India: Nothing Wasted, Everything Gained

The milk came in perfect tetrapacked slabs. The butter was a flawless paper brick. My mother loved the neat smallness of the hotel-sized packs of jam, but more than anything else, she loved the plastic yoghurt containers. She found them so wonderful that for two years, she saved each and every one she bought, scrubbing it clean then placing it in a cupboard above the kitchen sink. She used the pots to store little things: In one she put her needles and thread; in another her shopping receipts. A third held spare change. But many she saved simply because she thought they were too preciously made to throw away.

Eventually, my mother stopped stashing the yoghurt pots. She was neither a negligent person nor a wasteful one. But over the years, she, like the best of us, just took those kinds of things for granted and threw them away.

More than 40 years later in Mysore, India – a small city I lived in with my family - I felt something of what my mother felt when she first landed in Geneva. In Mysore, discarded containers and packages - so insignificant to people like me - were objects of great admiration, precious gems for those too poor to even dream about purchasing them themselves. But more than that, those items had a second, if not third and maybe even a fourth use, to the millions of Indians who live in poverty, and each one went toward helping a life gain a little more substance.

In India, each small box and bag took on a new Avatar as it worked its way down the social and economic hierarchy.