The Deonar dumping ground should be declared a monument. There ought to be audio-video tours, tickets, even merchandising booths selling T-shirts that read ‘I Survived Deonar.’ I suggest this for a number of reasons. To begin with, it deserves this honour because it has brought our city more fame than the many statues of dearly departed leaders our government puts up every other year.

This fascinating, if smelly, suburb was recently captured by a NASA satellite, thanks to an inconvenient blanket of thick toxic smoke that made our poor air quality levels worse for over a week. The fire was an accident waiting to happen, of course. Everyone with half a brain knew that so, naturally, the state government didn’t. The Maharashtra Pollution Control Board reportedly sent eight notices to the BMC on its unscientific handling of waste, at least two years before the fire. These eight notices must have been rejected because they weren’t sent on the right kind of paper, perhaps. Or maybe they simply weren’t read because reading and writing have never been particularly high on the priority list of BMC employees.