Just another Holi day

For people like me, brought up in the “south” in a southern populated neighbourhood, Holi is just another day. In our school days in Bangalore, Holi was a working day, so the question of colouring each other never did arise. At best it was a smattering of haldi and kum kum on the forehead. Only those children from the traditional “north”, for whom it was a big celebration, would miss school, and when they returned we would be awe struck by their pink and purple faces.

These days, in an effort to save myself from what I find a totally unnecessary and wasteful mess, it is a day when I don’t need to step out of the doors of my home. It is not that I am anti-Holi. Just anti-the-way-Holi-is-celebrated-today. Several days before the actual day, one finds children “having fun”, filling up plastic packets with water and throwing them at each other. By the time Holi actually arrives, we’ve generated thousands of plastic bags, and spent thousands of litres of water, when people around the world are fighting to reduce garbage and are desperate for water.

Garbage burning and science

While clearing up one of the shelves at home, I stumbled upon my son Gautam’s “Composite Science” worksheet of Std 3, done in March 2011. After looking through it, I realised why I had saved it.

Q7 Give reasons – The gardener was burning garbage and my mother got angry with him.
Answer: The garbage could have been put in a compost pit and be made into manure.

Of garbage and plastic bag alternatives

Bangalore has come a long way since this message I had posted on the ZWM-Blr google group <zwm-blr@googlegroups.com> in Sept 2010, about biodegradable plastic bags.

“About one-and-a-half years ago (meaning in early 2009), at Brigade Millennium Mayflower, we decided to go with green-colour biodegradable garbage bags for chute-disposal of garbage.

After a few months, we discontinued buying the biodegradable bags because –