in which schools at Korba the toilets should come up ? When the symbolic foundation laying had been done in two schools and the reports/photographs had been sent to the higher-ups, where was the need for this hurry ? Even if you work on a marathon speed, the banners could be at your disposal only after 2-3 hours, which means by 5 pm. After that, if you start visiting all the eight schools, you can complete the symbolic foundation laying puja by 8 pm. Then if you send the photographs, who's going to open it in the first place? But Rat has an answer. It was not him, the Wolf wanted this. At this, I politely conveyed my inability to carry out at this juncture citing my points-men were all on holiday and are not available for this service. Neither had I any assistant to get this job done, thus pointing him to explore other options. However, I assured him that the official photographer would accompany to capture the visuals.

Because I knew from my past experience, it was not Wolf. It was Rat himself. Rat's unprecedented Thanks Giving to Wolf after the morning pledge-taking was an eye opener that day. Mrs Wolf and her clan were there in the august gathering. Anyway, Rat again remembered me at 8.30 pm as photographs were obtained from all the eight as per his commitment to Wolf and I quickly logged on to email all of them, knowing well why Rat was doing it, and why I was doing it.

Tail Piece : Finding Fanny was easier than finding a right photograph of our Ladies Club's Swachchh Bharat Aviyan. All they were doing was gigling, grabbing a jhadu, posing with their fancy sarees, to the camera fellow. What's their to clean when you chose a place having no garbage ? But I had a bigger problem. Which photo should I send to the media so that it should not contradict that they were the better-halves ? As always, here also, Rat can have an idea to throw!!