Curtain of bamboo more effective than iron

recently read a report that fascinated me. At first I thought I had hallucinated it — easy to do in a country with a frail grasp on reality. Then, I checked my note book. The note read: ‘brilliant, imaginative, innovative, exciting idea of an Indian state. This is truly out-of-the-box thinking. If only other states would follow such a wonderful idea.’The report stated that with the Commonwealth Games bearing down on New Delhi like an express train, the Delhi government will not have time to shift the slum dwellers, and their slums, out of the way. Hey, this is our chance to prove India Inc is a 21st century country. We are going to have world class stadia, state of the art equipment, astro turf, air conditioned changing rooms, all-weather tracks and countless foreigners. But, what are we to do about the poor who are an eyesore? The Delhi government has decided to erect bamboo curtains around these slums so that our foreign visitors will not have to see such unsightly poverty. Now, don’t you think it’s a dazzling solution to an intractable problem? I bet some babu, brooding over Delhi’s slums must have come up with this idea. The ministers were so excited by this that they immediately contacted the Mizoram and Assam governments to place orders for many million bamboos. Both governments were happy to ship every piece of bamboo to Delhi.Even I was excited by this new approach to poverty. We can now ‘abolish poverty’ with a few bamboo curtains. Why spend billions on anti-poverty programmes when 99 per cent of the money ends up in the pockets of our politicians and babus? This programme will save us billions, and maybe even impoverish said politicians and babus. Every politician can now parrot another slogan — ‘bamboo the poor’. No doubt, they’ll also monopolise bamboo estates to make up for their losses. I believe this concept of a bamboo curtain should be applied to the whole of India. Never let a great idea go to waste, in my opinion. For a start, every city should follow Delhi’s example. Mumbai has so many slums, especially around the airport, and the first sight the foreigner sees, on descending out of a clear blue sky, are the many acres of slums. This will mean a two-fold approach in Mumbai. First, they’ll have to build a bamboo shamiana over the whole slum. Descending foreigners will only see a beautiful carpet of bamboo, and marvel at such a sight. Then, when the plane touches down, speeding past the slums at ground level, they will see a beautiful bamboo curtain. The poor and their slums won’t exist, at least, visually speaking, and this is what we need — make them vanish into bamboo air. Our of sight, out of mind.Once Delhi and Mumbai have set the examples, other cities should follow suit. We can then drive past bamboo curtains everywhere without being filled with guilt. We won’t be able to see the poor. Naturally, those behind the curtain will need to come out and go in, so there should be a few discrete doorways to allow them in and out.But our poor are not confined to our urban areas only. The BPLs are scattered across India. As a start, we should build a bamboo curtain around the entire states of Bihar, Orissa, Tripura and MP. As poverty is contagious this will prevent it spreading to neighbouring states, and across the entire country. Every state has its swathes of poverty and we can bamboo curtain off all these poor villages and their poor inhabitants. The curtains will cover two-thirds of India.Alternately, it would be cheaper to bamboo curtain off the affluent of India Inc, who are just a few million. Then the poor would not have to see them.