Our traditions have given shape to our thinking and beliefs and have made the character of our nation. We are very proud of it. However, with newer challenges increasingly facing us,which in the times to come, would turn into gargantuan proportions, if we do not mend our ways and get our acts together. This write up is a light hearted take on our ways we address the problem of E Waste traditionally with our love for hoarding and the plausible justifications we may offer!
“Update: ZeroWaste is now InstaCash”
- Keeping Clutter traditions Intact: To the west, cluttering is supposed to reflect the state of mind, but to us in India, it is an art, and it is our tradition. Clutter is our way of life. And we wholeheartedly subscribe to Einstein view. “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?
- Now that great minds also affirm our way of life how can we empty our houses of clutter? Einstein or no Einstein, we known long before anybody could point us, right from our childhood that we are foresighted, and we plan ahead. We always save for the event when our clutter one day would rescue the need to go out and buy a new part or a spare. So clutters in our homes are for great reasons.
- Stick to Stacking: We have it in us, all programmed in our genes. Thus we stack. We stack up groceries before the budget is announced, we stack petrol at the midnight before price hike and we are known globally to stack up gold in shimmering million tones. Traditionally we have been a nation of stackers, stacking every banal item which has long lost its significance in our lives. Thus we have our natural reasons for what makes us what we are.
- Practice Utilitarian Creativity: To most of us it is sacrilegious to give away even our most unused dilapidated, several generations over, discarded house hold stuffs. We have honed the skills to turn them into utility, to fit inside our 20 X20 spaces. Our old refrigerators metamorphose into cabinets for scrap or raddi. Cables and wires become the stethoscopes in our children role playing acts, the batteries become paper weights. We turn the scraps into utility and at times into abstract art. Salvador Dali would have loved to be born as an Indian.
- Live the Present: For a nation wanting to long-jump into development, our advice is Stack before You Leap. Healthy life and environment clean air and Swachh Bharat are too distant ideal. We need to concentrate on the present, Stack Up for the Future!
- Belief in Our Karma: They tell us the earth is getting less green because we stack. Now can somebody tell us how our stacking lead to environment pollution? Our parents stacked, their parents stacked and for innumerable generations we have stacked. Nothing changed because of the hoarding, stashing and stacking. How then we still have good air to breathe ample water coming into our taps. Our Children then must stack. The environment if it is turning grey from green, it is ordained to be such. Our karma has resulted into our present living condition. If the fate of our children has something in store which is different than green then it would be to purify them from past karma.
- Philanthropy is good for Economy: We do our philanthropic bit by giving the kabbadi wala some of our stuffs. It becomes his livelihood. He has his small place where he burns the stuffs into something which the big scarp dealers buy from him. These Scrap dealers then do something which they pass on to someone and that someone passes on to some other one. So our philanthropic stuff makes money for all and adds to the economy. But whatever it does to the ecology is not our concern. By the end of the day we feel happy for the little kabaddi wala.
- All Merge into One: What the kabbadi wala cannot sell goes into his stacks or goes for burning or into severs or drains or rivers or rivulets. Or close to our cities for landfills. What we had extracted from the Earth goes back to the Mother Nature. For all things will eventually merge into her sooner or later. Our efforts seem small, polluting but it finally ends into the beginning. This is our belief!
Note: This post was originally published in June 2015 and has been completely revamped and updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.