I got congratulated the other day. No great achievement or award, but many words of praise. All I tried to do was just to sort out my trash. Don’t get me wrong. I care for my planet. I carry my own bag to the grocery. I sort the plastic from the paper, put them in separate bags and carry it over to the recycling bin. I know I am not doing much, but I don’t just dump my newspapers in trash either. So, I don’t see what the big deal is.
Living in a small town in Southern India, most of the so-called “environment friendly” ways came naturally to me. As a little girl, I always accompanied mum on her shopping trips. I followed her to the local vegetable market every Tuesday. We walked approximately three kilometres armed with a wicker basket and a handmade red-and-white wired basket and we always came back home with our baskets laden with farm fresh vegetables.
Even our grocery was done in cloth bags — a green one and a white. Many times, the grocer would wrap the pulses and spices in old newspapers and hand them over. Sometimes, the groceries would go straight into the cloth bags. We re-used the bag, walked to the markets and rarely saw an odd plastic bag used for shopping. We did everything matter-of-factly. We switched off the lights in the bedroom as we got out of the room, We used one bucket of water to bathe daily and we recycled our old newspapers by selling them to the hawker who went around our village on his cycle every month. All this was not a serious or a deliberate act. But, just a way of life.
Somewhere between my childhood and adulthood was the ‘plastic phase’ when every body started using plastic bags indiscriminately. I also remember the time when we would talk at home about not really having to carry a bag because the local grocer would give one. We stopped carrying bags to the nearby supermarket. We mounted the scooter to buy our groceries that came packed in airtight plastic covers and we carelessly tossed the newspaper around not bothering to call the old hawker who still found his way around on an old rickety cycle. Then came adulthood when I started noticing many shows about ‘saving planet Earth’. There were stories in newspapers about being ‘eco-friendly’. It was then, that I started noticing the choices I had taken to unconsciously. I was a contributor to the monster we were raising. I had to change it and the simplest thing I could do was go back to my roots. It took a while, but it was not difficult. Trendy jute bags were used to carry my varied shopping items from large hypermarkets. Local produce was hard to find, but not impossible and stylish blue recycling bins took the place of the old hawker for my old newspapers.
Today, I notice that the ‘plastic age’ continues to thrive. On several occasions, I come across situations when the lady in the mall offers my shopping in two carry bags. I always politely decline to take them. And, almost always, the lady says: “It’s OK ma’am.” To this day, I don’t understand the underlying meaning it has — does the lady mean, she won’t charge me for the bag and that it is free or that another carry bag will not harm the planet? This I will never know. Perhaps that is why, the friendly visitor found me unusual and congratulated me for sorting trash. I guess, I just find it a bit odd because after all, it is just my way of life. Even as I thanked her politely, an uneasy feeling continued to persist in my stomach and a fleeting thought occurred — shouldn’t it be everybody’s way of life as well? At least, I wouldn’t get praised then!
Sudha Subramanian is an independent journalist based in Dubai.
