Single-use soft plastics – an ever-lasting and hard problem

     The prospect of a national ban, or at least discouragement, of single-use plastics is welcome. The obvious targets are disposable shopping bags, utensils (containers and cutlery), and disposable water bottles. But single-use plastics have made their insidious way into our lives in other goods where they are not so obvious. Wrappers of virtually everything ready-to-eat, not-yet-ready-to eat, and never-to-be-eaten are composed of single-use plastic. Manufacturers, distributors, vendors, and buyers of most retail products have a huge shift to make in their thinking and practice if they are to successfully eliminate plastic wrapping. Another arena that uses single-use plastic to signal hygiene is the restaurant/fast food industry that generates hillocks of transparent gloves and caps in food service. The ‘flex’ banners that people print and put up to announce everything from the birthdays of their idols to directions to the toilets at a conference are mostly unusable for another occasion.

     The examples here are all of plastics that are best avoided, but still find a few voices to defend them in that they can, in theory, be recycled, although the majority of them are not, in practice. ‘In theory’ because even after people carefully segregate their waste at home or in offices, they often come up short against recyclers or scrap-dealers who do not accept soft plastics, as their trade is not very lucrative. As for the unsegregated waste dumped in public places, waste-pickers choose among the recyclables to collect the most lucrative categories of waste, and soft plastics clearly do not make much economic sense for them to toil over. This leaves the big bulk of soft plastics to make their adverse journey to water bodies, or animal bodies, or end up in unhealthy fires. The big question before us on this is how, when the trajectory of used plastic is not assuredly environment-sensitive, and is on the contrary, practically guaranteed to be environment-degrading, governments can let the production and circulation of soft plastics go on.

     But, in addition to these products that are clearly single-use plastic for all to see are some products that incorporate single-use plastic so seamlessly into a multicomponent object that they may not be perceived as single-use plastics - a case in point is the typical commercially produced menstrual absorbent pad. This is a product that places convenience (not necessarily comfort) above all else, certainly above ecological health, and in most cases, over economic health too. Its greatest attraction is that it doesn’t need to be assembled before use, and disassembled or cleaned after use either. But the price for this convenience is paid by the environment.

     Unlike in some of the pads in the past where the plastic shield could be removed after use, and the plant-based absorbent disposed of in household garbage or sewage, the pads of today are not amenable to disassembling and disposal via composting, and reuse or recycling. This means that by virtue of being part of a pad, plastic that could have been recycled, and absorbent material that could have been composted do not take those routes, but contribute together to garbage dumps, mass for open burning or incineration, and landfills, and also, often, to the detriment of wildlife through ingestion or inhalation. This is undoubtedly too steep a price to pay for the convenience of peeling off and dumping a pad after use. This holds true for diapers too, the difference being in the composition of the material contained (menstrual discharge/urine/stool), and also in the compactness of the product (diapers being bulkier than menstrual pads).

     A concerted effort is called for to put an end to this dangerous practice:

• ·     policies need review and reformulation –- for waste segregation at source; clear and economically sound pathways for the recycling of all waste that cannot be composted; and composting of all compostable waste to annihilate garbage dumps and landfills –- to fully realise the intent of the ban on single-use plastic;
• ·       manufacturers of one-time use pads and diapers need to develop more environment-sensitive and user-friendly products, and guide users on post-use treatment; and
• ·       users need to contemplate the ramifications of their choices of product and post-use treatment processes, and resolve to follow less ecologically profligate ways.

Ssshhh!

If something is said to you in confidence, the expectation is that you keep the secret, i.e.,  do not divulge it to anyone – at all, and, possibly, ever.

It is not your prerogative to interpret the level of confidentiality as you please, e.g., it is okay to tell first degree family members – parents, siblings, and children; or okay to tell your spouse or partner of the day; or okay to tell someone whom the secret-generator is unlikely to ever meet.

The keeping of the secret should not be based on your judgement of the need (or lack thereof) for secrecy either. (“What’s so secret about having a crush? Let me tell people about A’s crush.”) Thus, if you think the matter doesn’t need protection from publication, it is not okay to distribute it freely - the generator of the information thinks otherwise, and that is paramount.

The secret is also not a weapon to be deployed in making a case for or against the secret-generator. (“You say this because you don’t know that A has been doing XYZ for years.”)

If all this seems like too much of a fuss to you, and you are of the opinion that once a piece of information has been imparted to you, the imparter yields control over it to you, at least have the goodness to declare this before any sensitive information is given to you. People are suffering enough dealing with enemies, they don’t need loose-tongued friends to contend with, in addition.

Aiyya!

The deity is celibate. Women in the reproductive phase (WIRP) of their lives should not enter the temple lest they perturb his celibacy.

Assumptions:

1.    The deity’s ambit is confined to the temple premises. WIRP can roam around outside the temple free from the danger of perturbing his celibacy.
2.      The deity’s commitment to celibacy may not be able to withstand remote sensual input from WIRP, particularly vision, hearing, and smell.
3.      Anyone other than WIRP, e.g., boys, men, prepubertal girls, postmenopausal women, transgender persons, poses no danger to the deity’s celibacy.
4.      Deities in other temples that permit entry by WIRP may be risking their commitment to their consorts, what with WIRP at large on the premises.

Shouldn’t the intervention be on the deity rather than on the devotees? Why not eliminate temptation by blindfolding, and stuffing the ears and nose of the potential temptee rather than curbing the potential temptors?

Chill, it’s just a forward!

Too many people forward more messages – text, image, audio, or video – than they create on their own, many without even the preliminary of attentively reading or watching what they forward. Often the only things people write are ‘good morning’ messages (which some others conveniently and labour-savingly forward as ‘good morning’ images instead). And, the rare images that many people take the trouble to create tend to be selfies. For the rest, electronic exchanges are a seemingly endless torrent of forwards, and emoticons felicitating those forwards, a huge expenditure of bandwidth, time, and effort, with very little edification to show for the trouble. Except perhaps greatly increased tolerance for spam. Sending and receiving forwards for want of something for one’s thumbs to do may seem harmless, but reveals a lack of respect for one’s own time and energy, and certainly those of others. It also suggests acceptance that one cannot come up with anything original that merits transmission.

Forwarding messages can be such an automatic action that some forwarders are surprised to come up against objections to what they’ve forwarded, often disagreement with some fine point: That’s where the lazy injunction “Chill, it’s just a forward!” comes in. This is terrific advice, not for the recipient of these mindless messages, but for the aspirant sender: Chill. It’s just a forward. Don’t send it.

Cows, mothers, and cow-mothers

The cow is not your mother. She doesn’t give you milk; you take her milk (which wasn’t meant for you) away from her forcibly. Although buffaloes do precisely the same job that cows do, and supply a good chunk of the milk consumed by Indians, for some reason, nobody seems to be claiming descent from them. If providing nutrients is the criterion for motherhood, all edible plants, and animals yielding milk, meat, honey, etc., should be your mothers. If it is not nutrients in general, but milk in particular, any mammal should be eligible to be your mother.

 

Is confinement to a shed or a mostly dirty circumscribed area; access to garbage as food; extraction of heavy physical labour; administration of loads of antibiotics (therapeutic or prophylactic); crossing with quite possibly immoral studs, or cutting out the work of the studs altogether, and artificially inseminating repeatedly to stack one pregnancy on another the way to treat mothers? On deeper reflection, maybe this is why people call cows their mothers, confessing in this roundabout way that they mistreat their human associates, or at least treat them as cash cows. Also, 'bovine' is not a complimentary adjective: Try calling a human mother a cow.

 

People who do not eat meat may be going into contortions patting themselves on their backs for their animal-friendly ethos, but killing is not the only cruelty. Daily milking (by anything other than the calf’s mouth); robbing colostrum, honey, etc.; shearing; confining animals to cages, sheds, or dirty, narrow streets; and making them slog pulling loads, all involve inconvenience at best, and torture at worst, of the animals in question. And animal-rearing, particularly cattle-rearing, contributes hugely to global warming, a disservice to more than the animal species in question.

 

If you claim to be against cow-slaughter on grounds of avoiding cruelty, in the first place, you need to be against the slaughter of any species, at least, any species that expresses pain that you can perceive, and in the second, you need to turn totally vegan, since most animal products entail some cruelty in their extraction. Feel free with the urine and dung though – no cruelty there, and no bullshit.

 

Ditch and varied heritage

I went on a heritage walk in the Charminar area. It involved picking my way through filthy streets to avoid litter, garbage, traffic, slush, and shit, and contriving to look up at intervals to glimpse the heritage structures I was there for. It was awful. My sense of belonging in Hyderabad may have seen me through some of the discomfort, but my friend from out of town didn’t have that buoy. I felt a blend of sympathy for her and embarrassment on Hyderabad’s behalf throughout the trip.

How can we get away with interpreting filth as quaint and cultural, and worthy of immersion in to get the true feel of a place? All the while, paradoxically, we get affronted when outsiders call our places filthy. Dirt, as in dust, mud, sand, gravel, may be mildly romantic. What is not is stinky garbage, poor municipal sanitation, thoughtless construction of roads and pavements, and bodily wastes on streets. Roadside eateries where food and beverage spills are wiped up with the same rag as the seats you are ushered into are not confidence-building.

Wastes have changed – in quality and quantity. People’s ways of dealing with them haven’t. The result is hillocks and streams of unsightly, and dangerous, garbage all over, particularly in celebrated places bursting with “culture”, unless the place has been taken under the wing of a foundation that cleans it up, restores it, and charges a fee to keep it visitable.

It is too easy to blame people for littering. But it doesn’t come naturally not to litter. The environment — physical, and socio-political — plays a vital initiating and maintaining role in such practices. If there aren’t user-friendly urban infrastructure designs; good urban sanitation policies, facilities and enforcement of rules; handy receptacles for wastes of different sorts; reminders at points-of-decision while the new behaviour is learned; and inspiration from role-models, not to mention pride in one’s home and surroundings, it is too much to expect people to keep their neighbourhoods clean, particularly when they have spent years adapting new wastes to old styles of disposal, e.g., flicking a plastic wrapper away like they used to flick the leaf and blade of grass that held snacks together in the old days.

This is a failure of intersectoral collaboration, preceded, unfortunately, by failures of each sector’s work. The tourism department puts its resources into organising visitor-friendly guided routes and schedules to showcase the architectural beauties of a place, and gets dismally let down by a set of other government departments, e.g., the local governance, traffic police, roads and buildings. Some more thought and concerted action are needed to make places habitable, visitable, and worthy of their attractive tags. 

The plight of the favourite

I know someone who dislikes her boss (true, that’s at least half the world), but is favoured by him. She receives due acknowledgement for her work, opportunities for more productive work, and some aid in negotiating administrative hurdles in her professional life. She didn’t seek this special attention, and doesn’t really revel in it, although the availability of opportunities and the absence of hurdles are not unwelcome. What’s unwelcome, and not entirely fair, is the inexorable envy of her colleagues.

I know someone who through chance events (X-Y pairing, and originating in the family of a particular person) became the favoured grandchild of a certain grandfather who held a good deal of sway. The grandfather, despite being well-supplied with grandchildren of either sex, chose to demonstrate his adoration of this child flagrantly, with visible gifts and special privileges, in full view of the other grandchildren. The favoured one is reputed (by his irate cousins) to have had his head turned by this coddling, which, even if true, lays the blame at the parents’ and grandparents’ feet rather than the child’s. In any case, he earned a great deal of bullying in his childhood, which turned to private scoffing and aloofness as maturity intervened.

I know someone who is a decent, insightful, intelligent, responsible and fun person, deserving of most of the popularity he enjoys. In addition, he is a light-complexioned Indian male, of a fairly privileged community, and holds the positions of son-in-law, brother-in-law, etc., which grant him special status more or less automatically. He has to contend with the annoyance of his less-advantaged peers, of either sex, who cannot dismiss all the adulation he gets as unjustified, but chafe, all the same, at the moiety of the adulation that is (unjustified by his character, skills, or work).

Persons in power – relatives, friends, bosses – often pick one or a few of their ‘subjects’ to favour, and to unabashedly and insensitively shower with attention, gifts, and opportunities. The ones bypassed are rightfully aggrieved, and often demonstrate their displeasure in resentful silence, plentiful gossip, complaints through ‘proper channels’, if any, or all too often, in mistreatment of the favourites. This last is an unfortunate, and seldom justified, recourse.

Not all favourites are sycophants, diligently sucking up to the authorities to ensure a smooth and undeserved ride for themselves. Some certainly are, and this is not about them, the *$#@&%! Others are simple souls, wending their way through life in all rectitude, neither seeking nor enjoying the glare of the authorities’ attention. That they do not shun the opportunities that come their way does not automatically make them undeserving. And the fact that some of them merit at least some of the favour they enjoy, making it tough for a fair observer to summarily dismiss their popularity and detest them whole-heartedly, is not their fault. This is more or less a ‘poor little rich boy’ situation. Many favourites even experience a measure of self-doubt at intervals, when contemplating the smooth path that stretches out before and behind them. It can be tough to negotiate the intricacies of these social associations, various combinations of fair and pleasant.

Not having had (or at least, not admitting to) first-hand experience of such favour, but having observed representatives of both the favoured and the envious subgroups, I speak from a point of detachment and empathy!