The Humble Pishvi

The brain has been buzzing around a lot today, for what seems a long time it has been rather quiet but now thoughts are pouring out faster than I can control and there is no way to catalogue them all.
The other day my daughters school had its annual day programme, the theme was 'Save the Earth'. The school distributed cloth bags to everybody. Now a few months earlier similar cloth bags had been given to my husband by an MNC, his company is an agent of, to distribute to clients. The cloth bag is a simple affair and is usually carried by poor villagers here in Maharashtra. In Marathi it is called 'Pishvi' and in my mind I always call it that. A pishvi is something a poor villager carries his belongings in, so these bags are always associated in my mind with that. Though everyone who seems to care a whit for the future of the earth is up there on their soap boxes, urging us to emulate the wisdom of the poor Maharashtrian Villager and following his example, make the simple Pishvi not just an indispensable object but also a trendy one. in fact as green fashions begin taking over the Earth you could be considered quite outre, if you did not carry one. So throw away that Gucci bag and pick up the unpretentious pishvi, or fashion might never forgive you.
What is ironic is that a couple of decades back, before that ubiquitous destroyer of the great outdoors; the plastic bag took over, most of us carried some kind of bag or basket to take our groceries home. In other countries they perhaps used other things like brown paper bag, carton, etc, etc. It is only now after half the earth is groaning under the weight of this ghastly, gruesome, non-biodegradable mess that we have come to our senses and are urging who ever may listen to pick up a bag again and go shopping. So when we began using plastic and thought we were so smart, actually we were not really progressing, we were not even regressing, for going backward even then would have meant going to a better cleaner world. We were simply beginning the long process of deterioration and degeneration. It is sadly not only in this one way that we have begun that, but in innumerable ways and as it is impossible to save the planet from the damage already done to it from the plastic bag till date, even if all seven billion of us were to pick us pishvis today, so it is impossible to reverse much of the damage already done to the Earth even if we reverse all the damaging trends we are following today. I do not mean this to be a pessimistic statement in anyway. I do not mean that if we cannot right the wrongs we should do nothing about it. No, I certainly do not mean that. We cannot afford to delay the moment when we begin to think and go green. For each delayed moment adds to the litter and the pollution on earth. We may not be able to right what has been done but we can prevent further wrong. There is also some caution the world can and should learn from this, and that is not to be so happy to accept a new product; for what seems to be the greatest boon of today may really be the bane of the future generations.