Stepping Back A Little

Stepping Back A Little

                Last year, we bought home a cane furniture set. It looks elegant and charming and did not cost us a bomb. The shop owner also threw in free service for five years and assured me that it would last for twenty years or more. He definitely did not exaggerate. Our first cane sofa set which was purchased in 2005 for a princely sum of Rs 5,000 would have lasted for another decade had we not exchanged it for the new one. At my village home in coastal Karnataka, till a couple of years back we had a rectangular cane box used to store soaps and detergents. It lasted for more than fifty years. Which plastic box will last that long? I am sure that most of us remember our younger days when we had cane/bamboo/wooden containers at home. It is very evident from the current trends that we are slowly rediscovering the values of traditional foods and household articles.

           Stone tawa instead of non-stick, fad of organic foods (god knows how much of it is actually organic and to what extent), cold-pressed oils and fruit juices, matka for cooking, wooden ladles. Hopefully, the good old days of provisions being packed in used newspapers would return.

                                     The Shopping Mania

               It is indeed bemusing to the uninitiated to hear that shopping can be a hobby. This trend of ‘shopping’ as a hobby was perhaps first noticed by my generation in the post-liberalization era, in the early 90s. You could read in movie magazines that the film stars ‘love to shop in London or Dubai’. Soon there were shopping festivals in metros and then the mall phenomenon caught on. Actually, there is nothing to oppose if some people ‘love shopping’ and it is snobbish to criticize it on ethical grounds. People who are rich, successful with the ‘have money, will spend’ attitude, in fact, help generate employment by their buying spree.

           But things are a bit different now. It all started with online shopping. My first purchase from flipkart was in 2011-some technical books for the office. I have been a regular at major online e-commerce sites ever since. These companies have generated thousands of jobs but also adversely affected livelihoods on the ground- in local kirana shops, mobile and electronic outlets. But customer is the king. If the rates are less, delivery prompt with Cash On Delivery and easy return option, why not?

         I have two issues with online shopping. Firstly, it is addictive. Just like the supermarkets, we succumb to the temptation of buying things which we actually may not need. ‘It will be of use later’, becomes an easy excuse for purchase. Even though we have sufficient clothes, purchases are done only because things are available at a bargain price. How completely opposite to the near obsession of many Japanese with minimalism these days!

          Secondly, we contribute immensely to the doom of this beautiful planet with each item we buy. Almost every product is wrapped in multiple layers of plastic. Amitav Ghosh, in his recent book ‘The Great Derangement’, writes how we trash our mother earth when we unpack the plastic wrapper from Amazon. It is estimated that products worth more than 3,000 crores were purchased from three major web portals last Dasara within a span of five days. That would definitely mean tonnes and tonnes of plastic spread over the country. Of late, I am seeing more of paper wrappings by these e-commerce giants and I hope that soon this will be the norm. 

        At the Nature Basket store of Godrej last week, I spotted a plastic-like packing material called ‘truegreen’. When I refused wrapping of a vegetable by this stuff, the employee informed me that it was not plastic but a recyclable material. But its look, feel and transparency were all similar to those of plastic. It was printed boldly on the material that it does not contain any plastic and is 100 percent biodegradable. Why don’t we see more of this trugreen thing everywhere? By the looks of it, it can replace plastic in a variety of utilities, especially as a thin/thick wrapping material.

Billu

            Billu is our pet dog. He is a dachshund, a year old and the centre of attention of my kids. We had a Labrador in Chhattisgarh briefly. That was five years back. With a heavy heart we parted ways when we shifted to Bengaluru. We thought that it would be difficult to take care of a dog in the city. So, despite repeated pleadings by our kids, we kept postponing the decision to own a pet here in Bengaluru. Last year, when four cuddly dachshund pups were born at my village home, our resistance was breached and one chocolate brown pup was brought to Bengaluru in all fanfare. In ever loving memory of our Labrador Billu, this pup too was given the same name.

           The timetable of kids has changed ever since. As soon as they are back from school, the bags and shoes are thrown in any which way and a dash is made towards the kennel. Billu struts proudly when he is taken for a walk and he has become the cynosure of the campus kids’ eyes. He is moody and many a times, irritating with his insistent barking at the slightest of pretexts. A scampering cockroach or ant, a squirrel hurrying up the tree or a crow that has come to peck at the discarded grains-all evoke a barrage of loud-throated barks from Billu, annoying us in our post-lunch siesta on weekends. Over the past 5-6 months, there has been an increase in the number of strays in the campus and so has been the frequency of Billu’s ceaseless barking. But dogs are always a package. If you like dogs, you will know that Dachshunds are emotional, loving, lively, curious and brave. They can be jealous too and a new entry into our campus- an adorable golden retriever with a crowd of admiring children around him- is already rousing this trait in Billu.