Respecting those who keep city clean sacrificing their own hygiene

The travails and despair of a community that operates unrecognised, underappreciated and often ignored by the urban eye, came alive through narratives at the ‘Olfactory Chamber of Ward X’ walk through Indiranagar on Sunday.

The two-hour-long walk, organised by members of Maraa, a media and art collective, traversed the main roads and bylanes of the area, focussing on rag-pickers and municipal waste workers who pick others’ waste for daily survival.

Poignantly, in many locations, the tour hushed to silence, with the 20 participants asked to open their eyes to the filth and be guided by the assault on their olfactory senses. This, emphasised the organisers, was the daily sight and stench for hundreds who sacrifice their own hygiene for the cleanliness of the city.

“The worst we have had to deal with is excrement that is hard to flush or if the flush doesn’t work. Once it is flushed, it disappears out of our reality, into another space,” said a tour guide.

Clean drinking water is hard for the workers to find, while, cleaning harmful chemicals out of drains has taken its toll on them, said the organisers. The stench during the tour eventually drove home the point that work done by pourakarmikas should be respected.

Olfactory Chamber of Ward X walk held

at Indiranagar