No Pepsi Please, We Prefer Raw Sewage

Mumbaiites have thronged in the thousands to Mahim Beach since Friday night after it was reported that the seawater had miraculously turned sweet. They came, they saw and they drank the seawater, many even filled the water up into bottles and took it home. The alleged miracle was attributed to the Durgah of Makdoom Shah on the beach. The miracle water supposedly cures any ailments from headaches to arthritic limbs. People have been drinking litres of the stuff as many proudly recounted to news reporters. The Bombay Municipal Corporation on the other hand has been going crazy, trying to dissuade people from drinking the water, citing the presence of industrial effluent and domestic sewage in it. Indians however prefer superstition to science and they are adamant in their belief that this is a miracle and not due to any of the numerous possible reasons forwarded by the scientific community.
Storm water was released into the Mithi River on Friday and the BMC attributes the excess freshwater for this phenomenon. They may as well be preaching to the deaf, for people continued to flock to the beach undeterred through Saturday.
Many News reporters were tempted to draw parallels between this miracle and the Milk-Drinking Ganesh idols. Even then though many went hoarse crying surface tension, people continued to feed Milk to the idols, unimpressed with any scientific explanation. I would like to compare this situation with a much more recent incident, the pesticide-in-cola controversy, though I have already written about it, this illustrates another side of the issue. The CSE fiercely took on the Cola giants levelling against them the charge of not caring for the health of millions of Indians. After the Mahim- Beach incident though it has become clear exactly how much we really worry about what we are consuming. The Mithi River is notorious in Mumbai for being highly polluted, yet people fearlessly chugged down bottles of that filth. I saw the bottles filled with the seawater that the faithful were proudly carrying back to ‘purify’ their homes. The water was dirty brown, something only a drought victim would be tempted to drink yet here were thousands gleefully throwing it down their throats.
Indians like faith, it has the advantage of not forcing people to think about what they do, common sense and logic on the other hand require a little mental effort. We love our little miracles, they brighten our otherwise boring lives so I can understand feeding milk to idols but to drink sewage, it is beyond my comprehension. Historically we can be considered a scientific people, ancient India was quite advanced and even today we are not totally scientifically backward. The problem is that unlike in the west, Indian science never came into conflict with our religious beliefs, as a consequence science and religion were never separated into mutually exclusive fields. We still revel in the apparent science allegedly present in Hindu religious texts. Interpreting ancient texts many find evidence for cloning, nuclear power and other weird science. One of my professors was fond of asserting that Krishna the blue god was actually green, as a result of chlorophyll in his skin, which allowed him to utilise sunlight to generate food. In a number of lectures that I attended, speakers showed an uncomfortable tendency to confuse our mythology with science. When a friend of mine at one seminar asked Dr. Karad, founder of Maeer’s Institute of Technology, Pune how he could draw such extreme parallels between science and religion, the well rehearsed reply came; “they are both different sides of the same coin my son”. Now an ambiguous reply such as that may satisfy someone who has faith but it left us sorely dissatisfied. The problem is that our education system stresses on memorising facts and accepting them as a matter of faith, independent thought and logic are not particularly encouraged. So for us science and religion are the same, both depend on faith and require no understanding whatsoever.
Religion is more interesting than science; you have temples and mosques to worship in but nothing to forward the cause of science. Additionally, religious indoctrination starts early and continues through life, most Indians study science for a few years only in school and what they are taught is not how to think scientifically but merely a few reactions and processes.
In this case though, you can forget scientific thought, maybe the water was indeed miracle water but even common sense should provide enough deterrence from drinking it. I doubt the sanity of those who drank the sewage but many even went so far as to claim it had cured them of various ailments, I doubt their honesty. If you put a camera in front of someone already excited by an alleged miracle there is nothing they won’t admit to. I blame the media to an extent too, irresponsible reporters were interviewing anyone and everyone, airing their absurd testimonials as to the waters healing properties. They did periodically mention that the BMC was warning people against drinking the water, but didn’t actually dwell on the point. Everyone who watches National Geographic, has at one time or the other wondered why nobody ever tries to save the poor zebra from being eaten by the lions, or alternately why they don’t try feed starving lion cubs. The answer is that they are merely documenting their behaviour and do not intervene with natural order. What happened on Mahim Beach was definitely not natural order and neither were the reporters doing a National Geographic special, they have a responsibility to their often not-so-bright viewers and shouldn’t have hyped the whole event to the extent that they did. Keeping everything in mind, is it any wonder then that people drank the miracle water? If they are fortunate, they won’t die from it and even if they do fall ill, modern medicine will probably save them. Sad, we could have done without a lot of them.