Dumpathon!

Selfie of our Conscience

The economic growth of the whole world is fuelled by Computers in the last thirty years. Particularly, the impact of Computers in my country is nothing short of phenomenal.

A definition of computer: Garbage in, Garbage Out.

So, as the logic goes, the whole world STINKS.

We bring garbage in, throw garbage out, 24*7*365.

Streets, Neighbourhoods, fences, highways, waterways, fertile land, fallow land, take a 360 degree view around you regardless of where you stand and you see garbage, garbage, garbage, plastic, plastic, plastic.

The actual problem lies in 'out'sourcing, moving away from a 'Producing' framework only to shamelessly source everything from everywhere. The whole world is our source; we are one bunch of happy consumers choking on our own filth. 

When it is time for garbage out, we let loose our creativity and throw them out in so many different places in so many different ways with scant respect to our environment.

This 'out' maybe backyards (ours as well as neighbours), vacant lands, roadside, water bodies, water ways...anywhere but garbage bins.

Garbage bins - we seem to be throwing (garbage) as a nation at a much faster clip than the speed with which garbage bins could be provided by sanitation bodies of our government. Probably the G in the GDP of our country, measured in garbage terms, would put us at the top of the Garbage Mound that the world is becoming.

In the very divided world we live, garbage seems to be the only thread that binds us all; regardless of our race, ethnicity, religion, creed and leanings, WE ALL DUMP, Period!

When a bunch of us went to campaign for 'garbage free neighbourhood' recently, we met a neighbour with senile cataract who kept complaining to us that she was seeing lot of ghosts in a tree next to her house. For her, that was a bigger problem than garbage. 

We had a look and noticed a bunch of plastic bags dancing from branches 15 feet high. Yeah, ghosts, true...ghosts of long dead plants coming back in the form of plastic to haunt us forever...

One day I called up my friend working in an IT company in a Metro city. He lives in a rented house with a bunch of his friends, all of them unmarried. I reflected upon the bad state of garbage in our neighbourhood and lamented that maybe in the near future people would become so lazy, they would start dumping their garbage in a corner within their own living space (all garbage generated in a house is dumped in the living hall of the house for example) and when the stink becomes unbearable, they would use their IT brains to find a fantastic solution, i.e. start sporting oxygen masks!

When I finished, he fell silent for few seconds and then started laughing. When I asked him the reason, he said that his house mates just went out to buy oxygen masks! 

The scenario that kept me worried seems to play out daily in his house and the worst part is that they have a servant maid who keeps gently goading them to throw the garbage out at least once in a while!

Today I read an article in the media that a SEVENTEEN year old girl has been rescued from a locked flat which was filled to its hilt with garbage; she was confined there by her own mother for three months for reasons unknown. (Photograph source: Hindustan Times).

What were you doing when you were a seventeen year old?

What do you want your kids to do when they turn Seventeen?