If Feet Had Wings, Sweepers Would Fly

This was published on 18 Mar 2011 in the Mumbai Mirror and on my site www.manfrommatunga.com. Here is the archive link.

Two days ago, this paper carried a piece on how applicants for Class IV jobs for sweepers and ward-boys in the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) were asked to prove their fitness as a pre-requisite, by running a distance of 4 kms in 15 minutes. 971 odd people had applied. None qualified!

I skimmed through this item chuckling to myself how we Mumbaiites are so unfit and then moved on to the next page. Suddenly, my brain went "ping" and I stopped. I turned the page back and looked at the numbers again. 

4 kms in 15 minutes.

I started doing the math.

1 km in 3 minutes and 45 seconds.

21 kms in approximately 1 hour and 20 minutes.

The runner who topped the Indian women category in the recent Mumbai Marathon finished with a time of 1:22. The corresponding male was about 15 minutes faster. It then struck me! What the BMC was looking for were not just candidates who were fit. No. The BMC was looking for highly trained, elite runners!

I have some theories! 

- BMC sweepers currently take ages (usually the full shift) to sweep a half-kilometer road. Now we will have Adidas clad sweepers running up and down the roads at night carrying large full-length brooms, sweeping away all the dirt and garbage in record time, leaving behind pristine shiny roads and footpaths without any piece of shit or paan pulp or vegetable waste for us to see the next morning.

- Currently, ward-boys in the BMC hospitals take their own sweet time to shift patients from an ambulance to the casualty or from one ward to another. Now we will have ward-boys in shiny Nike sneakers running at break-neck speeds with their patient trolleys and wheel-chairs, reducing transport times by precious seconds and minutes, which sometimes are all that stand between life and death.

- The BMC also has issues with the rat menace and pays money to anyone who brings proof that he/she has killed a rodent. Now with salaried workers who can run perhaps faster than the rats, none of this will be required. We will soon have Reebok shod workers stealthily and noiselessly running after the rats, spearing them with their spikes, like Spartans fighting their enemies, killing without any mercy.

Or perhaps it is something else. Maybe the BMC is planning a stealth army of runners who will work at their sweeper and ward-boy jobs, but in times of disaster, like Clark Kent to Superman, will shed their BMC uniforms, put on their running shoes and race to the help of the down-stricken and those in trouble.

Or maybe, I'm just reading too much into all this. After last time's war of words with the organizers of the Mumbai Marathon, perhaps all the BMC wants to do is to hire it's own army of runners, who will not only participate in the Marathon, but will also aim to win some medals.

There is only one small problem. Unfortunately no one qualified during the test. And given the state of fitness in Mumbai and India, it is unlikely that anyone will as well. Actually, the only people who would qualify are runners from Ethiopia and Kenya. But since they are not "sons of the soil", they can't apply. And our local applicants from Mumbai and Maharashtra will never be able to run this fast. What an amazing Catch-22!

4 kms in 15 minutes. Someone surely was smoking weed when he/she wrote up this rule!