Chances are you have not read Saumya Roy’s book, Mountain Tales: Love and Loss in the Municipality of Castaway Belongings. Not surprising. Because it’s not an easy book to read.
In short, it is the human story of the invisible people who live off the mountain of debris and refuse that stands, in this case, on the outskirts of Mumbai city. A dumping ground that was started in the British days, but continued to grow, and today stands many stories tall; a mountain of stinking, inflammable discards, that includes everything we throw away in our ‘buy, use and throw lifestyle’. It’s a sad story, pieced together by Roy over 10 years of research. But it holds a lesson for all of us.
What the book does, is make one rethink our use-and-throw ways. Imagine every plastic bag, spoon, wrapper, every carton, tin, battery, shoe, every mask, syringe, tubelight, bulb, every discarded wire, phone, multiplied by the number of people who throng a city being added daily to the pile. This is not true just about Mumbai, but every city in the world.
Add to it the waste from vegetable, flower and fruit markets, and our own homes, dead animals that no one disposes of safely, stuff from butcher shops and tanneries…the list goes on. The resulting mountain is an unimaginable risk of self-starting fires, fumes that choke and cause disease, and wastes that can flow into the waters surrounding it.
It’s a warning. A book that should be on every government official’s table; that the environment ministry should look at to understand what steps could be taken to effect a change in the packaging of goods, in the curbing of disposable cups, glasses, plates, trays, bags and more.
Small changes make a big difference. Airlines that serve food in trays rather than paper boxes do the environment a service. Every time we wash a plastic spoon and decide to reuse it, we do the same. There’s much hoo-haa about India hosting the G20 meetings.
City after city puts up posters crowing about our achievement. Do we give a thought to what happens to the posters once they are taken down? Or the trail of paper cups that follow a rally?
Let’s rethink our lives. The powers-that-be might grind slowly to bring change, but if each one of us finds ways to recycle and reuse, and create circles of influence, it would be our personal G20 victory, indeed.
Sathya Saran
Author & Consulting Editor, Penguin Random House
saran.sathya@gmail.com