Designated bag

On our recent India trip, there were 14 people in a Tempo traveller! Needless to say, there was a lot of eating, sneezing, wiping hands, cleaning up spilled water, juice etc. going on.

Jr. drank a juice in a carton shortly after the Van trip started and asked grandma 

"Paati, where is the designated garbage bag?"

My mom understood what she wanted, because when we go on road trips in the US, we used to take a plastic bag and hang it on one of the hooks in the van. It would be our "designated garbage bag" till it got full and we would dump it at the rest area or at the fast food joint garbage containers where we stopped for a break. 

Sometimes, on the long weekend trips, one can see a pile of such "designated garbage bags" outside of the large garbage bin in the fast food places at Coalinga, given that everyone is trying to get their cars and vans smelling okay again as they get back on the freeway. 

Getting back on topic... my mom replied "there is no bag here. Use this small plastic cover". So that cover held for all of 30 minutes before it was full. 

When it was clear that there was not going to be a rest stop soon, Jr. got a recommendation to simply throw the bag outside the window on the side of the road, on top of an existing pile of garbage we were passing. She was not a happy camper because she thought all that effort went to waste. 

Recently Indian social media is abuzz with the "clean India" campaign and every alternate FB post on my timeline is about some politician, movie star or cricket player, showing how they are contributing to the campaign. Some just talk, some actually clean. Then there are the posts that say "we are like that only!" and just like any other issue which has folks torn on all sides, there are posts about "how Indians will never change", "why this is yet another fad and this too shall pass", "why this time it is going to be different" etc. etc.

One thing that did catch my eye, was a bunch of articles on why this attempt won't work because the concept of garbage bins and their regular clean up was not possible, given the poor security for the bins themselves.  

"A garbage bin needs security?" is what I asked myself! Why would anyone steal a garbage container? I have seen folks steal shopping carts here in the US but never garbage containers.

Wanted to find out what was so appealing about the garbage containers in India that was worth stealing and the answer was "they are made of metal" and "they are very large" and as irony would have it, "they have great recycle value"! Maybe the solution is to make them with the right material that has less resale value?! was the next thought...

The latest news feed items suggest that the campaign is trickling down, as are the posts about the campaign. Somehow this is not going like the ALS challenge as one looks at it from the other side of the world through social media. 

On a side note, we now have no plastic bags in Cupertino. I am wandering around the local Target, Trader Jo's, Safeway grocery stores etc. with a big cloth bag that says "Hari Agencies", Mylapore! 

Talk is that SFO is going to ban bottled water soon, as the plastic bottles pose a cleaning problem. 

We live in interesting times. . . Cupertino is forcing folks towards reusable cloth bags and stores in India are using plastic bags for everything from Mutka Dahi to Malli poo! Just 20 years ago, the opposite was true. I was amazed at how many plastic bags we used to come home with after a trip to the grocery store in the US and how we used the same Venkateshwara Coffee bag for grocery shopping for years at home. Even remember talking to my mom about this ten years ago. 

The times, they are a changing?!