Almost 100 years ago, a peasant in Maxim Gorky’s audience is reported to have said, “Yes, yes, we are taught to fly in the air like birds, and to swim in the water like the fishes; but how to live on the earth we don’t know.” The subject was science and the marvels of technical inventions (https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/08/20/fly-swim/ )
Well, over the decades, this sentence has been used and attributed to many personalities like S. Radhakrishnan, C.E.M. Joad, Jack Parr, Martin Luther King Jr., and George Bernard Shaw. But that wise peasant’s comment still seems to hold good.
We Humans are only ONE of the millions of life forms on Planet Earth. Like them all, we too have our own name and surname, namely Homo sapiens, from as far back as 1758. This is Latin for ‘Wise’ or ‘Sensible Man”. These days looking at how far we have gone with polluting our planet, destroying biodiversity and causing climate change, do we deserve this name?
Gone are the days when we came home to delicious goodies handmade by mothers and grannies as evening snacks or festival spreads. Everything now is ready-made. Utility items are specifically manufactured for use-and-throw. Our mothers may not all have worked in offices or had jobs outside homes, but there seemed to be some tireless energy left over after picking up after husbands and children, housework, bazaar work, cooking, mending, still getting time to get together with neighbours, organize events and teach us how to draw, write, paint, cook, look up to elders and teachers, be kind to animals, listen to bird song, play fairly and above all spend quality time with the family, especially at mealtimes. Meagre or sumptuous, we were encouraged to look, feel and taste (not waste) our food, and sitting together at mealtimes was a done thing. There was a time when the simple act of plaiting hair was such a bonding experience; it still features in some TV ads. In villages in the plains as well as hills I saw this activity with women friends or family de-licing each others’ hair; for some reason, it was reassuring to me that all is well. Well, even monkeys groom each other all the time, lions too, it seems a great bonding activity in mammals as well as birds and many other species.
I tried to practice what my mother taught me. My children learnt to clean up after play, put things in place, cook simple and later more complicated dishes all on their own, not waste food, wash their own clothes, look after each other, read books, ask questions, and respect the natural world. Of late, we are all struck by the zero-waste lifestyle bug. We eat together most times, travel with our own bags, minimum luggage of course; we do not waste water or buy indiscriminately, we enjoy fresh foods as well as the occasional sinful stuff, and above all, fall sick very rarely.
Today when I travel in my adopted town Gangtok, capital of Sikkim for 130 years now, host to a fraction of the population I grew up amidst in suburban Mumbai, I am reminded of a ‘disease’ mentioned years ago in a documentary screened in the old Community Hall at Development Area by Satyadeep Chhetri and his beautiful wife Binita. I was fascinated with the word play that coined this ‘disease’ called AFFLUENZA. And sadly I see it all around me almost till the time we exit Sikkim at Rangpo or Melli. Beyond our state’s gates, I see just the opposite. Public buses and auto-rickshaws in West Bengal’s Siliguri actually still accept coins for tickets.
In Gangtok, climbing Tharo-line or the steps from Hungry Jack to MG Marg, or all the Flyovers of the town where some beggars place themselves strategically, our people stop to give hefty notes as alms. A sturdy young man elbowed his way past me into the SBI ATM booth the other day, explaining in good English, “excuse me, I am handicapped”. When I take a taxi home to the village we now live in, my co-passengers, often mothers taking small children home from school, gladly plonk their cell phones into little hands while turning to chat with their fellow passengers. It matters because many of them are actually aware of the ill effects of excessive radiation, and that they have been away from their children the whole day (because after school are ‘tuition classes’ to keep them busy) or that a beautiful rainbow gloriously splashed against the lush green mountainside outside the taxi windows is crying out for attention. One mother feeding Coca Cola to a really small child almost an infant said to me, “…kay garnu, maandey maandey naa…”. Elsewhere, another infant not even two years old was addicted to the soft drink Maaza. I have seen more than one baby eat only when they are sat in front of their favourite TV serials hardly aware of what they are being fed.
I note with concern several other things and have coined my own phrase, ‘Dus rupiya ko bimari’. Young people have stopped walking. They take taxis for ludicrously short distances….. Hungry Jack to Hospital Dara, Zero-point to Forest Colony bifurcation (we used to call it Farukh Paan Dokan), Sheesha golai to Pani House; these are distances just around 200 metres or less; and why, because the fare was only Rs. 10 the amount they would give a beggar, the cost of the wafers and chips they buy and which packets they carelessly discard either on the roadsides or stairways or out of moving vehicles, the little tetra-pack of juice, or the Rs. 10 ball-point pens handed out at almost every meeting like some mandatory rule.
The saddest are the kinds of ‘Tsog’ or prasad offered in most monasteries, especially the smaller ones. Some unspoken competition seems to be at play: whose is the most colourful Tsog? Even the take-away Tsog from household religious ceremonies seem to suffer this. At a glance, there would be around 10 items in a plastic bag, with a fruit, a ball of Tsampa (roasted barley flour mixed with ghee, sugar and dry fruits) being the only natural foods, the rest …. chips, biscuits, Mimi bhujia, chana, lollipops, Kinderjoy balls, Munch chocolates, sweets, chewing gum, juice in tetra-pack, dry cake… all kinds of assorted goodies in multi-layered non-biodegradable packaging destined for disposal in the nearest jhora or roadside or the town’s already overburdened landfill site.
Perhaps it is time we moved up the evolutionary ladder a bit. TV advertisements luring us into spending money, and buying everything new in the market or ordering online has turned us into such a materialistic society. Shopping is not a bad thing, shopping for the sake of shopping is definitely not good. Our children are not being taught to mend their own clothes, their own bags, and the cobbler at the corner is now a rare species (perhaps not such a bad thing). I could not find a decent umbrella repair place other than someone at the MG Marg-Tibet road junction who importantly asked me to come tomorrow seeing as I had only one umbrella-spoke to replace.
Sikkim however is still my wonderland. Here schools have or had a wonderful class called SUPW or Socially Useful Productive Work. How amazing is that! Children learnt to make their own brooms for one. My husband’s school in Mangan, North Sikkim encouraged students to grow their own vegetables and there were competitions on whose were the best. They used to walk over 30 km to and from Hee Gyathang in Dzongu through all kinds of perilous shortcuts, for a game of football. Luckily I think we have lost just one generation of children who grew up into adults mostly never having these opportunities, spoilt by easy money. This one generation had also a lot of wiser souls whose efforts at providing quality education to their children are bearing fruit.
Yes, we have made a lot of mistakes, but now things are looking up with the younger generation taking on the reins confidently. Our state has already got a lot of local, national and international attention for its many and substantial achievements, despite the hurdles of remoteness, ecological fragility, border security concerns. We are already suffering the onslaught of unregulated tourism, among other issues like increasing garbage and rise in population of stray and free-ranging dogs, especially in our wilderness areas.
The Zero-Waste Himalaya initiative, a pan-Himalaya movement is quite literally trying to move mountains, and slowly its efforts are bearing results. Several NGOs, individuals and community based organizations are working hard to retrieve the good habits of old, of thrift and of the need to minimize. More and more people are talking of the hazards of single-use plastics and the state government is also stepping up efforts for curbing the same. Some of our remotest frontier villages of Lachen and Lachung have banned packaged drinking water bottles imposing stiff fines even on their own people. Cleanliness drives in heavy tourism zones are fast becoming the norm and we hope to see a day when no more clean-ups are required. The sorry plight of Mt. Everest in neighbouring Nepal has shaken us up too. Our Guardian Deity Mt. Khangchendzonga is much too revered for us to risk soiling our sacred landscape.
The theme for this World Ozone Day 16 September 2024, is Advancing Climate Action. Today, every action we take, both in rural and urban areas is warming our climate, to our own peril. We know of the various alternatives to arrest that. Let’s start with ourselves before thinking of saving the world, switching off or stopping traffic for just an hour, planting trees or campaigning with candles. Now it is up to us to keep the clean green ball rolling in Sikkim. Here’s to a positive future for our next-gen to reclaim our nomenclature as a wise species.
(The writer is a Retd. Principal Chief Research Officer, Sikkim State Forest Department, and an acclaimed naturalist, researcher and conservationist from Sikkim. Email: ushalachungpa@gmail.com)
