Dedicated to Amma: My sustainability champion

Amma, that is what I call my grand mom, an Indian term for mother. While growing up, I spent most of my time with my grandparents. We were living in a joint family and my parents were mostly at work. I remember spending a lot of time watching Amma, busy with her chores and daily routines. At other times even if I was not observing her consciously; my brain was receptive of her actions. Spending so much time with her while growing up has made a lasting impression on my adult personality. My grandma’s behavior and habits have influenced mine. I can certainly identify some of my habits with that of hers, like having an urge to collect containers, reuse old toothbrushes for cleaning or never dumping leftovers .

Amma has habit of conserving things, of rescuing things and of saving things. She does not easily throw away any used object. She utilizes it until nothing can be done with it. In the kitchen, she is generally salvaging food or at the sewing machine, she is converting an old dress to a pillowcase. She is also frugal. She believes everything should be used in moderation and nothing should be wasted. This applies to everything; from soap to electricity and foremost to water. She is as prudent about saving water as she is about saving money. 

I think her habits are an outcome of experience. She was brought up in a world where resources were limited and people were generally aware of the effort involved in putting a meal on the table. Amma knows how hard it is to produce food, she has seen people working at fields. She knows how hard it is to get drinking water from a well. She understands the value of limited resources and how to conserve them. Her lifestyle is all about seeking the true value of things and not taking them for granted.

I have so many memories of Amma’s habits, most of them from my teenage years. She used to get annoyed when someone left the tap on to collect water and forgot about it. She still gets annoyed if someone wastes water but now she is much older and we have become fond of her yelling.

We have electric water purifiers (colloquially known as Aqua guard) back home in India. These appliances waste a lot of water by dispensing a considerable amount of un-purified water, this water is a by-product of the purifying process and generally ends up in the drain. In our house, Amma initiated a routine of collecting this waste water and using it for mopping, cleaning etc.

Apart from being judicious about water, Amma also excels in the art of waste segregation. We started separating compost in our house even before it became a household requirement across the globe. At our home in India, all the food waste is collected in a separate bin. This bin has a name as well, it is called the “cow’s bucket”(yes you read it right). This uncanny name is attributed to this bucket’s useful purpose. At the end of each day this bucket is sent to the nearby dairy for cows. This simple routine kills two birds with one stone, cows get to relish all those fruit/vegetable peels and the food waste is not wasted anymore.

While growing up I looked up to Amma. All her ideas made me gasp at her ingenuity. I have seen her fixing old things in ways that I can hardly imagine. She would mend broken stuff and use them until they couldn’t be fixed anymore. There was a snapped sieve so Amma knitted it to hold it together and I think it lasted two more years. She turned old clothes into shopping bags (which if torn later were again fixed with patch-work). She also used to get her old sarees (an Indian dress) transformed into beautiful blankets. There were many more ways in which Amma would mend and up-cycle old things. A funny corollary is that sometimes I used to wonder if we had money issues and that is why we had to make do with old things. In hindsight I understand that all those fixes were just a part of Amma’s way of living life with less, which my lack of wisdom as a teenager could not grasp.

I can go on and on about Amma’s quirky habits but then it would be unfair to Bapu, my grandpa who also contributed his fair share towards Amma’s sustainable lifestyle. He was the electricity-saving hero in our home. A switched on light in a room without anyone in it was like summoning the devil, it had to be turned off. I have been scolded a couple of times for this bad habit when I was young but I cherish all those memories and am proud to have built the habit of turning off lights now.

Our grandparents’ generation values things more than ours does. They lived most of their lives closely with nature and they understand the fragility of it, presumably, better than we do. If we could use their perspective in our lifestyles, I am sure we would be conserving a lot of spuriously wasted resources. All we need to do is respect and value what is given to us like our grandparents do. Using fewer resources and using them judiciously will take us a long way.

I am so grateful to have spent so much time with my grandparents and am glad I got to learn so much from them. My grandma is definitely the source of my inspiration for my lifestyle, I am always going to look up to her.