Title: Survive or Sink
Author: Naina Lal Kidwai
Publishing House: Rupa Publications
Pages: 260
Price: Rs 495
Recall the exiguous, but highly galvanizing mantra that Gandhi gave in 1942 during The Quit India Movement: Do or die.
The same can be said about the striking title of Naina Lal Kidwai’s extremely relevant book: Survive or Sink: An Action Agenda for Sanitation, Water, Pollution and Green Finance. It’s a sort of an SOS. What are we doing with nature, with our basic and fundamental sources and resources?
Naina realised, empathised and decided to address this pressing issue on a priority basis. This shows her commitment to nature, sanitation, cleanliness and preservation. Just imagine, there is a government advisory advertisement still to be watched on TV: ‘Aapne shauch ke pashchaat haath dhoye’? (Have you cleaned your hands after defecation?). That you need to tell this to people living in the 21st century, underscores the appalling ignorance and also about governmental perfunctory apathy.
Elsewhere, Naina says, “Provision of toilets and water are great liberators for women.” But she insists that we need men to change as well. She also works in the area of green finance.
The book doesn’t come out of the stable of a demagogue. It’s not a theoretical or hypothetical book. Neither does a reader find oft-repeated rhetoric that may often sound platitudinous bromides. It has the concreteness of a vision, steely resolve of a mission and sold foundation of a future action plan. Naina is not an ivory-tower, redolent lotus-eater writing to please her bloated ego. This book is an outcome of her deep empathy for nature and its resources and also of her profound understanding of ecological imbalance, threatening to engulf our planet.
Naina Kidwai’s book must goad people and concerned authorities to mull over her ideas and prepare an action plan. What she has preached can be achieved. All we need is Naina’s contagious dynamism getting rubbed off on us. Lastly, we all had better remember the wise words of the US poet Walt Whitman, “It seems to be a horrible human nature to play recklessly with nature.”
