In the seventies when I was growing up, we were all Greta Thunbergs, environmental warriors. Except that we did not know it. The way of life, adopted by our family of nine with my dad being the sole bread earner, did not leave room for much, except for the very basics. Moreover, guided by Indira Gandhi’s famous phrase, “A nation’s strength ultimately consists in what it can do on its own, and not in what it can borrow from others”, we strove to translate the idiom on the family level, as a result, living within our means in a culturally empowering environment. 

It helped that in the pre-consumerist period, our repertoire of needs was indeed small, and our spoken and unspoken desires, even smaller! 

The groceries that came either in brown paper bags or in bags made out of old newspapers, were immediately stored away into their designated containers. The brown paper bags were carefully cut, stretched, and pressed under a pile of books to flatten out evenly, then later used to cover our notebooks. On the other hand, the newspaper bags, too, were read thoroughly word by word, by my bookworm dad, and if anything interesting was found, it was assured an honoured place in one of his many scrapbook journals.

Vegetables were always bought  from local vendors, who came calling out loud the names of their goodies they carried on their  thelas, in their loud sing-song voice. My dad, aware of the nutritious value of the rind of each vegetable, forbade peeling of any vegetable, or fruit, except bananas, of course!.

Even though the ubiquitous biscuit, like in every Indian household, were always a part of our morning tea ritual, they did not emerge wrapped in a waterproof, glossy packaging, but, from a big tin container with a lid! Yes, we used to haul the wheat flour, sugar, and butter to the local bakery and have our monthly supply of biscuits at one go. It was cheaper this way! 

On the fashion front, Mom stitched most of our clothes, and only on special occasions was a tailor called home to do the honours. Mom also knitted our winter wear, sometimes even dyeing the wool at home in order to meet the colour preferences of each of her seven children.

The milk in glass bottles with striped silver foil caps, was left at our doorstep, every morning. After having licked the cream clean from the inside of the caps, we would wash them, hammer them flat, and then, mould them into bowls, plates, cups and saucers for our doll-house parties. 

Yes, we grew up in a zero-waste environment. In fact, the word, ‘waste’ did not even figure in our vocabulary. Undoubtedly, those were hard times, but, who would have thought that four decades later, we would be looking back fondly, reminiscing on the ‘good old days’, when we drank water from a hand pump, took our grains to the mill to be ground into flour, and ran bare-footed on the green grass of public parks, leaving no indelible carbon footprint behind….

Ah, those were the days.