A little community spirit gives so much pleasure

It’s the best time to be in The Netherlands - it’s the one time of year this otherwise modest and sober little country lets fly and shows off what it can really do:  flowers.

No one can do it like the Dutch when it comes to flowers.  A thought that was particularly evident for me when a friend invited me for the weekend to the little village of Anna Paulowna in the north of Holland.  The village, set in a landscape dominated by fields of fresias, daffodils and tulips has a particularly charming yearly event called “Bloemendagen” - Flower Days - to showcase its most famous product.  Most streets and houses are decorated with flower mosaics, bizarre and beautiful works of art that are both tremendously labour intensive and short lived.

Cycling around yesterday to view the displays was fraught with breathless expressions of wonder, not unmixed with bemusement that people would go to so much effort for essentially little gain except to impress visitors like me.

The giant portrait of Gandhi took 7 people voluntarily toiling five 15-hour days to complete - from picking the tens of thousands of blooms to nailing them into the design board. And that’s not counting the hours spent coming up with the concept, getting the photo printed on a giant board and signing in for the competition - a jury goes around to judge the entries, but there’s no real monetary gain to be had here.  Just the honour and the chance for some of the local flower growers and their families to show off their skills.

As we biked along street after street decorated in fantastic designs, I was amazed at the community effort of this little town and thought how wonderful it would be if we could transport this spirit to the suburbs of the great Indian cities.  In the Sindhi colony in north Mumbai, where I have visted my grandmother and uncles since I was a child, I’ve seen the local garden deteriorate to the point that the old people who come out for air in the evenings now can only perch on the broken stones ringing the lawn, now hideously overgrown.  The small children who come out to play are forced to struggle with their little tricycles on the jagged slabs of concrete, leaving the small shrubs and brambles of the garden to the giant rats and feral dogs.   

When I was a teenager, I tried to get my nani to agree to let me go around the colony with a petition asking people to come out for one hour in the evenings to clean up the garden, but she just laughed at my naivety and forbade it outright as a folly.  I still don’t understand why the mentality is so very different - why Indians, clean to the point of fanatisicm when it comes to their houses, can treat anything outside their front door as a giant rubbish dump. And so in all the pleasure I’ve had from these beautiful sights over the weekend, is a tinge of sadness that there’s no exporting a bit of this kind of community spirit which brings groups of people to huddle together in tents till late at night stringing blooms with needle and thread to just come together and make their environment beautiful - even if only for a few brief days of glory.