Baby Steps Towards Sustainable Living

2019 marked the ban of single-use plastics followed by waste segregation at source as a Government initiative in many states. In our gated community in Chennai, we decided to create a task force for the same. The task force was responsible for strategizing the various methods of execution of this Government directive at the community level and individual residents’ level. While waste segregation is one aspect of waste management, the fundamental aspect of it is understanding of the 3 R’s – Reduce, Reuse & Recycle

With sustainability practices gaining the needed attention in recent times to combat the climate change threat, awareness around waste management has increased as well. There are many surveys and articles on the Internet that highlight the volumes of waste that are generated worldwide and the damage that it contributes to the planet Earth. While Government can strategize and launch various initiatives to deal with this menace, it is paramount that we as individuals do our part in implementing them, starting from our own homes. 

How do you Reduce?

Let me share with you what I did (with my spouse’s support) as a lifestyle choice in my home. Any time there is a buying decision being considered, including the weekly grocery list and vegetables for home, the one pivoting point for the buying decision is always #NeedvsWant. This is what drives every buying decision in our home, even the children are now able to use this for their wish list! I wouldn’t categorise us at minimalistic standards, but our moderate buying has been quite effective for at least a few years now, even before the Covid19-induced lockdown initiated this process for many. For us, the lockdown only meant adjusting to the store timings rather than feeling constricted. Here are a few tips on how we achieved this:

• We always have a shopping list and rarely do we deviate from the list. 
• Shopping is never a stress buster. Even if this is true for some, I would urge that, purchase decisions while shopping, should not be under duress (FOMO – Fear of missing out), but a conscious and evaluated decision based on need vs want. Window shopping or moving items an online Wishlist (instead of the shopping cart) can be alternatives, if you are a compulsive shopper, though I would recommend that you work on addressing the root cause of what is stressing you in the first place to remove stress from life rather than going on a shopping spree
• Status symbols were never a motivator for our buying decisions. 
• Indulgent shopping is also something we never subscribed to.

What do we Reuse?

The benefit of reusing can be seen in reduction as well and contributes automatically to cost savings as well. 

• We have had multiple relocations and where we could, we reused our old functional furniture and fixtures with no replacements. 
• We also use the plastic bottles from the kitchen as a makeshift pot for seeds/plants, DIY pencil/pen stands. 
• Old worn clothes get upcycled as wash clothes for cleaning the kitchen counter, tables, fans, appliances, and mirrors. This has helped in reducing the purchase of paper kitchen towels and tissues.
• I make stripes from them that are used as make-shift ropes when needed. It has been a while since I stopped buying ropes and zip-tie to hold things in place. 

How can we Recycle?

As a practice, we have different bins inside our home, and everyone knows what kind of waste goes into which bins. There is one bin just for plastics and one for papers. These are then given to the wastepaper person in exchange for money. Money so earned goes into the kitty of want. When we can save enough to satisfy a specific reasonable want that all of us agree upon, this money is used.  

We also have a wet waste bin that only collects kitchen waste that can be converted into organic compost. 

What do I achieve by doing all this?

The personal satisfaction that I am doing my share to reduce the waste generation and thereby impacting the waste management process positively and contributing to keeping the environment a little less polluted. I also bring ‘cost saving’ due to the reduction and recycling that I have implemented as a practice in my home. With simple reusing methods, I further reduce the generation of waste from my home, thereby doing my bit towards the green revolution. 

Added to all this, we also have a home garden and the water that is removed from our fish tank is used to water the plants thereby recycling water as well. The plants also get natural manure from this water as it is rich with fish excreta. Growing kitchen vegetables as part of our home garden, we also benefit from ‘garden to fork’ produce and enjoy a fresh, tasty meal without the fear of pesticides and chemicals, occasionally.  

I am hoping that as you finish reading this, you have been able to take some practical pointers on what you can implement in your life to develop sustainable practices that will not only benefit the environment but will immensely be satisfying for you personally as well for being a positive contributor to personal and financial well-being as well as the environment.

This post is part of Blogchatter's #CauseAChatter - Environmental Talks

The Conundrum of the Gendered Glasses

Riya wants to get back to work just a month after her daughter was born. She has been well advised by her gynecologist and pediatrician about what she needs to do for her baby and care for herself when she takes on the additional load of being a working parent in the first year of child care. Her family though supportive of her decision is concerned for her health. She can hear some comments that judge her for making the choice to get back to work that early. She steps into her workplace, she can hear whispers of conversation that she knows is about her being back at work so soon.

"How could she leave a month old baby in someone's care and be here at work so soon?"

"She values career over her child. Poor child. It will grow up aching for its mother!"

Such comments were a couple among many more that judge her of being a bad parent despite the fact that her child is in good and safe hands. Riya's spouse is a consultant and has the flexibility to work at his convenience without any impact on his career or the income. Still, these comments just get passed with no care on how it could affect Riya.

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Mahesh visited his wife and son in the hospital where she delivered, to say bye to her as he was leaving for the USA that evening, on a long term assignment. Vani tried her level best to see if she could defer his travel for a few more months till she and her son could travel with him. Mahesh refused and everyone else, including her own parents, convinced her that her ask for Mahesh to cancel or defer to stay back with her till she was travel-ready wasn't fair. She wondered how he could leave so soon after becoming a father, unfortunately, she was the only one who thought that way!

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Siva has an offer letter from a Fortune500 as a trainee business analyst and can start work once he completes his graduation. He is passionate about Dance & Theater. He is an amazing singer and a scriptwriter. He was a very active member of the Theaters club at his university. He also had applied to a small theater group that was active in his home town, when on campus and has an invitation letter for an appointment to discuss his future with the group! He is afraid that his father would not let him choose the latter despite it being his passion. In addition to passion, he also excels in the skills to succeed in this line of career. His father's dream was for him to join a Fortune company. When he asks for help from his uncle and mother to convince his father to agree to the theater option, both of them deny and in turn tell him that he should take up the corporate offer letter. A career in the fine arts wasn't easy and that he would face a lot of hardships. A very upset Siva sat down to write an apology mail for not being able to make it to the meeting with the theater group as it was the same day of his joining at the corporate firm!

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Nila wanted to serve the nation by being part of the National Defence. The instant she told this decision to her family, she was met with vehement denial citing various reasons some of which even hurt her self-image and questioned her capabilities. Her family in unison said that a career in defence was not for girls and that she should choose options like homemaking, nutrition & dietetics, beautician and such, that were well suited for girls to pursue as a profession. No amount of discussion could change her family's opinion and she was forced to take up Psychology as her choice of graduation.

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Each of these snippets above is an example of how gender norms and stereotyping adds to the stress of being judged or forced to choosing something that isn't their own! 

The first two snippets show the difference in the way people treat the life choices made by individuals based on their gender and the associated gender norms. A father leaving a newborn for work-related reasons is not even discussed but a mother choosing to go back to work very soon after childbirth is judged for making that choice. In fact, Vani is judged for asking her husband to postpone the work travel so that he can be with her and his son.  

The right to make a choice is basic irrespective of gender. Whether a man decides to take up the role of a househusband or pursue a career in gynecology or beauty, it is his personal choice to make based on his interest and ability. Similarly, if a woman wishes to become a biker, war journalist, or heavyweight champion, it is her choice to make. Gender and gender norms should not interfere with this process. The freedom to decide what they wish to do with their lives must be theirs to make despite their gender.

The above was a creation for the tagged challenge #EachForEqual #6Blogsin6Days blogs on Momspresso in March 2020, just before lockdown. There were 5 more written in the same theme which you can read (for now) here:

Breaking Stereotypes as Parents (Proud Mommy Moment)

Breaking Stereotypes - Role of Media

Respect - A Two Way Street   

Homemaker or Professional Parents    

Hierarchical or Equal - How do you see the World around?

My First FB Live on 'Coping with Social Change', Learnings & Recommendations

My relocation to India has not just been a personal learning curve but also been good for my professional exposure and experience. Yesterday, 17 May, 2020, I attempted to host a live session on Facebook (FB) for SuperParents, an initiative of Divyam Trust.

I prepared on a topic "Coping with Social Change", which was close to my heart and relevant to the new age parents. 

I learnt how to conduct FB live session, toggling between my laptop and mobile, to screen share my presentation online. The session was planned for 45 minutes including Q & A, and I managed to time check quite well. Thankfully I had prepared the visual cues and rehearsed the entire narration by self-recording. Being a weekend my spouse also obliged to sit in and observe my rehearsal, providing valuable improvement feedback to make my presentation style and flow of content more engaging with the target audience. Both of these helped me get through my first session with confidence and deliver my best for this maiden attempt. 

The entire live session is available on the SuperParents FB handle as three separate videos (Introduction, the main presentation and the Q & A). 

Having a budding digital artist in-house does have its own advantages. I enlisted my daughter's help to stitch the three videos into one full-length video, using KineMaster (adding watermark and snipping relevant portions and exporting options etc.).

So here is the stitched video that runs for about 45 minutes from start to end! 

With this experience, my recommendation to Solopreneurs/Mompreneurs/Homepreneurs & those who are part of the gig economy are:

1. Understand and leverage the Internet to your personal advantage starting with:
• Having profiles set up on at least the basic platforms - FB, Instagram, LinkedIn and Google. Depending on your target audience and the reach you would like to have, you can explore other options too including Twitter, TikTok, Youtube, etc.
• Familiarise yourself with the messengers of the above social media accounts and actively respond to messages that you receive. You never know when one of these might become your prospective client or a word-of-mouth marketer for the services you offer.
2. Using Mobile and Laptop to join and host online sessions
• Have the necessary plug-ins and tools downloaded and installed. Try them with your family and friends
• Any updates of the existing software that need to be done also have to be taken care of.
3. Know and familiarise with basic tools that are needed in today's world (Zoom, WebEx, FBLive, Hangouts/Meet, Microsoft Teams (Advanced users), Zoho social/meets.
4. Give adequate care to personal appearance as well, especially if you are conducting live video sessions. This is important because your appearance can impact the impression people have on you and if you are hosting a session on behalf of an organisation, then they also base their opinion about the host organisation as well on the basis of your appearance.
5. Invest in a good quality headset (with mute / noise cancelleation options, to cut-off unwanted noise in your background) and camera (with HD option). Helps in making professional streaming videos with good picture and voice quality.
6. Preparation is the key. Trying to make impromptu speeches live, may not be everybody's cup of tea.
7. Rehearse, Rehearse, and Rehearse - The importance of this cannot be emphasised enough. It helps you deal with time-checks, fog-on, browser & software issues and other non-verbal cues/fillers that might end up diverting focus from the point-in-discussion. E.g. In my case, because I rehearsed, I realised that the regular version of Google Chrome did not allow me to start a FB Live video from my laptop. I needed to download the beta version. I still need to understand why it was so, but doing it ahead of time helped me in being prepared with the necessary software for conducting the live on the scheduled date at the right time.

Let it Go! Let it Go! - The Self Guilt - Let it Go!

Thanks to the ever-charming host ‘King’ Khan, Latha started watching a popular TV show - “TED Talks India”. On a relaxed Sunday, she saw a recorded episode, focusing on women empowerment. Two speakers talked about girl child education (Safeena Hussain – Educate Girls) and standing up for sexually abused children and women (Trisha Shetty – SheSays). Both these speakers and their causes hit too close to home – one because she believed that educating the girls is really a single stop solution to most problems that we see in our society and the other jolted her from her pacified state of mind that all is fine, to acknowledge that some wounds are so deep that the scars remain for life!

Halfway through the narrative of Trisha, Latha was stunned to feel raging emotions in her mind and tears started rolling down her cheeks uncontrollably. Just then her husband entered the living room, got a glimpse of the TV screen and immediately rushed to give her a comforting hug. This instant feeling of love and security gave her the shoulder she wanted and she eventually calmed down – as Trisha completed her speech and the sound of claps reverberated from the TV screen. 

Like Trisha and millions of women across the world, Latha had also experienced such abuses. In her early teens, Latha was visiting her relatives’ home during her summer vacation for a short homestay. Taking advantage of the situation that she was staying alone with his family that night, without her parents, one of her cousins had touched her inappropriately when she was sound asleep.  She had just hit puberty and was already dealing with physical and emotional changes and was baffled by experiencing such a lewd behaviour at such an unexpected moment. Though she had the presence of mind to quickly react & run to safety before it could have gotten any worse, she felt immense shame to not be able to share it with any of the adults around. In the morning, to her astonishment, her abuser coxed her to remain silent and made her feel guilty by implying that she probably enjoyed the encounter as well! His remarks were convincing enough for her to carry the guilt, though she strongly refuted his lewd statements. She missed her mother and could not wait to get back to her home.

Once in the safety of her home, she still could not bring herself to speak to her Mom. Every emotion that Trisha was talking about, including looking at herself in the mirror and asking “Why did it happen to her?” “Why did she let it happen?” “How did she let it happen?” kind of questions in a never-ending loop drove her crazy and eventually she decided that she had to let it all out. Still, she wasn’t comfortable talking about it to anyone, not even her Mother who unlike the other mothers of that generation, was very friendly and open to talk anything. Almost a month had passed and she feared that her Mother might also judge her. So, she decided to pen it down in a diary and kept it well hidden in her shelf. She kept moving the dairy every day, but as fate would have it, her Mother did find it and also read it and confronted her.

Though Latha felt cornered, her Mother comforted her and said she will not be judged and that she need not blame herself (as Latha had written in the diary), as it was not her fault. Hearing this, Latha started bawling, lying down in her Mom’s lap. Her mother told her not to hold herself responsible, and that most women go through this, including herself! This shocked Latha to another silence but made her realise how the double standard of this society places an enormous burden on the woman for character building and associates the same with her sexual chastity. The absurdity of this was something she wanted to change and this prompted her to choose her career path in Behavioural Sciences. Mother asked Latha to “let go” of her guilt and promised to stay by her for any emotional support that she needed. A few months of erratic emotions and a few Mom-Daughter talks (Mom playing the role of a counsellor) later, Latha was able to come out of victim mentality and guilt, but the incident itself left a deep scar in the mind of a teen that she hasn’t been able to forget.

She never went back to that relatives’ home after this, though she did not shy away from speaking with that family if she happened to meet them on other occassions. Her abuser never bothered her again - guess he saw the change in the demeanour of Latha and felt that he might end up in trouble if he pursued her further. There were other such encounters where aged men tried to take advantage of a teenager alone at home or those leechers who felt no shame to grope her on a crowded bus, that she took for her school.

Such incidents only strengthened the resolve that Latha had made to pursue a career in Psychology, primarily to be the kind of support that her Mother was for her, to many more than just her future children. Her Mother always quoted that “You can only feel guilt when you were responsible for an action”. In all these cases, Latha was only a passive innocent recipient of abusive behaviour, and so she was not responsible for what she had to face. This lesson stuck with her for life.

She knew that not all survivors were lucky like her to have a Mother who listened and supported them in all their decisions and situations. She wanted to set up a support system for sexual abuse victims to cope with the after-effects of such trauma and also to spread the message that a survivor of sexual abuse has no need to wallow in self-guilt. She aspires to create a society where not only girls but boys are also taught about boundaries, educated about appropriate and inappropriate behaviour, taught to acknowledge and deal with emotions and vulnerability and create a gender-neutral mindful parenting strategy, that would enable parents to bring up well-rounded (grounded), responsible adults.

This focus drove Latha to pursue Arts and Science after school, top her Masters in Behavioural Science and become a Psychotherapist who excels in counselling sexual abuse survivors, their families, conduct parental workshops to increase awareness on related topics for both genders, including giving tips on gender-neutral parenting strategies that ensure healthy mental growth and outlook for the children. Hearing Trisha speak of similar vision made her feel that she is not alone and there is hope for a better tomorrow for our future generations.

As Latha woke up the next day, reminding herself to get in touch with SheSays, she walked to her home office to get ready for her first appointment of the day.

Yes – she now helps others also to “let go” of the unwarranted guilt!