A spate of Western country students – of sociology, language, yoga, music, film - pass through Pune every year. Besides the obvious ills and charms of Pune that hit many of them, there is one Indian quality that never fails to impress them, or at least set them thinking: how much we Indians restore, repair, and reuse our things.
Throwing away stuff is the very last option. Of course, as malls and retail stores and shopping hungamas increasingly define and dictate our lifestyles, we’re being increasingly encouraged and hectored into chucking stuff on a whim and replacing it with more stuff; or told to dig up perfectly serviceable flooring and put in some newly ‘elegant’ stuff…and so on and so forth.
However, the fact remains, that the average Indian does really use a thing to the maximum. And after he/she’s done with it, someone else down the line will squeeze out service from the object and use it some more. Only then, if at all, will it find its way to a kabbadi waala, from whom it will go into a recycling process – and we have been doing this much before the West even coined the word recycle.
When you see some of these routine habits of ours through the admiring eyes of a person outside of our culture, it gives you a pleasant shock, sometimes. What are the things about our reuse lifestyle that really strike the foreigner?
Quite routinely, in the generation before mine and one generation before that, no paper is thrown until it is written on both sides. This includes bills, receipts, etc – people will slip them into the grip of an exam-pad clip, and these serve as stuff to scribble numbers, accounts or notes on. Throwing away a paath-kora-kagad (paper whose one side is unused) is considered wasteful, even wanton. Old diaries are divested of their unused pages, and these are cut up to make memo pads. And these generations didn’t have ‘environmental science’ as a subject in school, and didn’t waste huge amounts of chart paper and internet time and massive colour printouts for ‘projects’ on environmental friendly behaviour.
The other thing that fascinates foreigners here is the ubiquitous cobbler, and the stuff that he (and in some places she) will do for you. From minor stitches to major surgery, the chambhar will do a fantastic job on any footwear. Even the availability of the new straps in the market for our home flip-flops (rubber chappal, as we call them), is something that the Western visitor is amused as well as impressed with. As for broken straps or zippers of a suitcase - it usually means that you simply throw it away in America, unless you can repair it yourself. Here, the mochi or even a big shop will take it in and nurse it back to good health for you.
Take home containers from restaurants, ice cream and dahi containers…none of them are thrown away once the contents are used. They go into a corner of the kitchen somewhere, and are pressed into service when there is extra food to be given away or stored. Or they are given to people who use them for months after.
Food – the wastage of food in the West is too well-documented to go into here. And it strikes the visitor right between the eyes, when he/she sees how most of us do not throw away food, nor do we let leftovers sit glumly in the fridge for days. There are always takers, if we give the food away while it is still good. I remember, in the Sadashiv and Navi Peth areas of the city, where my grandparents lived, at one time, leftovers would be put into dron (leaf bowls) and given away to the poor, who would walk the lanes collecting this food fresh.
We’re getting there with the ‘developed’ attitude to things, of course. Shockingly, I know people in some of Mumbai’s buildings, who routinely throw unwanted food, handbags, diaries, broken stuff etc down the garbage chute or shaft provided by builders as a ‘modern amenity’. They just couldn’t be bothered to find takers for this stuff.
When you travel in the West and visit the great malls, at first you are fascinated by how there is a product for every conceivable human need/whim – and that too an aesthetically made object with truly intelligent design. For instance, in the gardening sections, I saw ‘tree ties’ – robust plastic strips and strings of varying sizes, to hold up or hold back creepers, branches, and any other vegetation that needs to be smartly pulled back. And because they were made in a garden green colour, they merged into the greenery – doing their job wonderfully and invisibly. You thought of your own bits and pieces of rassi, naada, old wire; or cut up bits of a clothesline that has gone old and weak, to hold back your Madhumalati creeper. And of course the ‘tree ties’ look so much more attractive an option.
But I like our way better, and so does a lot of the right-thinking Western world, now.
Throwing away stuff is the very last option. Of course, as malls and retail stores and shopping hungamas increasingly define and dictate our lifestyles, we’re being increasingly encouraged and hectored into chucking stuff on a whim and replacing it with more stuff; or told to dig up perfectly serviceable flooring and put in some newly ‘elegant’ stuff…and so on and so forth.
However, the fact remains, that the average Indian does really use a thing to the maximum. And after he/she’s done with it, someone else down the line will squeeze out service from the object and use it some more. Only then, if at all, will it find its way to a kabbadi waala, from whom it will go into a recycling process – and we have been doing this much before the West even coined the word recycle.
When you see some of these routine habits of ours through the admiring eyes of a person outside of our culture, it gives you a pleasant shock, sometimes. What are the things about our reuse lifestyle that really strike the foreigner?
Quite routinely, in the generation before mine and one generation before that, no paper is thrown until it is written on both sides. This includes bills, receipts, etc – people will slip them into the grip of an exam-pad clip, and these serve as stuff to scribble numbers, accounts or notes on. Throwing away a paath-kora-kagad (paper whose one side is unused) is considered wasteful, even wanton. Old diaries are divested of their unused pages, and these are cut up to make memo pads. And these generations didn’t have ‘environmental science’ as a subject in school, and didn’t waste huge amounts of chart paper and internet time and massive colour printouts for ‘projects’ on environmental friendly behaviour.
The other thing that fascinates foreigners here is the ubiquitous cobbler, and the stuff that he (and in some places she) will do for you. From minor stitches to major surgery, the chambhar will do a fantastic job on any footwear. Even the availability of the new straps in the market for our home flip-flops (rubber chappal, as we call them), is something that the Western visitor is amused as well as impressed with. As for broken straps or zippers of a suitcase - it usually means that you simply throw it away in America, unless you can repair it yourself. Here, the mochi or even a big shop will take it in and nurse it back to good health for you.
Take home containers from restaurants, ice cream and dahi containers…none of them are thrown away once the contents are used. They go into a corner of the kitchen somewhere, and are pressed into service when there is extra food to be given away or stored. Or they are given to people who use them for months after.
Food – the wastage of food in the West is too well-documented to go into here. And it strikes the visitor right between the eyes, when he/she sees how most of us do not throw away food, nor do we let leftovers sit glumly in the fridge for days. There are always takers, if we give the food away while it is still good. I remember, in the Sadashiv and Navi Peth areas of the city, where my grandparents lived, at one time, leftovers would be put into dron (leaf bowls) and given away to the poor, who would walk the lanes collecting this food fresh.
We’re getting there with the ‘developed’ attitude to things, of course. Shockingly, I know people in some of Mumbai’s buildings, who routinely throw unwanted food, handbags, diaries, broken stuff etc down the garbage chute or shaft provided by builders as a ‘modern amenity’. They just couldn’t be bothered to find takers for this stuff.
When you travel in the West and visit the great malls, at first you are fascinated by how there is a product for every conceivable human need/whim – and that too an aesthetically made object with truly intelligent design. For instance, in the gardening sections, I saw ‘tree ties’ – robust plastic strips and strings of varying sizes, to hold up or hold back creepers, branches, and any other vegetation that needs to be smartly pulled back. And because they were made in a garden green colour, they merged into the greenery – doing their job wonderfully and invisibly. You thought of your own bits and pieces of rassi, naada, old wire; or cut up bits of a clothesline that has gone old and weak, to hold back your Madhumalati creeper. And of course the ‘tree ties’ look so much more attractive an option.
But I like our way better, and so does a lot of the right-thinking Western world, now.
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