Confessions of a litterbug: A clean sweep to jumpstart Project Eco-clean

He looked straight into my eyes and spoke through his eyes, “No properly educated and socially habituated individual will litter. Period. If you do, you ARE trash yourself and deserving of scorn and even legal prosecution.”

Well, maybe he did not speak them but that is definitely what I read in his eyes.

Background: I was chatting away with my family in the moving train, eating away biscuits and when it got over, like it was the most natural thing to do, I casually threw out the plastic wrapper out of the window. That is when one of my cousins (who looked at me as if I threw a baby out of the train! Gulp!) asked me, “Do you always do that, akka?”

When all the intimidating eyes turned towards me, putting me on the hot seat, I swallowed hard and awkwardly came up with 1000 things, trying (well, let us say failing) to justify my action.

I stammered and reluctantly answered, “I’ll occasionally let go of a biscuit wrapper or something…err… when I’m just not thinking…err… but I really don’t litter that much. I used to be a tree hugger as a kid though… when I would walk home from school and had a biscuit wrapper, I usually held on to it till I got to a dustbin. And moreover…I do not see a trash can around”, (which is true!). I even agreed in unison to one of us who said, “Well, I only throw decomposable stuff”.

Yikes! Isn’t it? I know, I am not too proud of myself either.

Back to the story…

This was one of those moments; I felt a stomach turning culmination that I was one of those guys. “Those guys” that Abdul Kalam spoke about in his letter to Indians, “Take a person on his way to Singapore. Give him a name –’YOURS’. Give him a face –’YOURS’. YOU walk out of the airport and you are at your International best. In Singapore you don’t throw cigarette butts on the roads or eat in the stores.” This time it really was me. Did I stick to not littering outside India merely because of law?? Or was it that US made it very convenient for me to find trashcans everywhere?

I can pretend that I was making the best I can to keep earth clean but….yeah….I litter occasionally when I do not have an easy access to the trash can, and I did not feel very bad about it, either (till I was put on the hot seat). And, yes I’m very properly educated and socially conditioned. I’m also rather apathetic and came across as a person who didn’t give a damn.

This whole episode got me thinking. I admit I have an OCD about keeping my house clean. If you ask my family and friends, they will even tell you that I brag about it sometimes. BUT, it seemed to end right at my doorstep. Initially whenever I stepped out, I used to collect all the trash in my purse to dispose them in my house. But later I just seemed to have gotten tired doing that.

Certainly, I am not the only one augmenting the “broken window theory” here in India. Clearly, if you look around there is trash and litter everywhere. Throwing our waste on the street, and right outside our own homes is a part of our daily routine. Littering is seems to be socially accepted in India – not everybody minds, not everybody cares.

But can the average Indian be persuaded to change? Yes, I am sure we can. In a different scenario, this is what my neighborhood back in my hometown in Kerala did. To stop people from dumping trash outside their homes, a team from the colony invested in waste management by launching a garbage collection drive. By insisting on collection of garbage for Rs. 50 per house and taking it to a government authorized waste disposal site, they worked towards sanitizing the environment outside of their homes.

What makes me feel worse is that my dad was an integral part of that team. And here I am littering the town.

Educated Indians who DO care about earth get disconnected sometimes from those things around us. We forget that these are our roads, our trains, our property, and our earth. And we do crazy-irresponsible things to make them messy and ugly. Throwing garbage in the street is grungy and unacceptable, even if it’s food garbage.  Sure, it is biodegradable, but in the meantime it will just sit there making everything look lousy, attracting flies and is a total nuisance if someone steps on or trips over it.

I needed to bring that connection back. The point is that have potential and that I’ve known my stuff. I need to make my environment and it’s surroundings a part of my priorities. I am not a passionate environmentalist (may I add, “yet”!) but I definitely am not a hypocrite. And you will never see me litter in public again. ?