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. In my home, empty boxes from Pizza Hut found their way into a secondary market for cardboard boxes, thereby generating an extra income stream for a needy family. A particularly strong box, which held a blender I bought in a department store, was used to patch a hole in a hut, while several sheets of bubble wrap served as a softener for a rock hard bed. One day, a bright orange plastic bag that had held detergent reappeared in my house with two holes cut at the top, and a string going through them: It had been turned into a clutch for a small girl.

It wasn’t just the boxes and bags that were recycled: One day, I handed Manju (my cook) a shirt that had, in my opinion, seen its day, since it had lost most of its color and was slightly ripped under one arm.

“You can throw this away,” I told her.

She hesitated, holding the item in her hand.

“It’s so nice,” she replied, her hand caressing the faded garment as though it were a piece of fine silk. Then, with a small voice, for fear she might offend me, she asked: “Do you mind if I take it for myself?”

Later that afternoon, when I had forgotten about the shirt, Manju came to my room and proudly showed me how she had used part of the garment to patch a large tear running down the side of one her own shirts, thereby enabling her to wear it again. The other half, she said, could be fashioned into handkerchiefs for her father and her brother.

As someone who sits at the top of the box-and-package-and-clothes chain, I was constantly reminded in India of how much I had taken these things for granted, and how I had thrown them away without a second thought. Conveniently packaged items are still a relatively new phenomenon in India, as are the supermarkets you can get them at. Indeed, our local supermarket in Mysore was a real treasure trove: In under 15 minutes, I found Coco Puffs, soy milk, Aquafina water and frozen chicken nuggets - well past their expiration date, but chicken nuggets nonetheless.

I even located paper towels and Ziploc bags, and for those, I was particularly thrilled. My children thought the supermarket was the coolest store in the world, and we’d often walk out with flimsy, plastic toys that I knew they’d discard the moment they got home.

But even more often, the most important thing on my list, Nestlé’s tetrapak long-standing milk, was nowhere in sight. Very annoyed one day, I pushed my rusty, rickety shopping cart toward a sales attendant.

"Do you have Nestlé’s tetrapak milk?" I asked.

He nodded - a side-to-side shake of the head that is typical of South India, and is neither a “yes” nor a “no.”

I tried again: "I want Nestlé’s tetrapak milk, please, the blue one."

He nodded again, without giving me any clear response. Then, he shouted something in Kannada, the local language of Mysore, to a man sitting at an old wooden desk, whose portly build and rather superior manner evidently indicated a position of power in the supermarket hierarchy.

The man picked up a phone, punched in a few numbers on the dial pad and growled something into the receiver. I stood expectantly in front of him, but I know the answer even before he gave it to me: "Sorry, Madam, out of stock.”

It was the standard supermarket response. At my supermarket, things – at least the things I bought – were almost always either out of stock or in stock for so long, their expiry date had long since come and gone. Shopping there was often a frustrating experience. There was no air conditioning, which meant that butter and cheese were often rancid. The fruits and vegetables – which were brought, I’m told, from neighboring farms every Wednesday - looked ready to weep by Thursday afternoon.

Then again, I knew somewhere that even if someone like me could easily disregard the withered fruits and vegetables, the rancid butter and the mildewed bread, they could still sustain many, many more. The supermarket, then, was also the leading cause of my discomfort in India, because it underscored more than anything else the stark differences that exist between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ in the country, differences that landed me constant kicks in the gut because I was among the few who could afford to shop at such places.

So there it was that for the one second of annoyance I felt because my Nestlé’s tetrapak milk was out of stock, then, I would feel 100 seconds of guilt, because just outside the supermarket, there were children who had no milk whatsoever. I merrily bought Nutella bottles priced at 300 rupees each, jars of Prego pasta sauce at 250 rupees each and four-pack packs of toilet paper for 150 rupees. Without a second thought, I bought six-packs of one-liter mineral water bottles, knowing full well that millions, if they even had access to any kind of water, didn’t have the luxury of choosing its source. No wonder my stomach churned each time I walked out of that supermarket because in the one shopping trip, I spent almost as much as I paid in a month to the grinning driver to whom I handed over my bags.

India’s economy is growing at breakneck speed, and middle-class consumers have a plethora of choices they never had before, not least supermarkets full of the tetrapaks and yoghurt pots my mother admired decades ago in the west. They are so commonplace now that Indian shoppers buy them without even batting an eyelid. They are also just as quick to throw them into garbage cans, and like the rest of us, not bother to look back into those garbage cans again.

But overall in India, those who sit at the top of the consumer chain are but a minority, a mere sprinkling among the millions who rely upon the wastage of a few to cobble their lives together. And if ever there comes a day, then, when we might not have such ready access to the things we are used to buying and throwing away, it will be those masses that inherit the earth, because they will know how to make something out of nothing.