India's Building a Future, But It Can't Stop Spitting on It
Let's get one thing straight. You can build all the gleaming, state-of-the-art infrastructure you want. You can pour billions into bullet trains, swanky airports, and cricket stadiums that look like they were beamed down from a sci-fi movie. But none of it matters if the people using it are determined to treat it like a public toilet. And right now, India's biggest architectural threat isn't earthquakes or neglect; it's a five-rupee pouch of chewing tobacco.
I’m talking, of course, about gutkha. That rust-colored sludge you see staining the corners of every building, staircase, and sidewalk. It’s become the unofficial national paint. The latest exhibit in this gallery of civic decay? A brand-new international cricket stadium in Bihar, which was christened with blood-red spit stains on its inauguration day. Gutkha defaces Bihar’s brand-new Rajgir Cricket Stadium - ‘That’s the signature mark!’ The person filming the video put it perfectly: "The Gutkha Men have arrived. The attack has begun."
An attack. That’s exactly what it is. It's not just a bad habit; it's a conscious act of vandalism, repeated millions of times a day. It’s a middle finger to progress. This isn't some isolated incident, either. We’ve seen it on the brand-new Mumbai Metro, where pristine railings were decorated with pan stains just days after launch. We’ve even seen it at 30,000 feet, with some genius crushing up his tobacco mix on a flight to Thailand, turning his airline seat into a personal prep station.
The crown jewel of this whole tragicomedy, though, has to be Kolkata’s Howrah Bridge. This absolute beast of engineering, built without a single nut or bolt, survived Japanese bombing raids in World War II. Think about that. Actual explosives dropped from warplanes couldn't take it down. But the acidic, corrosive spit from millions of mouths? That’s literally eating away at the steel. Kolkata's Howrah Bridge survived World War bombs- but is losing to 'Gutkha spit'. Internet says, 'Ajay Devgn supremacy'. Engineers found that the mix of lime, tobacco, and saliva was corroding the bridge's foundations. It’s like watching a tank get taken down by a swarm of termites. You almost have to admire the sheer, relentless power of it.
The Internet's Useless Screaming Match
Predictably, every time one of these videos goes viral, the internet does what it does best: devolves into a pointless screaming match. The comments section is a beautiful, chaotic mess of human psychology. You’ve got the public shamers demanding that officials use CCTV to find the culprits and plaster their faces everywhere. "Ban them from the Metro for six months!" one guy yells into the void. Sure, buddy. That’ll fix it.
Then you have the whataboutism crew. When the video of the guy on the plane surfaced, the big-brain defense was, "Well, they serve alcohol on flights, so what's the difference?" Let me spell it out for you: the guy sipping a Jack and Coke isn't going to corrode the fuselage with his breath. It's a bad faith argument. No, it's worse than that—it's a deliberate attempt to muddy the waters and excuse behavior that’s objectively disgusting. This ain't about personal freedom; it's about not being a menace to society.
This is the part of the internet that just exhausts me. The endless cycle of outrage, bad takes, and calls for bans that will never happen. "Just ban gutkha!" they all scream. As if you can just flip a switch and erase a cultural habit that’s deeply ingrained in tens of millions of people. It’s like trying to solve traffic by banning cars. It’s a fantasy. A lazy one, at that.
And offcourse, you get the dark humorists, who might be the most honest ones in the bunch. The comments about "Ajay Devgn supremacy" and "Bolo Zubaan Kesari" are funny, I’ll admit. They’re a coping mechanism. When your country's landmarks are being dissolved by spit, what else can you do but laugh? But does that laughter actually accomplish anything? Or does it just normalize the decay, turning it into another meme before we all move on to the next outrage?
I keep wondering what the guy on the flight was thinking. Was he oblivious? Entitled? Or did he just genuinely not see a problem with it? And what about the guy who asked an air hostess to open the window so he could spit mid-air? Is that a prank, or is it a symptom of a society where the lines between public and private space have completely dissolved? I don't have the answers, but the questions are frankly terrifying.
The whole debate is a microcosm of a much bigger problem. You can build a world-class city, but you can't import a world-class civic mindset. One user on X summed it up perfectly: "You can build a world-class city, but it’s only as clean as the mindset of its people." And right now, that mindset seems to be stuck in a pre-civic sludge. Maybe I'm just an outsider yelling at the clouds. Maybe this is just... progress. But damn, it feels like watching someone meticulously paint a masterpiece while someone else follows behind them with a bucket of mud.
So, Is This Just What Winning Looks Like?
Look, let's be real. This isn't going to get solved with a few fines or some angry tweets. This is a cultural issue, baked in deep. The spit isn't just a stain; it's a statement. It's an assertion of self over the collective, the individual over the communal. Every red splatter on a new metro wall is a tiny declaration of independence from the very idea of shared space and mutual respect. We're watching a nation race toward the future while actively, deliberately defacing its own progress. And the most depressing part? It feels like everyone’s just accepted it as the cost of doing business. The stains are here to stay.