Journeys

When was a poor student, I travelled mostly by second class sleeper or rickety buses. I saw and experienced more of India on such journeys than I have in the recent past as I zip around in jet planes and ac train coaches.

The most frequent journey I have made in the last decade has been between Dehradun and Bangalore. Earlier, I mostly travelled by bus between Delhi and Dun - this took you through the sugarcane-mustard-wheat growing areas of N. India as well as the lovely Shivaliks. The journey changed colours with the season - mustard fields painted the landscape yellow in feb-march, monsoon was full of life and green, early winters were several shades of brown-red. In the recent years, I have been mostly doing this journey at night by ac trains...till yesterdays drive from Dun to Delhi.

Driving down from Dun with some friends - through the Haryana route (rather than the Roorkee-Muzafarnagar road) was an incredible experience. The people-scapes around the Shivaliks and even around Rajaji where I once worked, have changed beyond recognisition in the last five years. Tiny Biharigad is thrice its size now, and there are over a dozen shops at the park entrance to Rajaji (Mohand). The roads are better, but there are many more vehicles.

For all of you asking me about my post-phd plans, here is #1 on my wishlist:

..to backpack around India / SE Asia on a shoe-string budget ...and experience life more closely...take lots of pictures and lose sense of time in some time-less places...

Plastic waste in Bangalore...where are we headed?

It shocks me to go into one of these new swanky ‘***fresh’ supermarkets. First they wrap your vegetables individually in plastic or provide you with big rolls of plastic to wrap them separately and then put all these individual plastic covers into several large plastic covers. The billing clerk frowns down at me as I pull out veggies from my trolley for billing – ‘Why can’t you wrap them separately?’ he mumbles. At other times, they have looked down upon me and treated me like an imbecile who did not know how to behave in a swanky shop like theirs. 

Well, it is not just at the ***fresh stores, everything comes wrapped in plastic – be it tea, salt or sugar. Every shop, any shop offers a plastic bag to hold everything you buy. And, no one declines – anyone doing so is looked upon as a freak. Even our good old Ramanna – the man who has sold vegetables to us for over for the last twenty years, puts veggies into a plastic cover for my mother to carry it inside.

I  am not very knowledgeable about plastics – but know enough to know that packaging plastic can never be recycled and is among the most dangerous kind. There have been some attempts now to use some of this to relay roads in Bangalorehttp://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/mp/2007/12/06/stories/2007120650920100.htm. But I don’t know how much difference this will make, given that it will probably re-use only a small fraction of all the plastic that the city junks daily.

Does Bangalore have a conscience? Don’t Bangalorean’s have a conscience? And, once again, do we care?

Across India, the only working solution seems to be strict legislation banning plastic covers/bags and levying a strict fine on anyone seen carrying it. All other attempts – posters, pleading seem to fall on deaf ears. Look at the difference this has made to Nilgirishttp://www.nilgiris.tn.gov.in/ANTIPLASTIC.htm or other hill districts in Tamilnadu. This is still addressing only a small fraction of the plastic wastes generated daily – but it still makes a big enough difference.