In the wake of racist attacks on Indians in Australia, and a consequent backlash to such assaults, a large number of anti-Indian Australian Facebookers have accused Asian immigrants, particularly those from the Indian sub-continent, of being dirty and unhygienic in their public behaviour. In short, they’ve accused Indians of being literally filthy foreigners.

We Indians dirty? What utter rubbish. But it’s not the first time such a charge has been made. Last year it was the British who rubbished us. Tory MP Lucy Ivimy was reported to have said that Indians don't know how to dispose of their rubbish and are congenital litterbugs. Though she later apologised for her remark, Ivimy's accusation provoked dudgeon among Indians in not only Britain but, even more so, in India. Us Indians? Creating a mess wherever we go? What a load of garbage.

Unlike people in the West and other so-called developed societies we Indians are scrupulously particular about all matters pertaining to hygiene management and waste disposal. Take the example of household garbage. What do they do with it in these so-called advanced countries? They store it -- as though these scraps of leftover food, vegetable peelings, egg shells and other guck were precious jewels -- in a special container made for the purpose and generally kept in the kitchen. How thoroughly disgusting. Imagine keeping rotting refuse in the kitchen, which after the puja room is the most hallowed sanctum sanctorum of the Indian household.

A barbaric notion totally inimical to 5,000 years of Indic civilisation and culture based on the totems and taboos of ritual pollution. Which in turn is based on the concept of what has been called inappropriate context. For instance, it is appropriate to wear shoes to go outdoors, but it is inappropriate (ritually polluting) to wear shoes indoors, more so within a place of worship. Similarly, keeping ritually polluting garbage within the kitchen and defiling its symbolic purity is an emphatic no-no. So what to do with the muck? Simple. Throw it out of the window. That's what windows are for, apart from letting in air and light.

The scrupulous cleanliness of us Indians is attested to by the assiduity with which we expel all forms of rubbish, garbage, junk and litter from our homes and places of work and dump such offending and offensive matter where it rightly belongs: on our public streets and thoroughfares.