Nanna waste or naane waste?

Don’t wish for more!

A furious argument in the Yoga class I was teaching last week left me worried. The moot point was this: is ‘contentment’ (Santushti) appropriate for the modern world? The young student argued that if it were not for discontent there would be no progress, no invention and no achievement. Popular television ads urge us to want more, not be content, not settle for less, and get more! When I was speaking to ten year olds in a school and told them we are running out of water to drink, a serious looking child told me, “Don’t worry madam, we can always drink Coke or Pepsi.” In the race to fill our hunger and thirst with more we forget when we fill something up in a bottle it has to disappear from somewhere else – a river or spring or a water source. In a rampage of consuming things that are better, newer and then throwing away the old, we often forget that resources on this earth are limited. One day we will run out of petrol and of metals in mines. We will even run out of trees to cut for paper. Every TV, mobile and car, or anything we consume has eaten away a bit of the earth, a bit of air, some minerals, some petrol, lots of water, some wildlife and their habitat.

             Earth worms in my compost bin eat the soil and my kitchen waste and leave behind fertile compost. But as a human in my entire life I consume stuff and will leave behind one kilo for rubbish for each day of my life. That’s around 300 kgs every year for all of my life of 70 years! This is just normal household waste. Add to it all the bottles, tetra packs, plastic packets, disposable cups and other things I throw in the dustbin in my office and during holidays. And not to forget all the e-waste (Cds, Computers mobile chargers and the e-duniya stuff) that poisons the earth! I am less useful to the earth than a worm that is may be one thousandth my size.

            It’s easy to pretend that as a human being I am free to do what I want but actually I am doing what the TV ads want. What they want is for us to be dumb and buy “energy boosters” and “super” and “better technology” stuff. I have no will to refuse to buy.  I have caught the discontent viral fever. If all of us don’t think and act soon, we will be left with a shell of a planet, gasping for all things that make it living, all things that make it verdant. We are already running out of water. Soon we will run out of food and oxygen right in our lifetime. 62.4 per cent of the total waste generated in India is produced by the 23 metro cities alone. So what can we do? Go on a diet control in all areas of life.  Buy for your needs not your wants. This is what santushti means.  It’s a simple age-old value to take on - be content! Be content with local food, be happy with fewer things, recycle and reuse things. Progress is important no doubt but progress towards what? We need to sacrifice quantity for quality. That I think is a sensible trade off that even the hardest skeptics will agree. For those of who are still wondering, it makes sound economic sense. You will end up saving more!