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.
