It’s the green fad I told myself, deleting the Earth hour and Earth day emails in my inbox. But I cannot escape it. The newspapers report how switching off lights for 60 minutes helped save millions of mega-watt hours of electricity. Impressive statistics achieved in one hour. Yet it is the collective bid to do something even in the name of fad that interests me.
When I was young conservation was a way of life. A wasteful lifestyle was abhorred. In the wee hours of the morning, my mom would get up and switch off the fans and open the windows. Was she saving electricity or was she just letting oxygen in. I never knew. All I heard was the sound of her voice waking me.
The daily run to the milk booth was my duty. I would step out into the mist blotted winter mornings in Calcutta and make my way to the match-box sized dairy milk counter. At 5 am a serpentine queue of men and women was already formed. I would join them holding my coupons and ID card tightly as instructed by my mother, till my turn came to exchange the coupons for milk. I counted four bottles of milk for our family of six. I checked for leaks. None. No wastage.
Very often on my way back I would meet my brother who made the run to the grocery; like me he would wait for the vegetable vendor to dish out fresh vegetables. Check them for flaws, weigh them, pay for them and return. Frozen vegetables long withering in the fridge or decaying, waiting to be thrown was unheard of.
Then came the Sunday mornings… the afternoons were spent reviving the barter system of exchanging old clothes for brand new utensils from a hawker at your door step. Re-cycling was not a word, only an act. The walk to the ironing man, three streets away, for Dad’s trousers and mom’s starched sarees was a child’s duty. The last minute dash to the neighborhood cobbler for a patchwork of my school shoes which must not catch the eye of the school prefect. Waste was curbed in every way. Walking was a way of life. No petroleum wasted at long traffic signals. Not that there were many options. Effort and cause were always attached to the hip.
Those were the days when taps were closed after use. Forget to do it and you got the spanking of your life, lights were turned off as a habit, one-bucket of water per person was allotted, showers were relics that sprayed rust instead of water.
Earth hours were like any other hour of the day. The cumulative saving was higher than the latest statistic. These avatars of the past are unequalled. Today when I walk past a never ending aisle of stocked milk of different varieties and brands, I am reminded of a life that was fun, natural and rhythmic. There was no dearth on earth then.
