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.
