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| Edited By: Gayatri Menon |Source: DNA |Updated: Aug 16, 2018, 05:45 AM IST
Last month I was visiting remote places in Ladakh. Perhaps it was the remoteness of the villages but what struck me most apart from the gorgeous beauty of the mountains was the manner in which people have made a sustainable living amidst such harsh conditions. The houses were made of local stones and mud. Branches were cut from local trees to be used as insulating material to protect from harsh winters. Many parts of Ladakh do not get rainfall and the only source of water is the melting snow. Not many trees grow in this environment. We were told that the villagers took the initiative to grow the local species of tree in their courtyard so that they can cut its branches and use them as an insulating material. The sense of self-sufficiency was amazing.
One of the villages near Padum in Zanskar Valley had a beautiful network of water canals running through the lanes of the village carrying water from the nearby waterfall. We saw local women washing utensils and clothes in the running water right in front of their houses. Beautiful flowers grew on both sides of these water canals. They worshipped the water and made stone pagodas around - perhaps, the sense of reverence made them take care of nature.
The cook at a local homestay where we stayed had something interesting to say: Politicians should come here to have meetings and make decisions. I thought that since this area is neglected and not conventionally developed, he might be saying this so that this area too gets benefitted from the powers to be. But he continued saying that if the politicians stay and take decisions in the middle of these vast expanses and mountains, they will not be able to think selfishly and in a manipulative manner, their decisions will be selfless and sustainable. Maybe, its time to change our capital.
What happens when we do not understand the repercussions of bringing new ideas without considering the system surrounding it? A good example is the simple plastic food packaging material for items ranging from chips to biscuits and mixture. Packaged food has today reached rural India too. Many villages in Gujarat have a clutter of these brightly coloured plastic wrappers floating around in dirty canals and heaped in mounds around village chowks because these places do not have adequate waste disposal systems, unlike cities. It is a one-way system wherein the packaged plastic food comes to the village but the plastic wrap is not taken back for recycling/proper disposal. The cost of such decisions is enormous for the environment and people staying there in the long term.
In countries like Germany they may use packaged food products but they have a good system of segregating different types of waste and disposing of them accordingly and they have policies and social awareness to strengthen the system at the grassroots.
The problem is that we get fascinated with the idea but do not care for the system. We copy ideas without copying systems. We copy ideas without understanding our context. We copy ideas for the short-term functional goals, forgetting long-term goals of good living.
There are many lessons to learn from this:
To go beyond the obvious and to try and understand the backstory of ideas around us can be a fascinating revealing experience.
And this could just be the beginning of change.
The writer is a senior faculty at the National Institute of Design. She likes to visit mountains not to conquer them but to feel insignificant.
