SUDDENLY in the city where I live there’s digging, and digging and digging again, going on at a furious pace. There’s so much of digging that we have become one of the most polluted cities not just in India, but the world. It’s as if there’s a deadline for all the digging activity to halt and the race to finish goes on. We are the world’s best diggers and it’s time we start promoting this sport internationally!
Every year huge groups of sports people leave our shores every year for some foreign event or other and come back nearly empty handed, or maybe with just a medal or two. If we can somehow convince the rest of the world to include road digging as a field event, we can be sure of success every year. What a nation of diggers we are. Just look around.
There’s a road tarred and paved and ready for traffic, but hey presto, before the break of dawn and before the first car has tested the smoothness of the newly laid tar, the diggers arrive, and without even a look of regret, start breaking the road. With axe and shovel and all other cunning equipment, cleverly designed to damage, they destroy.
Lately, not satisfied with pick and shovel, new sophisticated machines have been brought in. I have watched amazed as a road, which for months has been dug and then quickly and clumsily covered with tar, bitumen or concrete, starts being dug by another group the very next day! It’s like a group of sportsmen saying, “We’re done practicing, you may start!” There is no doubt whatsoever in my mind that digging has become a national sport and pasttime and one for which we should start receiving international recognition.
Professional diggers and all of them are, can dig a sewage line, and in the process hit electric cable and waterline, telephones line and even open new flooding underground springs, making an Atlantic Ocean out of a Sahara, overnight. A good digger, with just a shovel or pick axe, can turn a well lit night into an area of darkness, can turn noisy telephone instruments into silent decorative show pieces, by just using his digging tool well. Ah, what potential! A gold medal year after year for digging!
Digging is without doubt in our blood. What other reason is there for so much controversy as to whether one is a citizen of India or not, or if one can marry someone from another community, other than too much digging into the past and one’s past to unearth unnecessary reasons for new suspicion? Ah! We dig and dig and dig and one day we will come back winners from the Olympics with a gold for being the best diggers in the world..!
—Email: bobsbanter@gmail.com
