Everyday Musings > Less plastic, more life

My dear friend Lal just created a campaign on plastic and how it chokes animals. Not to mention the planet. I went into my kitchen and looked at my three large bags stacked with plastic covers of all sizes, neatly folded and pressed to accommodate the ever growing number, saved to reuse someday. Till recently, it made me feel organised. Today it made me realise how guilty I am of filling this world with plastic.

I shop for vegetables at the fancy hyper city where every vegetable and fruit is shrink-wrapped or sealed in a plastic pouch after weighing, where they give out eco-friendly plastic covers which still end up choking animals eating out of a garbage bin.

Looking back, I love the concept of Apna Bazaar and ration shops, where my parents carried their own cloth bags to buy groceries. Or how, in Delhi, my neighbouring aunties would lower baskets with money in them from the first and second floor and the vegetable vendor would fill it with vegetables of her choice.

As a country, we've grown up with the best environmental practices. The ones that people struggle with now to earn green credits. Our food was packed in leaves, and we made spoons and plates of them too. We dumped our vegetable waste in our gardens or fed them to our cows. Milk was brought home by a milkman in a steel container and poured into steel vessels handed out by sleepy children. We ate local produce. We wore organic cotton and bought new clothes once a year. We ate organic and learnt not to waste our food. We carried our cloth bags everywhere we went and lived comfortably without missing the allure of plastic.

What changed? Why did we start blindly adopting what we can see is not working in the West? Why did we stop doing what worked perfectly well for us and the planet? Why, now that we know the state of things, don't we wake up and see the plastic each of us generates every time we shrink-wrap our sandwiches or ask for extra plastic bags, just in case. I don't buy veggies from the local cart vendors because I think they'd be unfair with price and the experience is not as exciting as wheeling a shopping cart and being lured by packaging. Now it seems like such a short-sighted choice.

Apart from veggies, I shop lots too - Lifestyle, Food Bazaar, Shoppers Stop, all of them give you plastic bags. And offer no option of you bringing your own cloth bags and shop with them. Actually, I've never asked. I wonder how they would react if I carried a cloth bag in, and asked them to seal that instead of giving me their plastic bags. I will try that next time.

My bag, like many women I know, is stuffed with various things I just might need. The next time I step out of home, I'm going to put something else in it – a neatly folded cloth bag.

Everyday Musings > Is it worth it?

Cost and Worth are often poles apart.

A £18 admission ticket to see the original paintings of a master is a profit for me. Buying a poster with the same art on it for £12 is a cost for me. Buying good quality fresh vegetables worth £20 that keeps my doctor's bills away is a profit. Spending £15 on a restaurant salad is a cost for me.

We live in a consumer-centric time where things are designed and consumed at a rate never seen before. Fashion has gone from Spring/Summer-Autumn/Winter to include Resort and Fall and now pre-season lines, thus ensuring new merchandise in the stores every month. Old things are discarded and new bags are bought with a fake vintage worn out look which is ironic in itself. The idea of 'Something New' is turning out to be mostly cost and very little worth.

The emergence of DIY, sewing, gardening on balconies, second-hand shopping and buying locally has challenged the buy-buy culture. It is making the idea of 'worth' more relevant to us and removing the stigma of it 'being cheap' or 'thrifty' and replacing it with a belief that one can attain a richer life by angling for less 'worth-less' things.

Consumption is as much about real fulfillment as it is about satiating the mind. Thus how does one put a cost on satisfaction of seeing/experiencing something beautiful. Which is where the Internet is such a blessing.

The Internet, currently, is high on worth, as it doesn't cost us per view and is essentially free. Tools like blogs, fb albums and Pinterest are a fantastic way for us to vicariously collect and show-off the things we love without owning them. By posting a picture, or posing next to someone else's Ferrari, sharing someone's comics collection, it tells us and others that 'we are living that experience'. And most often, it's more than enough. We pin it, post it, share it, like it, and move on.

In a city like London, I am fraught with the choice of cost and worth every day. It's a re-engineering of my mind, a letting go of the band-wagon, but as I've come to see over time, you'll earn it all back and more.

Everyday Musings > Useless

Useless - that thing that the dictionary says has "no practical value, no beneficial use". We would call it a waste of our time and money. That thing that we never want to do or be.

Logical, sensible people, I have often heard, only do Useful things - like getting an MBA , managing time, going to the gym, taking breaks on long weekends, buying a car, investing in a house or winning awards. All Useful things that have been tried, tested and verified by repeated action, much like Hamsters running on the wheel - active, stereotypical and explorers of the already known.

Which leads us to the unknown. Which leads us to progress, technology and inventions. How does Useful lead us to the unknown, the black hole of the unexplored? To get there you have to try new things, new ways, new formulations. To get there you have to perform Useless actions and hope for new Useful results. Eureka.

Progress, technology, inventions largely fall on the shoulders of people who spent a lot of time doing Useless actions and experiments. The rest of the world doesn't have time to be Useless. They are Hamsters, in a speeding circle, running, to live. Examples of the effects of Useless are all around us - Greeks chattering and discovering Philosophy, Magellan sailing around the world and proving that the earth was round, Columbus discovering continents, all the isms in Art, the birth of the Internet, creation of facebook. Useless actions that led to Useful things.

Useful runs the world, but the Useless makes it jump forward, into a new dimension. By only doing Useful things, we may be losing out on the most interesting aspects of what we can create or be. Life changing inventions aside, it has practical applications in our daily life.

If I had only one advice to give, it wouldn't be sunscreen. I'd say, discover Useless.

Everyday Musings > Personal Truth

What makes us, human beings, more powerful than other species on Earth? Perhaps it is our large brain, the ability to walk upright, imagination and the fact that we can communicate using language. So if all of us are equipped with the above attributes, what really makes us variably powerful within the human community?

The recent uprisings in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia shook up powerful dictatorial regimes that held forth for decades before citizens lost faith and took over power. So perhaps we could add Faith to the list of what makes humans powerful. Belief would then be equally important, or as I've come to see it - Personal Truth.

But how is Belief a Truth – isn’t that like saying ‘same difference’?

I turn to the dictionary. Faith is defined as ‘belief that is not based on proof’, Belief as ‘an opinion or conviction’ and Truth as ‘reality or as a thing exists’.

We hold Truth in high esteem, real things being more admired and loved than fake things. The ‘real deal’, as we refer to something worth our attention, love, money and time.

So where do Personal Truths fit in?

We all have beliefs. About people, experiences, ideology and objects. We trade them freely and confidently in the form of advice, opinion, orders and in conversation. They are clearly not casual thoughts to us. We believe them to be true – “Honestly, people with grey eyes cannot be trusted”, “I am ugly”, “War is the best way to get peace in the Middle East”, “I am going crazy”, “I will never fall in love”, “I am not worth anything”, “I am the best”, “All actors sleep around” … these and many other such statements have become undeniable truths for us – our Personal Truths.

We value our Personal Truths as they help us navigate life; which is possibly why the shattering of one is similar to losing faith in someone we believed in. Sometimes, we berate ourselves and lose trust in our future judgements. Sometimes, we see it as a sign of growing wiser and make peace with it.

We share many Personal Truths with fellow humans and create communities of mutual understanding; as is evident in Clubs, Gangs or on Facebook as Groups or the many Likes seen on Pages like ‘Delhi is the best city in the world’.

The Truth we choose to believe can guide us to do good, to be neutral or to do harm; to ourselves and to others. Great power that brings great responsibility.

A person with no Personal Truths is like a ghost, unreal and probably impossible to find. But that, of course, could be my Personal Truth. Smile.

Everyday Musings > Unsubscribe

Information, on anything, fascinates me. As a result, I’ve subscribed to plenty of newsletters, blogs and websites to gather data. As time passed, this hoarding resulted in a piled up inbox with unread mails to be read ‘not now’. I decided to get clever, and moved all my subscriptions to a new email id. Good plan it seemed like, except that in a week, the new inbox was choked with unread wisdom from New Scientist, Bartlett Architecture, Craft Collective, Trend Watchers, Guardian and more. Not to mention the fashion stores I’d shared my email id with.

I persisted for some time, deleting the mails as they came into the inbox since I was no longer interested in reading all of them. Some had lost relevance. Some I had grown out of. Some didn’t tickle my mind. I decided to be brave and impolite. And decided to cut the umbilical cords that held me to so many worlds. I unsubscribed.

It seemed like such a simple thing yet it took me a while to get there. I was running on auto-pilot, reading, replying and deleting mails. It never occurred to me to let something go for good. The ‘what if it does me some good sometime’ hung somewhere in the air. I realised I would never know, but shedding the weight made life healthier and the inbox leaner.

The same works for my mind, my space, my home, my body as well. There are so many things I’ve subscribed to in life that have stopped working for me, that don’t nourish me, that make me unhappy. I’d like to unsubscribe to them. So off go the pants I’ve been holding onto thinking I’ll get to a size 6 someday. Off go the books that I’ve never read and if I am to be honest, I will never read. Off goes the need to please everyone all the time. Off goes ‘I will recycle this into something’ basket that only had things going in and never being taken out. Off go the TV shows I have to watch or I will die. Off goes the habit of giving unsolicited advice. I am unsubscribing from all these things in my life, and without as much as a diet, I’ve lost so much weight. My mind feels less bogged down by all the things that were in my life that didn’t nourish me, qualities I didn’t care for, things I could do without.

I don’t think we own anything in our selves; they are all subscribed to, like apps on an ipad. We can choose to let go. And subscribe to a new life.