The expression of an unknown vintage Cleanliness is next to Godliness has been appropriately modified as Swachh Bharat Swasth Bharat (Cleanliness in the land means an affliction-free land), attributed to someone among the top brass in the incumbent Government at the Centre. The timely exhorting the masses seems to have happened in the wake of God, worshipped by followers of a particular faith, made to lose the time-honoured perch, marked by devotion, sanctity, fear and trust as a result of emotion-charged exchanges between eloquent atheist speakers and hard-boiled believers in the existence and boundless powers of the force above. In the just hotting up verbal wars between the two sides, one is prompted to remark that God is not the loser. A celebrated agnostic who lived a full hundred years, making no bones about the non-existence of God had confided that arguing either way was an unrewarding exercise.

If only one spares some valuable time in leafing through the ancient palm leaf scripts, one can effortlessly notice the clear guidelines prescribed by the knowledgeable and followed by people at large in the matter of food habits and life’s discipline to keep illnesses at more than arm’s length and also live the full length of the Biblically granted span of four score and twenty. To live to reach 100 years was no big deal for them.

The now-fragile connect between God and Cleanliness which is hard to miss in public places of all descriptions, including places of worship is only a mirror image of the rock-like connect between insanitary ways of living by the land’s people at large and their open invitation to illnesses whose number is anybody’s guess. While the ongoing Swachh Survekshan, gathering information on Cleanliness or otherwise in some 4,000 plus urban regions across the country including Mysuru to rank them and identifying the cleanest city yet prompting one to remark that the terms ‘cleanest’ and ‘clean’ are as different as chalk and cheese.

In a nutshell, the just reported fact that India’s hospital sector has begun to wear a gleeful face like never before owes it in no small measure to nation’s apathy to be tidy in food habits and lifestyle. The feature of illness invasion is there for all to see and suffer.