Cut back to that time not so far back in history when the word ‘recycle’ was not known to many and you will realize that the quintessential Indian was a recycler par excellence.

I remember seeing cycle chains, pencil stubs, fanta bottle caps, broken switches – you name it and I can include it in this list – being put to use in ways that defied logic and challenged the imagination of the most imaginative of us. The reason was simple – waste of any sort was a loss of meager resources and therefore unacceptable. The custom of saving, beatifying and passing on of clothes, is an example that none who grew up here needs to be reminded of. The clothes that saw the most faces were the baby clothes – these had the least wear and tear before the user grew out of them, you see!

But that was before the exposure to more affluent lifestyles prevalent in the western hemisphere started eroding the native psyche. My mother once narrated an incident that happened when she was expecting my sister and I was about 3 – her neighbor, a foreigner married to an Indian, a much older lady, whose daughter was also expecting her second child, passed a comment in a very superior tone, that they were getting everything new for the baby – ‘each baby is special to us you see?’

My mother, a retiring soul, who wouldn’t pass comments, or argue, to support her point of view, felt hurt at the oblique criticism. The implication of the comment was that those who didn’t get all ‘new’ for a new baby didn’t because this second baby was not as special as the first had been! This was contrary to the traditional view which celebrated these passed on garments as special blessings from those who came before. A pregnancy always meant that all close relatives would dig into their collection with enthusiasm, exclaim and cherish the treasures, wash and iron them, and then with great eagerness cart them over to the lady in question. Once there, they were, in all probability, admired and exclaimed over once again, and accepted by the lady (or her mother) with pleasure. It was understood that only those who cared deeply parted with their treasured memories like this. And of course it made economic sense too!

All this was before the term ‘hand-me-downs’ got adopted into our vocabulary. Treasures and blessings became discards to be accepted as burdens. A beautiful tradition got tainted and a natural system of recycling and reuse ….. ditched.

All one needs to do is look back into our childhoods with these words ‘recycle’ and ‘reuse’ and we see not tens, but hundreds of such things that we used to do as matters of course, that were really about recycling and reusing. Many of us make a joke about how our mother ‘never throws anything away’, and how much clutter it causes and then happily take something out from that clutter to use for the son’s school project. I am sure all of us have faced a situation where we have thrown out something following the principal that ‘anything you have not touched for a year is never going to be used again’ only to go out and buy something similar within days, guiltily remembering the one that we threw out!

We, as a nation are not wasters. Though we see so much in the news about the amount of garbage that we create and the visuals that shock at the size of garbage that is generated in our cities, in our heart of hearts we are not a nation that will discard things easily. It is just that we have lost touch with our innate preservationist selves.

The corner side grocer – his bill is a corner of note book paper – only a corner and not the full sheet! This might be a problem for the tax collector but an ape-able ‘maximum use of resource’ example.

The auto driver’s rain protector is an old discarded cloth poster.

The garbage collector uses a discarded plastic floor mat as a lining for his collection bin.

Discarded CDs as vehicle decorations; and many, many more examples of such reuse when we really look around with those two words in mind.

What is really preventing us from connecting with the inveterate recycler inside us? The most insidious single ‘thing’ I think is the ad world. Ads that say things like ‘my mother used to tell me to do so-and-so but …..’ or others that extol ‘why make do with the old when you can have the new for so little…’ and so on.

I guess they are trying to do their job – they need to sell more to survive and grow. The glut of consumer goods means competition and in turn means each competitor needs to sell that much more to stay ahead of the pack.

Can our innate frugality survive this bombardment? I think it can. I found a simple way. We have made a game out of dissecting ads. My children and I often poke fun of the claims and junk the hype where ads that depict luxury items as must haves or the ones that reject something old as useless. Slowly but surely I have seen a change in the way they look at possessions and their discard-ability. I cannot claim that it has completely negated the effects of the non-stop bombardment they are exposed to. I am thankful that it has at least sown a seed in their mind that sprouts every time they start yearning for the new item in the ads. A seed that prompts them to think whether they really need it, and if they don’t, then to think whether what they have can be put to other acceptable use to justify getting it. In other words, an attempt to recycle and reuse before getting something new.

The ideal situation would of course be when we would ensure that there can be no more use squeezed out of a possession before discarding it. Failing that the next best thing would be to prolong the use as much as possible before discarding – and then finding alternate use so that it doesn’t end up as that much more junk in the junkyard – not a difficult proposition given what lies dormant in our psyches – recycling.