Once upon a time, there was no waste...

In the era which defined us,  we were all Greta Thunburg, environmental warriors. Except that we did not know it. The way of life, adopted by our  family of nine people with my dad being the sole bread earner, did not leave room for much, except the very basics. Moreover, guided by  Indira Gandhi's famous phrase, " A nation's strength ultimately consists in what it can do on its own, and not in what it can borrow from others", we strove to translate the idiom on the family level, resultantly, living within our means in a culturally empowering environment. 

It helped that in the pre-consumerist period, our repertoire of needs was indeed small, and of spoken and unspoken desires, even smaller. 

The groceries came either in brown paper bags, or those made out of old newspapers, and were straight away poured into their designated containers. The brown paper bags were carefully cut, stretched, and pressed under a pile of books to flatten out evenly, and later used to cover our notebooks. On the other hand, the newspaper bags were read thoroughly word by word, by my bookworm dad, and if anything interesting was found, it was assured an honorary place in one of his many scrapbook journals. Vegetables were always bought  from local vendors, who came calling out aloud the names of the goodies they carried on the thela, in their sing-song voice. My dad,  aware of the nutritious value of the rind, forbid peeling any vegetable, or fruit (except bananas, of course!).

 Even though the ubiquitous biscuits, like every Indian household,  were always part of our morning tea ritual,  they did not emerge wrapped in a waterproof, glossy packaging, but, from a big tin container with a lid! Yes, we used to haul the wheat flour, sugar, and butter to the local bakery and have our monthly supply of biscuits made at one go.

The milk in glass bottles with striped silver foil caps, was left at our doorstep, every morning. After having licked the cream clean from the inside of the caps, we would wash them, hammer them  flat, and then, mould them into bowls, plates, cups and saucers for our doll-house parties. 

On the fashion front, our mom stitched most of our clothes, and on special occasions, a tailor was called home to do the honors. Our mom also knitted all our winter wears, sometimes even dying the wool at home in order to take into account the colour preferences of each of her seven children.

Yes, we grew up in a zero-waste environment. In fact, the word, 'waste' did not even figure in our vocabulary.  Undoubtedly, those were hard times, but, who would have thought that four decades later, we would be looking back fondly,  reminiscing the 'good old days',  when we drank water from a hand pump, took our grains to the mill to be ground into flour, ran  bare-footed on the green grass of public parks... leaving no carbon footprints behind...