Hypocritical environmentalists!! Who me??? No way!!

Hypocritical environmentalists!!  Who me??? No way!!

I went out to buy some stuff from the nearby market with my friend, after it was all over, he requested for a poly-bag to the shopkeeper, “Bhaiya!! Ek polythene dena  …”, which the shopkeeper didn’t entertain (of course, the reason for that for him was to not incur that cost of extra poly-bag). I obediently kept all the things in the other bag we had and moved on. On my way back I just thought, even after knowing what all effects a poly-bag may have on the environment, we still don’t think twice before asking for one. Don’t we know that polythene is non-biodegradable and hence when we throw it out into the open (which we do quite regularly) will remains there for a long time.  Long time implies a really long time (Seriously, this thing just doesn’t refuse to let itself die as if poking fun at mortals like us.)

Polythene pollution( if at all I can term it like that) affects not just human life and society by clogging down drains and being an irritant littering agent but also for animals ( terrestrial as well as aquatic) who swallow it and let me tell you it does not get digested. There was this story I heard that some kilos of poly-bags were recovered from a cow’s body!!!

Even with so much of ill-effects, it is still used widely because of no close substitutes. One can of course afford to carry their own bags instead of poly-bags (but who bothers??).

Government had even banned those small guthka/pan masala sachets as these are the naughty little ones who are omnipresent to litter around the town. Similar things had been done with poly-bags (but then again, who bothers??).  Who cares about government banning anything?? Even music downloads from illegal websites is banned. The thing is, we are happy with disobeying the government orders but cry foul when the government does it.  We protests in the form of calling a “bharat bandh”, where we make it happen by forcefully closing down shops and stopping public transport and even resorting to violence in the name of bandhs. As our finance minister P.Chidambaram remarked during a recent bandh (there are so many, I can’t even tell which one exactly), “they have called a bandh to protest against the government concerning economy and it is ironic that the form of protest has caused greater economic losses”. So, apt.

What I intended to say was, we are a hypocritical society of uncivilized people who only try to portray themselves as something which they are not.

Hypocritical environmentalists.  Who me?? No way!!!!

We shout out to others, to help save the environment yet leave out water taps or lights switched on, throw away used stuff into places, thinking the whole world is our dust-bin.  I can surely brag about the fact that one night (during some sleepless night before the exam), I went to each of the rooms in our hostel floor and switched off some 10-12 lights!!!! This is just the case of one floor of 10 rooms, now go figure what all things happen in each house in each city. We say we care, but do we???  We don’t think twice before asking for another poly-bag from the shopkeeper. We “forget” switching off lights and fans as we are in a hurry; we just can’t help ourselves from ablution the dirt of this whole dirty world by using as much water as we can and at the end of it all, we still say, we care!! But seriously, lemme ask again, Do we????

I don’t want an answer. No one wants one. But just for a thought, that the next time we say “we care”, we mean it.