Glamorous garbage
How celebrities can help to clear our cities of rubbish
Indira Gandhi famously remarked that poverty is the biggest pollutant. Can the reverse hold true? Can wealth and fame be effective as anti-pollutants and help in clearing up manmade mess?
It might seem so, if the example of singer-songwriter and international icon Taylor Swift’s wedding to American footballer Travis Kelce is anything to go by. The red-carpet nuptials, attended by the who’s who of celebdom, took place in New York City’s Madison Square Garden earlier this month.
The matrimonial ceremony was billed as the most newsworthy event of the season, not least because an uninvitee, Donald Trump, who has a virulent antipathy to Swift after she vocally backed Kamala Harris in the last US presidential election, tried to upstage it on X and rained on her parade by asserting POTUS’s supremacy over a mere pop star, even though with an estimated worth of $2bn she is the wealthiest woman entertainer in history.
Like the common cold, uncommon wealth can be catching. An NYC resident reportedly cashed in by selling garbage, like bottle caps, cans, and straws collected from around the wedding venue to Swifties, as the celebrated diva’s devotees are called, at $25 a pop for trash marketed as collectible mementos of the occasion.
The canny entrepreneur not only cleaned up financially for himself, but also indirectly helped in cleaning up a part of a city notorious for its lack of sanitation, which has earned it the reputation of being the richest garbage dump in the world.
Taking a tip from this Swift method of garbage disposal, India’s stellar celebs from the realms of Bollywood, cricket, or politics, might stage their own public events in places with a notable lack of conservancy services so that their adoring fans might take away from the site mucky memorabilia of the gala occasion.
Stardom, of any kind, is a competitive business and it can’t hurt to present a squeaky-clean image of oneself in the face of rivals who might be out to rubbish you.
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
