Let’s stop talking conservation and living it instead.
It’s usually the biggest, greediest, wasteful-most consumers of anything who shout the loudest when that thing becomes scarce. It’s an inverted pyramid: Large, prosperous nations tell us how not to overuse water. Large, prosperous city dwellers lecture rural India to conserve water. Large, prosperous farmers grab the benefits of irrigation projects and lecture small farmers on the ancient and revered Indian art of making do with less…and so on and so forth…you get the drift.
While the rains seem to have at last stopped giving us huul (as we call it in these parts) the last month has been frightening. We were, and possibly still are, staring into the hard dry eyes of a drought. What was our (us, urban Indian types) response? We promptly lectured our daily help on the conservation of water – but in her home, not ours. As for our homes, we continued hosing down our cars with water, then soap water, then some more water. We watered our gardens, we washed our balconies and patios every morning as if someone had dyed them black the previous night. We didn’t even remotely think that we should fix any of the 3-4 dripping taps and leaky cisterns in our households (plumbers are so scarce! so expensive! we whined, showing that we had maybe 0.25 of a conscience). We continued to have 2 baths a day, we washed clothes that we’d worn for an hour, we installed fountains, we let water run and overflow in buckets while we yakked on the phone - enough of it to water 2 rural households. Then we partied, we seminared, we nodded and clucked and used the flavour-of-the-month sentence: “I tell you, future wars are not going to be about territory, religion or oil…they’re going to be Water Wars.” Then we went home and bathed some more, threw away ‘stale’ drinking water, and filled up some ‘fresh’ water.
Our kids, ever the young environmentalists, set about making charts and presentations in school on Water and Drought and The Farmer – but at home they brushed their teeth for 20 sleepy minutes, the water running abundantly out of their taps and into their sinks while they attended to their pearly whites. They will drink half a glass of water and toss the rest into the sink. They simply won’t notice that in their very own homes, water trickles away while they parrot platitudes taught in school about the Earth and Resources. Like all good and prosperous Indians, they too are learning the art of tokenism, the mouthing of the right things at the right place; and they are learning young.
Pune was not like this. It was Mumbai that was at one time water-rich and wasteful. Then Mumbai learnt, the hard way. Pune too will learn, the hard way. Of course, even today, there are pockets of Pune that are not profligate in their use of water. But these are fast-shrinking pockets. Pune was seriously the city of conservation, even before the word became known. We were, even then, obsessively clean and loved our gardens – but we were thrifty to the point of being considered miserly. It worked brilliantly with conserving water and paper. Generations of Puneris have grown up doing their homework on the reverse of ‘paath-kora kagad’ (paper that has been used only on one side). Householders routinely made a neat pile of pink and yellow newspaper bills, flyers, notices, etc, clipped it to an exam board, and used the reverse for lists, notes, messages. Vegetables were bought in a bhaji chi piswhi and sorted at home, instead of in 6 wafer-thin plastic bags. Shower baths were considered plain silly, and a steaming bucket of water was enough for even the most fanatically clean to have a satisfying bath. Children were clipped on the head for spilling or wasting water – and the only time that they really indulged their inclination to play with water was in rivers or streams and during the rains – not in screaming water parks. (Can there be a more grotesque form of enjoyment in the context of our country? – fat semi-clad bodies splashing in thousands of cubic feet of water that thin naked bodies badly need). Puneri children’s artistic expression was rarely provided for with pristine, expensive art and bond paper, on which they scribbled a sentence or a scrawl and threw it away. And yet Pune grew artists, painters, writers, thinkers.
We’re from that same stock. Let’s reconnect to our thrifty genes, and while we talk of cloud seeding, water harvesting and conservation, let’s also practise one small gesture: turning off the tap.
It’s usually the biggest, greediest, wasteful-most consumers of anything who shout the loudest when that thing becomes scarce. It’s an inverted pyramid: Large, prosperous nations tell us how not to overuse water. Large, prosperous city dwellers lecture rural India to conserve water. Large, prosperous farmers grab the benefits of irrigation projects and lecture small farmers on the ancient and revered Indian art of making do with less…and so on and so forth…you get the drift.
While the rains seem to have at last stopped giving us huul (as we call it in these parts) the last month has been frightening. We were, and possibly still are, staring into the hard dry eyes of a drought. What was our (us, urban Indian types) response? We promptly lectured our daily help on the conservation of water – but in her home, not ours. As for our homes, we continued hosing down our cars with water, then soap water, then some more water. We watered our gardens, we washed our balconies and patios every morning as if someone had dyed them black the previous night. We didn’t even remotely think that we should fix any of the 3-4 dripping taps and leaky cisterns in our households (plumbers are so scarce! so expensive! we whined, showing that we had maybe 0.25 of a conscience). We continued to have 2 baths a day, we washed clothes that we’d worn for an hour, we installed fountains, we let water run and overflow in buckets while we yakked on the phone - enough of it to water 2 rural households. Then we partied, we seminared, we nodded and clucked and used the flavour-of-the-month sentence: “I tell you, future wars are not going to be about territory, religion or oil…they’re going to be Water Wars.” Then we went home and bathed some more, threw away ‘stale’ drinking water, and filled up some ‘fresh’ water.
Our kids, ever the young environmentalists, set about making charts and presentations in school on Water and Drought and The Farmer – but at home they brushed their teeth for 20 sleepy minutes, the water running abundantly out of their taps and into their sinks while they attended to their pearly whites. They will drink half a glass of water and toss the rest into the sink. They simply won’t notice that in their very own homes, water trickles away while they parrot platitudes taught in school about the Earth and Resources. Like all good and prosperous Indians, they too are learning the art of tokenism, the mouthing of the right things at the right place; and they are learning young.
Pune was not like this. It was Mumbai that was at one time water-rich and wasteful. Then Mumbai learnt, the hard way. Pune too will learn, the hard way. Of course, even today, there are pockets of Pune that are not profligate in their use of water. But these are fast-shrinking pockets. Pune was seriously the city of conservation, even before the word became known. We were, even then, obsessively clean and loved our gardens – but we were thrifty to the point of being considered miserly. It worked brilliantly with conserving water and paper. Generations of Puneris have grown up doing their homework on the reverse of ‘paath-kora kagad’ (paper that has been used only on one side). Householders routinely made a neat pile of pink and yellow newspaper bills, flyers, notices, etc, clipped it to an exam board, and used the reverse for lists, notes, messages. Vegetables were bought in a bhaji chi piswhi and sorted at home, instead of in 6 wafer-thin plastic bags. Shower baths were considered plain silly, and a steaming bucket of water was enough for even the most fanatically clean to have a satisfying bath. Children were clipped on the head for spilling or wasting water – and the only time that they really indulged their inclination to play with water was in rivers or streams and during the rains – not in screaming water parks. (Can there be a more grotesque form of enjoyment in the context of our country? – fat semi-clad bodies splashing in thousands of cubic feet of water that thin naked bodies badly need). Puneri children’s artistic expression was rarely provided for with pristine, expensive art and bond paper, on which they scribbled a sentence or a scrawl and threw it away. And yet Pune grew artists, painters, writers, thinkers.
We’re from that same stock. Let’s reconnect to our thrifty genes, and while we talk of cloud seeding, water harvesting and conservation, let’s also practise one small gesture: turning off the tap.
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