Here’s an interesting approach to educating the public about health and sanitation — make a song about it.
Daily 620 million Indians are defecating in the open. That’s half the population dumping over 65 million kilos of poo out there every day. If this poo continues to be let loose on us, there will be no escaping the stench of life threatening infections, diseases and epidemics.
It’s weirdly catchy, too.
With the animation style, it could easily be translated into a Wii game. Fitting!
V S Naipaul wrote about this, somewhat more eloquently.
What kind of shitty crap is this?
Behold Mr. Hankey, all growed up…
In case anyone is considering donating through their web site, the Chromebleed extension on my browser indicates that http://www.poo2loo.com might be vulnerable to Heartbleed.
It’s currently #1 on India’s Top Farty chart.
Kidding aside, fecal waste in streets could create the perfect {ahem} storm of mass deaths comparable to Bhopal or even the Black Death.
I’m still partial to this condom use commercial
Japan just got some serious competition there.
Heheheheeeeee Poo Poo Poo Poo Everywhere, Poo Poo Poo Everywhere…. poo2loo poo poo poo… shshushuuuu (whistle )…. gotago, had teeka mashala, gotago Poo Poo Poo everywhere….
Sometimes I say that life is shitty, but I’ve never meant it litterally before.
Back in ’83, I spent about 4 hours waiting for a train, in Ahmedabad railway station. I had the first class loo available to me. I tried to not want to go, because it was way, way beyond ‘filthy and disgusting’. The other hundreds of passengers were on the floor below me, without any loo. And they weren’t holding back. I can only hope that the Indians have now actually built some loos, otherwise they’ll all be singing catchy songs, as they shit on the floors…
Just curious whether treating them with chemicals and unleashing those pollutants into the water cycle is only separating us by mere degrees from the pestilence of poo. Which is worse?
On my first trip to India, my first stop was Calcutta. Since I had plenty of time and no money, I wound up staying in one of the cheap hotels down by the Indian Museum. Almost invariably, during my first few days in the city, I would step outside of my hotel, and within 5 steps, my feet would slip on something. “Aw, Shit!,” I’d say, and I’d be right. New Delhi was even worse, and in general the Northern cities were worse than the Southern ones, although Chennai/Mysore has a special place in my memory as having streets paved in feces.
There is the story of a British man who was asked by an Indian acquaintance to succinctly summarize the difference between India and the West. “Hmm,” he said. “How to put this? In the West, we eat in public and defecate in private. In India, you eat in private and defecate in public.” I met a couple of other Brits who started a collection of videos of people crapping in public. It was a perfect example of the sort of love-hate relationship you develop when you are traveling in India.
The thing is that it’s unlikely to improve any time soon. There are simply too damn, many people. And anyone who has walked down the streets of downtown L. A. or other major cities in the US with large homeless populations knows that this problem isn’t unique to India. India is just ahead of the curve when it comes to homelessness. In Calcutta, there are families that have occupied the same spot on the pavement for 3 generations going back to the Partition in 1947. In the future, we will all become like either India or China. I’ll take India.
Didn’t they try to blame wild dogs for the piles of shit inside of dormitories during a major sporting event? I can’t recall the event itself (soccer, perhaps?) Gotta hand it to those wild dogs for climbing 3 or 4 flights of stairs and pooping in corners. Do they wipe, too?
Here’s another nicely animated PSA about a different body function:
urinating
nice little ditty. Much better than Moses insisting that no one poops in camp because his god is walking around and might step in it.
It seems likely that the makers of this video are Indian, so they probably know better than I, but it was always my impression that the biggest problem with defecating in the open was lack of access to toilets, so I’m not sure telling people on the internet to use the toilet is really going to help much. I would even assume that the people who made this video also are among the people who have access to toilets and may not fully be aware of the problem. Are there public toilets that poor people can readily use? Do poor people have toilets in their homes?
I guess it just looks like the assumption by the makers of this video is: look at all this shit lying around. These low caste peasants need to be taught to shit in the loo! Meanwhile, the poor people are all thinking, man, I wish I could go into that posh hotel lobby and use the loo instead of squatting down here in the street outside.
The reality may be that both are issues and this kind of education has real value, but the top down view of it still troubles me.
Ain’t that some shit.
/rim shot
@17 gussnarp: Public urination, at least, is a big problem in some areas, lack of toilet access or not. Driving down the road in Delhi, it’s not unusual to just see guys with their backs to you peeing against a wall (a wall often painted with “Do not pass urine here”). Maybe I’ve been going to the wrong (or right) places, but I don’t recall ever coming across random shit piles in public places (except the NYC subway, but that’s not in India!)
That aside, my favorite part of this video is the little Hindi signs in the background saying “Do not shit here.”
@13
There did seem to be more wholesale poverty in Old Delhi than the parts of Chennai I visited, but the public breach front in Chennai, with the smelly haze and skeletal horses, roving bands of children, and ragged tarps flapping in the salty breeze, is the most apocalyptic thing I’ve ever encountered. That’s how I spent my honeymoon!