Anila, Aravind, Bindu, Cris, Srijith and I got inside the gate by 3:30pm. A little later, Sreenath joined us. We had embellished ourselves with the TIDYCITY badges[I assume that's how Aravind found us in the first place!] We got ready to start the procedure by applying Odomos, wearing gloves and distributing the sacks.

The lawns and the sand were almost clean. In my opinion, Veli was comparatively cleaner than the dirty museum premises. Most of the litter was near the food vendors and the deserted construction areas. The waste bins, although very aesthetically made, was rather useless since most people wouldn’t understand that it is, in fact, a waste-bin.

There were people from the public who inquired about our activities. We dumped the waste that was collected from the premises into the misleadingly-shaped waste-bins each time the sacks got full. We used gloves and tongs this time, which made the work easier. But the gloves needed to be removed and worn in intervals since our hands were perspiring like anything inside them. The plastic covers which we used last time, though messy, were better compared to gloves because of this one drawback.

By 4:30, we completed a great deal of the cleaning process by cleaning up to the park area. We needed some rest since there has been a lot of waste to collect and a lot of area to cover for 7 people. While we were taking rest, we discussed the next steps to take and the feedback from today’s work. Cris noted down everything that we were discussing. The discussion ended with some good suggestions for our next day’s activities, and Bindu had to go in order to attend a seminar on POTA [I presume..] as we had almost finished our day’s work. But soon, Anoop, Hari and Joshua joined us. They were in full vigor to contribute their share to TIDYCITY’s tidying efforts of the day!

The 9 of us dispersed inside the park area, which was apparently the dirtiest place inside Veli. There were ice-cream cups and covers and sticks everywhere. It needed some serious cleaning. There was a small hill which was covered with soft-drink bottles and ice-cream covers and cups. We cleaned up the whole mess while people were watching.

The beach area was the ugliest! It was pointless cleaning it up. We picked up the ice-cream covers and the big pieces of paper ad plastic waste. But what are we supposed to do about small bits of paper and wrappers that, sort of, covered the whole sand layer? Like Sreenath said, this place couldn’t be cleaned even if you used a strainer!

I don’t know much about the shopkeepers’ opinions on this. Srijith can definitely throw some light on that, so find it out in his post. All I know is that, they were unaware of the fact that plastic shouldn’t be burned and that it creates toxic matter that pollutes air when burned. But I still don’t think that they have any other solution to avoid burning plastic material or that they’ll stop burning it from today onwards. Nevertheless, the message has been spread to them, and we’ll keep doing that.

So we’ve said the magic words again today and are just waiting for the magic to begin.