Last Diwali, I and my wife found ourselves vigorously arguing about whether or not to ‘upgrade’ a particular thing in the house.
The grinder should have been the most qualified. It’s the only surviving appliance from our marriage days, its white plastic body drunk on all manner of pastes and fumes, now a dirty shade of ivory. However, we didn’t have to replace it because an unusually generous Reliance retail gifted us a new one for buying three shirts and a few womanly stuff from their store.
Nopes, it’s not the TV either, because I already have the cheapest 55-inch in the world. Heck, not even my grey Samsung refrigerator — fully hidden behind south-east Asian souvenirs and salvaged alphabets from the kid’s destroyed magnetic slate — because I still can’t let go of my creativity with its shattered vegetable tray (the previous maid, who was always in a tearing hurry, is to blame). The tray is a work of art, its unfixable cracks fixed with a combination of Fevikwick, duct tape and, nuts and bolts.
So what did we upgrade? It’s the dustbin. Yes, you heard right. Garbage bin. Trash can. Kachre Ka Dubba.
The existing one, a sky-coloured bucket whose top lid had recently started to hesitate when you pressed the pedal, was proving to be too small for the mountains of garbage we had started to generate — atrociously heavy diapers, given my then three-year-old’s congenital love for water; scores of biscuit and noodle wrappers; polythene grocery packets; tags and inserts of garments; juice tetra packs; milk and curd pouches and cups; disposable plastic straws; Amazon or Flipkart bubble wraps, foams and cartons (and pointless paper invoices); old toothbrushes and tubes; bottles of shampoo, face-wash, fabric softener and a host of cosmetic products; pet bottles of soda, soft drinks or water. Phew! The list just goes on.
No amount of stamping, pushing or winzipping worked. We only ended up tearing the see-through garbage bags, thinner than a whisper, and spilled the beans — and much more — on the floor. So pretty wife and I embarked on a street-side search, she looking intently out of the car window for a ‘big shop’ offering greater choices. Finally we stopped at someone whose wares conveniently spilled to almost the middle of the road through makeshift projections, satisfying our desire for scale, and agreed to adopt a large tub of black plastic. It obviously didn’t have the convenient pedal at the bottom but was cavernous all the same, large enough to gobble up even my ten-year-old; almost the same size as the barrel of apple Jim Hawkins hid himself in.
While growing up, I have had no memory of a dustbin. Nothing we produced required one. The vegetable waste always went into a compost pit that swarmed with the fattest of fishes when the rains came. Grocery was packed in newspaper bags that the cows happily chewed up. Expensive packed items like powder milk or health drinks came either in tins or glass jars that were always re-used to store something else (even today, almost everything in my parents’ house is stored in Horlicks jars). Biscuits came wrapped in waxed paper, which, if not eaten up, lay faded under the sun for some days after which the chubby Parle boy’s face slowly disappeared into the ground. Milk, if purchased, was delivered from cans and the same bottle was used over and over again until it became permanently cloudy. Almost all the toys were locally made from tin, wood or mud. Discarded metal cans lay rusting in the backyard, slowly eaten up by the elements. Wasted food, if any, was devoured by crows and dogs, and occasional cats.
Life seemed to be in perfect balance, one’s waste readily desired by another.
We, in fact, didn’t learn to throw anything that was even remotely usable. The earthen pot Ma boiled milk in was thoroughly scraped with an oyster shell and the produce fed to us (which we loved more than milk itself!). We bought a spare hose and joined it to the washing machine’s so that discharged water could be collected for the plants (it’s a little painful, but Ma does this judiciously even today). Ablution water always went the plants via many branches of the channels Baba painstakingly prepared and maintained. Over-ripened bananas were mixed with dough and made into pancakes. Torn fishing nets were used to save little plants from the marauding goats and occasional cows. Broken metal buckets were planters and unused saris were stitched into mattresses. Old trousers were reborn into cloth bags and appliances were repaired, and re-repaired until you could no more stand the sight of them, or they disintegrated on their own volition.
The only garbage you saw on the road were cattle shit, discarded ice-cream sticks, open newspaper cones of hot-mix or bhelpuri, and leaf plates or bowls.
The other day, I was watching a documentary on Ladakh, about the serious threat posed by the many idiots who wished to shoot themselves like the ‘3 idiots’. I watched with a broken heart the thousands of water bottles desperately being dumped or buried in an otherwise godly Himalayan landscape.
I ask, can’t the visitors carry their own bottles? Can’t Maggi and other snacks be sold there in paper or decomposable packets? When did we grow such thick skins?
In the pool of a beautiful waterfall I recently visited were scores of plastic bottles bobbing and tossing, the crevices of its stony approach filled with chips wrappers. Earlier, if you had a picnic, you either carried your own utensils, or used leaf plates that vanished within days. Today, every pristine (hah!) natural site, waterfall or river bank I visit, I find it chocking with foam plates and glasses, pervasive water bottles and pouches, alcohol bottles and beer cans. And the funniest thing: on my last visit to a river, I found the tops the trees near its banks surprisingly adorned with thousands of torn polythene bags waving at us in the coo breeze. How? You figure that out.
We have become the unapologetic pests and our filth is everywhere. While we are jammed into our neat little cars and cooled glass-houses, the world around is filling up with our smoke and shit. Yeah, life is Good!
Sadly, no one, not you, not I, and least of all, our leaders, gives a damn. We continue to empty our swimming pools into drains for cleaning, happily pickup several water bottles at parties and toss them into garbage bags after only drinking partly and load our shopping carts with tons of factory-made plastic-wrapped stuff they label as food. We furiously buy poisonous plastic utensils or boxes, pick up pet bottles on our journey without carrying our own, throw away perfectly usable garments and readily gift each other unnecessary, never-used stuff (for example, my kid now has probably ten coffee mugs, more than twenty sharpeners, scores of useless toys, pencil boxes and many more packs of pencils and erasers as a result of pointless gifting).
All of us have become experts in wasting. And it’s not a question of recycling alone. The key issue is over-producing and over-consuming. When you produce more, you dig the earth more, you smoke the earth more, you consume more power, you make more waste, and when you recycle, you do many of the same things. But I firmly believe, it doesn’t have to be like this. Life can be lived comfortably while drastically reducing production and wastage. It just needs a bit of will and innovation.
Milk, for example, could be delivered in temper-proof cans which consumers can fill from; shopping sites can pack their items in special boxes and other materials that could be returned and re-used many times. Reducing individual packing and increasing group-packing could be used to reduce packaging wastage. And most importantly, snacks could be packed in decomposable bags, or could be priced, let’s say, a few rupees more if the bag wasn’t returned. Same could be done for bottles too. It might add to reverse-logistics cost, but this along with a near-complete ban on single-use items (not just plastic) will at least ensure that we don’t have filth lying everywhere.
And as consumers, we could progressively change our lifestyles; buy less toys and spend more time making one at home; cook more and buy less; fix and use more, discard less. And avoid all products that have use-and-throw components.
If you are still reading this post (don’t blame me, I told you this was about unimportant things) and wondering what sonpapdi has to do with all this, well, here it is! In those days, the only way to get the delectable sweet was by donating old glassware to a bell-ringing cyclist. The sound of the bell in a warm, sleepy afternoon made us dash to the backyard to gather all the discarded, broken bottles and jars, their insides rocking with water, and swoop down thereafter on the paper cones loaded with the fragile sticks of sweet that would eventually stick all around our mouths.
The earth too is as fragile. Some say we are humans and we will always find a way when things get too bad. But how bad is too bad? It’s up to you to decide and make a beginning. Others can get their favourite packet of snacks and keep munching.
