Hi it’s me Kalki, and this is an episode of My Indian Life from the BBC World Service.
If you have a story that’s made an impact on you, if you know someone who’s really
inspired you, then please write to us about it. We’d love to hear from you.
When you think about our environment and climate change, how do you feel?
Scared, worried? Perhaps helpless? I know I do sometimes. Many of us fear poor air quality,
water scarcity, and extreme weather. Many of us have actually experienced all three.
But the question I have asked myself and perhaps you have too, is what can I do about it?
It's a global issue. Doesn't it need a global response?
How many of us with that thought, that sense of powerlessness, shrug and turn away?
The answer is plenty. But not everyone. I always read about global warming and I'd
always read about climate change and pollution in textbooks in school. I was 14 and I realised
that someone needs to do something and I realised that I can do something. So that's when I
decided to try – at least in my house. From the BBC World Service, this is My Indian
Life with me Kalki Koechlin, with stories about being young and Indian in the 21st Century.
Episode Seven: Saving the Planet. I started segregating waste at home, composting,
recycling, and I started reducing also consciously the amount of waste I was producing. So I
used to compost in a smaller like, bucket like container. So we use that soil for our
plants. And when I started doing that, the waste in my house went down. And then I decided
that maybe I can try getting my building to adopt waste management.
This is Arushi Majumder. She was 14 when she decided to act.
I drew up plans, made a budget also for how many tumblers we would require and how much
- like everything in total would cost us. And I met my building chairperson and committee
members and I explained to them what I had been doing at home. I think that's what convinced
them the most, because they saw like tangible benefits. Within another six, eight weeks,
they bought the tumblers. We started composting. We tried to get families to segregate waste
at their levels. There were a lot of families who didn't really take it seriously. So a
lot of families still send their waste collectively. So we started holding seminars for domestic
staff. And we explained to them the importance of segregating, and we explained to them how
easy it was again. And so then after a month, the process itself started. So every family
would segregate their waste, and it started going into the compost bins. And six weeks
after that we had our first cycle of compost. And I think it was probably the best moment
for me also, the building committee members who could like see the results. And we started
using that soil for our plants as well in the building and everyone really fell in behind
this plan. After that, it's been a self-sustaining process, kind of.
One girl changed the attitude of her entire community.
I feel kind of proud that I managed to convince people to kind of reduce the amount of waste
that we were sending. If you look at the amount of yearly waste that we use to produce and
the amount of yearly waste we produce now, there's a huge difference and it's that much
better, I think, for the climate and for the world. And it's honestly not that much effort
on our part. We just have to take conscious decisions to do better for the environment.
And I think it's so simple and I think that all of us honestly should do as much as we
can for the environment. Arushi Majumder is a young Indian who confronted
with the environmental damage we are living with, chose to act. Arun Krishnamurthy is
another. I grew up in a very lush environment in suburban
Chennai. My house was located between a lake and a pond. During monsoons when the lake
used to fill up, the water would run through my street, mud roads, and then fill up the
pond and as a child, I've drank water from that road. Right – water used to be that
clean. I grew up with a lot of snakes, frogs, crabs,
and what we call as a dhole - wild dogs. This was what was my childhood, right? I had a
greater understanding of the ecosystem at large, not in terms of scientific knowledge
and more, just that they all exist and we live with them. Then the urban dream caught
on where things started changing, and that's around where I was in the fourth and the fifth
grade. So that's when it started to bother that, you know, something is not right.
He was a bit different from others. And this is his mother, Buma.
Once he brought up a map of the world, and he asked me to create globe, because that
was a school project. I was wondering how to stick it. This fellow he brought a big
football, and he asked me to stick it and then he painted blue everywhere. So these
are the oceans and this is the land that out of the box, thinking. And we had all stray
dogs around. And people used to be quite scared about those dogs and they won't hurt Arun.
They will go around him and they will climb on him and they will play with him. And he
will never allow anybody to go near our home to litter it. And he will go and fight with
the people, those who come there and do something. He was also a big fan of adventure stories,
The Famous Five and The Hardy Boys. And like his fictional heroes, he wanted to find clues
and solve crimes. They used to brew illicit liquor in the neighbourhood,
which was an open secret everybody knew. But then I wanted to solve some crime, right?
The biggest fantasy was to solve a murder, but then nothing happened. But the closest
to crime scene that I could get was the place where they were brewing liquor. So I did go
there. I was trying to be sneaky. But of course, the others there. spotted me. One of them
even made me sit by the side, shared his lunch with me. And then like, the liquor was still
brewing and they treated me really well. And then my whole dreams of solving mysteries
completely shattered. But only temporarily, because Arun was about
to see another kind of crime, something he felt was a lot more serious.
ARUN: I came back to the pond, I was sitting by the pond and I was just watching this one
truck came by and was dumping construction debris. They demolish some building close
by and they didn't know where to dump it, so they were just coming in bring in dumping
into the pond. Arun complained to anyone who would listen
about what he had seen. Some were sympathetic, but one of his friends, thought Arun could
do something more useful than just complain. What is the point of just complaining if you
want to do something, do something otherwise don't talk about it. Then we spoke to a bunch
of our classmates, all of us wanted to get down into the pond, we started cleaning that
pond. A lot of adults did join. So what happened was, you know, not that we planned and made
it into a community celebration, but that eventually branched out to become a community
celebration. Cricket was the core crux, a bunch of us would play cricket close to the
point, right. And the cricket match for that day was to be preceded by a pond clean-up.
And then the gentleman who used to own a store close by said, ‘okay, divide yourselves
into teams and I will give you guys bag’ then we used to get this wafer choco bar.
So he said, whichever team does well, all of you would get a chocolate bar. So for a
chocolate bar, a lot of us did a lot of work, right? But then when you're doing that, you
also get to see that the work gets noticed, where adults joined in and they saw that we
were doing it they pitched in, we were able to remove close to 30 big sack loads of trash.
Arun is pretty extraordinary. Because this experience - his ambition to improve the environment
around him - has only intensified as he's gotten older. He's always had one eye on his
calling, no matter whatever else has happened. And quite a lot has happened.
Google came to campus and they did multiple rounds of interviews, tests and more. And
I was a science student and they were recruiting for a humanity stream, right. Fortunately,
I still got through. I was a very small town boy, very happy small town boy, limited in
his own world. The Google experience is what actually opened up my entrepreneurial ambitions
because I was working for them. I earned a living, used to save money and then spend
on my projects. Those projects work what else - environmental
efforts. Arun took his salary and invested it in an organisation he called EFI. Environmentalist
Foundation of India - its focus is cleaning water bodies.
Pretty soon Arun decided to quit Google, so he could focus on his environmental work.
He was careful to leave he says, before he got too comfortable there.
What if there’s a lot more money that I get used to over the period of time? And one
day, I'm suddenly told ‘no, you're not going to have this?’ Isn't that going to be a
rude shock and difficult to handle situation, compared to just growing at my own pace?
Arun's father Jela had to get used to the idea that his son had turned his back on a
hard-won and well-paid job. But it didn't take too long for him to get round behind
his son. My son should grow like anything, you should
earn more and live a very comfortable living. For that he requested job and should get promotions
in his company and to become a big man - that was every ordinary middle class people would
think, isn't it? This boy decided ‘I want to do some services to the society’, my
country, water bodies are deteriorating. So I want to clean up, the water should be protected
for future generation. That was his aim. Okay, I accepted it.
So until now Arun had saved a pond, setup EFI and left a well-paying cushy job - but
what was driving him? Perhaps his fears. If somebody else is not growing my food, I
don't have the skills to grow my food. I can only buy the ingredients to prepare a recipe
of a dish that I cherish, but I don't know how to grow my food. If you ask me, I'm more
scared about such things. I want to find my water. I want to grow my food. And the day
when I'm able to do that, I will call myself skilled.
But that is quite a unique way of looking at things. If you look at a lot of people,
I think that that fear is not having a good marriage, not having a good house. These are
the sort of middle class fears of our country today.
It also depends on what you've been exposed to. Pondicherry, Kanyakumari, Chennai, Denali,
all these places which I consider very close to my heart have shown me a path which is
beyond all this. I think that you know, when we get exposed to such stuff, we will never
think about anything else. Exposed to the change, you mean? Of your habitat,
being ruined. Exposure to reality.
And do you think that people are aware of the scale at which this water crisis is?
There wouldn't be until the day there is still at least one drop left in that tap. When the
taps go dry, when the alarm bells ring, is when we will finally wake up. I don't think
we are a society who can take signals and be precautionary. We need to be given that
big bang, only then will wake up to it. That's been our response to almost everything, right?
Any social problem for that matter whether it's gender based or whether it's socio-economic
base, caste based, we need to have that big one unfortunate incident for all of us to
wake up to it, right. When have we been precautionary? Do you feel overall we're approaching a day
where we might not have water available, or a place to store it. And are we really prepared
in India for a water shortage? Not at all. We're not prepared at all as a
nation. When I go see some of the step wells in Gujarat, Rajasthan, how artistically our
forefathers have established an intrinsic system of water storage. And today it's nothing
but a place where we dump trash, or invasive species is growing or there is some kind of
an anti-social illegal activity happening. It hurts. We are in a vicious cycle of blame
game, where you and I are blaming the government and the government is blaming us. There is
no collective effort to take India's water seriously.
Were you in Chennai yourself when the crisis hit?
So I live in Chennai. Chennai is my base. The water crisis did hit us hard. We some
days had no water. And the rest of the days when we had water it was poor quality. I'm
not even talking about drinking water. I'm talking about domestic usage water for the
wash and more. So your building itself?
ARUN: Yeah, almost all of us ran out of water. How that happened was simple as this one.
Definitely the monsoons failed. Two, the demand for water, as I was mentioning earlier, also
- how much water are we using? There's no meter system, which tells us how much water
we use. If electricity was free, and unmetered, we would exploit right that's what we're doing
with water. And we've tapped the groundwater reserves so hard for exploitative usage that
we run out of water simple as this. Arun is playing his part in trying to solve
India's water crisis. Reviving traditional aquifers is one of the prime functions of
EFI. Along with cleaning pollution from lakes and beaches, like this clean up at a beach
in Chennai. We think we're trying to protect the planet.
We're not we're trying to make this place, a better place for ourselves, right? And getting
people to respect nature in the true sense and mean it when they say it, has been a challenge.
Across 14 states in the country. We are now on our hundredth water body.
Til now, Arun and his team at EFI, along with volunteers have cleaned up 39 Lakes and restored
101 water bodies. There is a greed. The greed is to take as
many water bodies as possible clean them, revive them, because I've seen what happens
to a water body when it's protected and revived. When you give nature a chance, she bounces
back in style. Well, I certainly hope this is the kind of
greed that we can encourage and more and more young people in India today.
Arun and Arushi, who we met at the top of this episode, inspire me, they make me feel
empowered, less helpless, and show me that perhaps the actions of each of us can make
a difference. I've been lucky enough to grow with people
like our Arun and Arushi who care about the environment and have found that I can also
adapt myself in little ways. I don't use plastic bottles, use my own metal water bottle from
home, as well as a metal coffee mug as much as possible different food from home as well.
And I've also got my first compost bin! You can tell us what you think of this story
or any of our others – all you have to do is send an email to My Indian Life at BBC
dot com. Our producer Ishleen has been looking at some of your recent messages -
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Indian Life… That’s our next episode: The Biggest Brother
in Asia. My Indian Life is an original podcast from
the BBC World Service. I’m Kalki Koechlin. Our producers are Ishleen Kaur and Prabhjit
Bains. And thank you very much to our editor, Richard Fenton-Smith.