80 years of Worship?
Yesterday morning, I was driving my elder daughter to our workplace for the Independence Day celebrations.
We crossed a temple on the way, which was unusually crowded.
She looked out of the window and said: "Papa, today is not Krishna Day. Today is India Day. So why are people still going to the temple?"
I smiled and kept driving.
A few minutes later, just as we were approaching the factory, she spotted a large pile of garbage dumped on the side of the road.
She turned to me again. "Papa, why are people throwing garbage on the roads?"
Two questions. From a five year old. In ten minutes.
I had no good answer for either.
When I stood up to speak at our Independence Day celebration shortly after, I shared exactly what she had said. And then I asked everyone one simple question.
Have you ever seen anyone throw garbage inside a temple?
Have you ever seen anyone spit on the walls of a temple? Leave it dirty? Treat it carelessly?
Of course not. We remove our footwear before we enter. We lower our voices. We clean up after ourselves. We would never dream of doing to a temple what we do every single day to the roads, the pavements, the rivers, and the public spaces of our own country.
The only difference is mindset. We believe the temple is sacred. So we treat it that way.
What if we believed the same about India? Is our motherland not sacred?
Earlier this year at Davos, Harvard economist Gita Gopinath said that pollution is a far bigger threat to India's economy than any tariff, acting as a persistent drag on growth by affecting labour productivity, increasing healthcare costs and weakening overall economic activity. The Lancet Countdown estimates that air pollution costs India the equivalent of 9.5% of its GDP every year. That is roughly Rs 30 lakh crore. And 1.7 million Indians lose their lives to pollution annually.
India loses approximately 1.3 billion workdays every year due to pollution-related illness.
1.3 billion workdays. Lost. Every year.
We talk about India becoming a five trillion dollar economy. We talk about shooting to the top as a nation. But we cannot build a great country on dirty streets and poisoned air.
Each of us shooting to the top means very little if the country we live in is being left behind. Real progress is when all of us rise together.
And it starts with something embarrassingly simple. Not throwing garbage on the road. Not spitting in public. Not treating our country like it belongs to someone else. Because it doesn't. It belongs to all of us.
My daughter figured this out in the back seat of a car on the way to a factory.
If we can bring even a fraction of the reverence we show our temples to the land we live on, we will have done something that no government scheme ever could.
Jai Hind. And I hope this helps all of us Shoot to the Top!
