Eating right to good health
Recently, I quite unexpectedly met a group of German visitors to India at the home of a friend who has been promoting the conversion of garbage into compost for ever so long. Her organisation Clean Air Island collects four-five tonnes of wet garbage every day from south Mumbai markets and through the process of vermiculture, converts it into organic compost. When one sees how this miracle happens — by simple segregation of wet and dry garbage — one wonders why it isn’t a national or at least an urban habit. The wet garbage is converted into compost and the dry stuff is recycled by the country’s much unappreciated rag pickers — mostly children. Imagine a scenario where there won’t be garbage littering the streets of our cities. Public health would improve, landfills would be history and filth would become a memory. This might sound like utopian wishful thinking, but it’s exactly what the Germans are here for. They want to spread awareness about a rather unusual website www.droppingknowledge.org which is accessible to anyone who wants to pose civic health questions. Already hundreds of questions have been posted on the website by people from all over the world. My German acquaintances had captured many of these people and their questions on film, and these video clips are available on the website which is copyleft, i.e there is no copyright. In the latter part of the year, a panel of over a hundred intellectuals will be invited to answer these questions, and subsequent discussions will be open to the public. The answers will be posted on the website. Through this unusual exercise, they hope to generate some solutions to the world’s all too numerous civic health and related problems. Visit the website if you want to pose queries. As I watched some video clips, of the hundreds of questions buzzing in my head, I was allowed two. The first question I asked was, “Why do we need police?” This was followed by “Why do we always need more?” Though embarrassingly simplistic, to me they seem the root cause of several global as well as personal problems. The revelation came to me that the day we begin to accept that less is actually more, we can expect some change in our mindset. As a young teenager, I loved accumulating new clothes, perhaps because my mother restricted my wardrobe to three checked dresses in pink, blue and yellow during my formative years. So the moment I stopped growing taller, I was allowed to build a wardrobe. But since I am aware of my acquisitive greed, I decided to restrict myself to just one cupboard. With the wisdom of hindsight, I realise now that I spent too much time tidying cupboards. Now I am aware that it’s much better to give away clothes I don’t need to a friend, a relative, an employee or a rag picker. Doing so saves a lot of time and energy. If only I had been content with less, I could have…
