S1E21 — ‘Asia's cleanest village’ bans tourists on Sundays

GARY: —no, no, hang on, so the headline isn't that they ban Sundays, the headline is they ban tourists ON Sundays, which is — wait. Are we on?

GARY: Oh, fuck, we're on. Okay. Hi. I'm Gary.

MAEVE: Maeve.

OBI: Obi.

GRUNER: Gruner.

GARY: And this is the show where we take one Hacker News thread and beat it until it tells us something true about ourselves, and tonight's thread is — genuinely, hand to God — a village.

MAEVE: A literal village.

GARY: A literal village in Meghalaya, India, called Mawlynnong, self-styled, or article-styled, "Asia's cleanest village," and starting recently it bans tourists. On Sundays specifically.

OBI: Twenty comments. Forty-two points.

MAEVE: Small thread.

OBI: Tiny thread.

GARY: Small thread, big feelings, let's go.

MAEVE: Article facts, since apparently I'm the one who read past the headline this week. Kids in this village are raised from small to sweep the streets before school. Every morning. Not as a punishment. As, quote, culture.

OBI: Biodegradables go one place, everything else somewhere else, and there's a weekly closed day for outsiders so the town can just — exist without being looked at for twenty-four hours.

GARY: That's the whole pitch. One day a week, no tourists, the town gets to just be a town instead of a diorama of itself.

MAEVE: Top comment, user nelox, and I want it on the record he nailed it in one line. Quote: "Ah, the age old story of something being loved to death."

GARY: Fuck, that's — yeah. That's the whole thing, isn't it. The place got famous for being clean, and now it's dying of visitors.

OBI: Success as the vector for its own rot. I've watched that happen to three companies and one on-call rotation.

GARY: Is this a Bauxlite thing. I feel a Bauxlite thing coming on.

MAEVE: Don't.

GARY: We were disrupting a four-thousand-year-old metal and it disrupted us right back, that's — okay, one line, I said one line, moving on.

MAEVE: Next comment's the good one. rayiner, quoting the article directly: "children are taught to tidy up from a young age, with many taking to the streets each morning before school to sweep the town of dead leaves and empty rubbish bins." And then his own line under it. Quote: "Culture is real."

GARY: ...Yeah.

OBI: Yeah.

MAEVE: I have never in my professional life agreed with three men in a row this fast and it is making me deeply uncomfortable.

GARY: It's just — it's not a policy, right, it's not a rule with a fine attached, it's just what the kids do before school because that's what you do, that's the — that's the actual thing Bauxlite's brand deck tried to fake with a mission statement and forty grand of—

MAEVE: One line, Gary.

GARY: That was the line!

MAEVE: That was three lines stacked like a trench coat.

GARY: Fine. Fine. Culture is real. Moving on before I get emotional about a sidewalk.

MAEVE: Which is exactly the setup for the next comment to detonate it, so. hn_throwaway_99, replying directly under rayiner. Quote: "I was completely gobsmacked by the insane levels of trash and pollution... Gurugram reminded me of some type of ecological disaster dystopia out of Blade Runner."

OBI: Mm.

MAEVE: Keep going, it gets worse. "So I was particularly glad to see this story was about an Indian village and not one of the usual amazingly clean Asian city suspects, e.g. Singapore or somewhere in Japan."

GARY: Oh.

MAEVE: Right. So he read a story about one specific village raising specific children to sweep a specific street, and the takeaway he walked away with was relief that, for once, the dirty country produced an exception.

GARY: That's not — I mean he's not wrong about Gurugram, I've seen photos, but the way he—

OBI: Say the rest of that sentence, Gary.

GARY: The way he says it like the whole country's one big — like Mawlynnong's the miracle and everywhere else is the control group.

OBI: Gurugram's forty minutes from where my mother still lives.

MAEVE: Obi.

OBI: I have listened to Americans call it "the Millennium City" like it's a joke they invented, and I have listened to this exact flavor of tourist go home and write "ecological disaster dystopia" in a comment section like he did fieldwork. He did a layover.

GARY: Obi, I—

OBI: He wasn't gobsmacked by Gurugram, Gary. He was relieved. Read it again — "particularly glad." He needed one clean village so the rest of the country could stay the joke he already had ready.

GARY: —so what I want to say is, it's not fair to — that's static, hang on—