I LOVE MY KOCHI

English Translation:

I LOVE MY KOCHI

My dear friends,

I am starting a blog! For Kochi from me!. With the wish that this city, which throbs with history, remains beautiful always.

Before a tsunami in some ancient age led to the creation of this port town, no traveller who passed by this route had made any reference to the existence of a place called Kochi. Neither Ptolemy or Marco Polo talked about it. Mahuvan from China was the earliest traveller who referred to it.

The history of modern Kochi begins with Sir Robert Bristo. On April 13, 1920, when the Madras Mail stopped at the Ernakulam station, it heralded a revolutionary change for the city. For, that was the day when Bristo set foot in our city. When he made a short journey on his tiny boat Vasco along the backwaters, it turned out to be a journey of progress for the Kochi port too. Transforming the tiny port to the Queen of the Arabian Sea was Bristo’s unforgettable gift to all of us.

The same town grew to be a melting pot of cultures and arts of various hues, and people began to communicate with each other in around 13 languages. Over the years, it has expanded to a giant Metro!

I now come to a subject that I want all of you to ponder upon. We are proud of our cleanliness. But just think for a minute. Where does our cleanliness begin and end?

No doubt, we all maintain hygiene at the personal level. But what about the scene around us?

How many of us are ready to take responsibility for it? Every Gandhi Jayanti, we join together to sweep the streets and remove the garbage.  Such efforts may continue for a week at the most and then it is back to square one.

Frankly, shouldn’t it be an everyday activity just the way we brush our teeth daily? How will our country be if that happens?

Don’t have any illusions that if you keep your surroundings clean, you will earn appreciation from others. It may be a thankless job. But think about the satisfaction that you will derive by doing it. Yes, the satisfaction of doing a good deed.

Actually, any habit is easy to develop, as long as we realise the purpose behind it. It is a skill but nobody will tell you how to begin. You need to develop it yourself by understanding its importance and reinforcing it in your active as well as passive consciousness. When this happens, the realisation will dawn that hygiene and cleanliness are not mere personal habits but concepts that involve other people and our surroundings too.

As a result, the concept of cleanliness will take shape in a person’s mind and spread to the collective consciousness of the society. As we know, cleanliness is next only to godliness. Each of us will then emit the light of awareness that will soon envelop the surroundings. When we do these small acts of service, for ourselves and others, we are sure to feel happy and satisfied.

So, on this Gandhi Jayanti day, let us all Kochiites take a vow to carve out a new path to a healthy future that is rooted in a clean society.

I had shared these ideas with the students of St Teresa’s College yesterday. It is their receptiveness and encouragement that convinced me that I should take this idea to the community at large. It is hard for the subconscious mind to do anything that is not part of routine. But what if we make it a festival? Yes a festival of cleanliness for 100 days. It will then become ingrained in us.

Ours is truly God’s Own Country. But we need to do everything at our command, together and with a sense of camaraderie. This is a request from me. If we can do this, we will be among the happiest people on Earth. As I said before, let us make this a festival with the slogan, "I LOVE MY KOCHI".

I wish all the best to everyone, as I look forward with great hope towards a clean Kochi.

Your Mayor

Tony Chammany