Progress report

I ran around and played games like any young boy did, in contrast to my sedentary and lethargic life as a middle-aged man.  All that activity as a kid meant that I had my fair share of injuries that, thankfully, were all minor.  

My mother patiently and carefully took care of the problems that I brought to her.   But, sometimes--not often, phew!--she, being the at-home parent, had to take me to the doctor.  The clinic near home, which was referred to as the dispensary, was where the nurses bandaged me up, or yanked out thorns that had embedded way deep in my heel.

But, most injuries called only for home remedies.  Amma usually cleaned up the scraped skin, applied Burnol, which was used for practically everything.  She then tore a piece of an old, discarded veshti and tied that around as bandage.

Why veshti and not a sari?  Because the white veshti, which would have dulled by the time it was tossed away, served better as bandage than a piece of colorful sari would!

Once when visiting grandma's village in order to celebrate her sixtieth birthday, I fell while racing another kid.  The terrible bleeding from the bottom of the chin wouldn't stop and appa took me to the local doctor, who cleaned up the wound and sutured it.  For a few days after, I walked around with a tape--plaster--under my chin.  I felt like I had accomplished something in life.  The injury, the suture, and the plaster were my trophies!

Later when I had other minor injuries at home, I couldn't understand why we were back to the Burnol and veshti routine.  I didn't want to go to school with a piece of tattered white cloth serving as a bandage that now had a big spot of the Burnol yellow.  I wanted to look modern--with a regular bandage gauze and plaster over it.

My parents could not understand why they had to waste money buying gauze, or why I should be bothered by the Burnol yellow on a piece of an old veshti.

Looking back, I now see that the reusing of an old veshti was merely one of the many things that my parents and others in the old country did in ways that we now would refer to as living sustainably.  The contemporary mantra of "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" was how people lived.  

Very little of what we purchased was not a need.  We kids wanted many, of course, whether it was medical gauze and plaster or Fanta, but rarely did the parents cater to the want.  Not only because of the tight budget but--and even more importantly--because they couldn't imagine wasting money when there were options at no cost. 

Bottles were reused as storage containers.  We tore unused sheets from school notebooks and bound them together to create notebooks that came in handy at home.  Even the envelopes received in the mail were reused in order to write grocery lists.  No wonder we did not have a trash can at home--there was no trash to throw away!

Grandmas' homes and villages were even better models of sustainability.  In the kitchens, grandmas even set aside the water that they used to rinse rice and lentils, after which it was not fit for drinking or cooking, and the domestic help  carried away that water to her cows and water buffaloes.  Water was reused; imagine that!

My luxurious existence now and the material progress worldwide have come at the cost of the natural environment.  Could I have arrived where I am in a sustainable manner, but without modernity trashing the natural environment?