A billion Indians who have been working hard were very disappointed that India did not make Trump’s shithole (or even shithouse) list.
There are about 600 million rural Indians who prefer open defecation. But it turns out that open defecation, while attracting flies and emitting some odour, is not capable of great pollution.
To become a shithole/shithouse of a country, it takes a lot of infrastructure, fancy plumbing, copious amounts of water, and people who only care that their tiny personal space is clean, while massive cesspools build outside. The first step is to provide urban Indians with lots of water from far away, clean it, and fill up fancy, white toilets. Then people naturally pee and shit into the clean water and using even more clean water flush the unholy mess out of the building into storm drains, streets, lakes, and rivers.
Not a single Indian city processes all its sewage, nowhere even close. 96% of cities and towns do nothing. Mumbai sends around 4 billion liters of untreated sewage into the sea everyday. Delhi puts it out into the formerly holy Yamuna river towards the Taj Mahal. Bangalore prefers to keep it locally in its lakes.
Every Indian is downstream of a shitter and they happily add to the flow. So while cities downstream of Delhi cry foul, Delhi itself is downstream of so many towns that the river is foaming before reaching the capital. And Bangalore’s lakes foam and froth and stink to high heaven.
And yet, India did not make Trump’s list. The urban toilet-using elite, who have worked hard to make their cities unlivable are amazed. “Just because a few Indians in America become CEOs of tech companies and make a lot of money, they think Bangalore is a Silicon Valley? It is Shitty Alley, really shitty,” says an android programmer who flushes before he pees and then also after.
A scientist at Bangalore’s leading research institution said that there is not one water body in India that is not contaminated by sewage, “ah, I forgot the glaciers, but they will be all gone in a couple of years.”
“All that glitters is not gold, but all that smells is definitely shit,” grumbles the head of an environmental NGO that is promoting dry toilets.
Indians are skaking their heads while holding their noses. “Sewage exposure is stunting us physically and mentally, we need to get onto Trump’s list before our minds stop generating new ideas and our shorter brethren drown in the rising sewage,” says a mother holding up her girl in school uniform at a smelly bus-stop.
One entreprenuer is studying the use of sewage to fight wildfires in America. The study seems to indicate that putting out forest fires with sewage helps regenerate the forest better. The profit-making solution is to have ocean-liners tow large plastic bags filled with sewage from India to California. Another researcher has been studying mudslides: “Generating more than 62 billion of sewage every single day, Indians have filled their pure wells and aquifers with sewage — get ready for shitslides.”
As the shorter Indians sink into the shithole and the taller Indians reach for the last can of anti-bacterial air freshner, their last hope is that Ivanka tells her father of the smells she encountered on her visit to Hyderabad and that the POTUS finally promotes India to its much deserved status.
