Four Shopping Habits to Avoid for Sustainable Living

My first blog on the series of #CauseAChatter by Blogchatter under the #EnvironmentalTalks was Baby steps towards Sustainable Living. While it is easy to read and write about such topics, to really incorporate it as a lifestyle, takes a huge level of commitment from self and the ability to lead by example. This will help to positively impact our circle of influence to follow our lead, especially when we have members from two or three generations (older or younger). 

While it took us a few years to instill these concepts in all our family members, we did start our journey with the #NeedvsWant discussions at home. Any buying decision being considered, big or small, including the weekly grocery list and vegetables, always went through this filter. This has become so much a part of our lives that even our children use this for validating their wish list! When you do not buy in excess or something that may not be used at all, then the waste generated automatically reduces at source, thereby doing our part in contributing towards maintaining a healthy environment for our future generations. 

Here are four habits on how to achieve sustainable living and helping to potentially reduce waste generation at source:

Unplanned Shopping

Planning, and sticking to the plan as much as possible under any circumstances helps to keep our expense pattern and our purchase pattern under our control, which in turn results in lesser waste generation as we are anyway buying only what we need and will use.

• Always have a shopping list and try not to deviate from this list. 
• Make the shopping list after taking stock of what you have at home. Only include the necessities on the list. 
• When you have an urge to shop any additional items, evaluate the #NeedvsWant e.g. you can add an additional snack that your children may enjoy, but not overstock them.

Stress Shopping

I have had some of my friends call me for a day out shopping as a stress relief activity. This, I think, is an extremely costly and ineffective way to relieve stress. There are more efficient and effective methods of stress relief that include, exercise, practicing mindfulness (processing emotions, meditation), Yoga, gardening, and many more. 

Shopping is never a stress-buster activity. When it is for just the necessities, it contributes towards reduced waste generation at source and is light on our finances as well. 

A good alternative to stress shopping could be window shopping (no actual purchases) or moving items to an online Wishlist (instead of the shopping cart) to be reconsidered later. These are only temporary fixes. The best would be to work on addressing the root cause of the stress and completely remove it.

Extravagant Shopping

Buying items to keep the projected image of a social stature is another fallacy that would weigh heavily on our finances as well as the waste of resources and probably contribute to higher waste creation. The status definers, like trends, keep changing quite frequently, and keeping up with it might eventually even add to the stress in your life. 

Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) should never be a driver for shopping. If you shop to stay in trend, understand that in the current times, trends change every day, sometimes twice in a single day. When we base our purchase decisions to stay in line with trends, we will always be part of a game of catch-up, wasting our time, money, and resources and still not be in trend more often. All the ‘out of trend’ items pile onto the waste / useless stuff. 

Indulgent Shopping 

I fail to see the difference between this and stress shopping, but I have had advice coming my way that I should sometimes indulge myself in shopping to treat myself. I have never seen a point to this, especially when this indulgent behaviour is only a temporary fix to any problem or a mere few minutes/hours of happiness. In the long run, you will probably regret the decision of purchase, especially when it gets added to the growing pile of unused items. 

My way of indulging is different, I guess. For me, anything to do with mindfulness and sustainability is to indulge. I enjoy finding new ways to positively contribute to my family’s cost-saving and waste reduction effort, and try and do my bit towards positively impacting the society at large as well.

We aren’t Minimalistic

I wouldn’t categorise ourselves at minimalistic standards. Our conscious choices on purchase decisions indulging in Need vs Want debates have made our buying pattern moderate. This helped especially during the pandemic lockdown times as we were always aware of what was needed for our family, what was available in our stock, and when we needed to replenish them by how much. 

This enables us, as a family, to stay away from panic buying and judiciously work with the available stock till we could add more to it when we were allowed to. Lockdown restrictions only meant adjusting to the store timings rather than feeling constricted or afraid that we would not have enough.

I hope that these not-so-healthy shopping practices that we learned to tackle over the years would serve as a starting point of your self-explorative journey towards sustainable shopping habits that can also contribute to a better and healthy environment (by saving on resources and reducing waste generation at source) & better use of our personal finances. 

This post is part of Blogchatter's #CauseAChatter - #EnvironmentalTalks

The Radiance of a Thousand Suns - Manreet Sodhi Someshwar

A one-liner before I delve deep into this book – I agree with what Gulzar sir has given as a caption for the book ‘Has the radiance of Blood and the Sun’. 

I won this book for posting a comment on an Author live session on Blogchatter – #BlogchatterWritFest – in March 2021. 

While I have read many storylines with a woman as the protagonist (starting with Nancy Drew & Alice in Wonderland, during my school days), this book was completely different to read and connect emotionally as well. In fact, the narrative of the entire masterpiece was so well interwoven from the point of view of different women who had different lived experiences and strong in their own sense of being, to bring about change in the societal narratives, in their own ways. 

I was floored by the author’s take on Violence and Silence in that order while bringing out women-centric narratives on the 1947 partition of India and the 1984 Anti-Sikh riots. Violence always leaves a deep gash not just physically, but also emotionally, that takes probably generations to even become a scar. Healing would take forever, as the grief that violence leaves behind is just too heavy to process and handle any faster. 

In a conversation between a grandmother and a granddaughter (who lost her mother at birth – a story of gross negligence due to misplaced priorities – read the book to know more on this), the grandmother, Biji, talks about a metaphor of all women invisibly pregnant, carrying inside them millions of stories to tell, yet silent and hence yet to deliver. This metaphor was just mind-blowing and so well relatable, especially as chapters unfolded and story after story showed why women chose to remain invisibly pregnant. Even today many of us choose this path for the exact same reasons. Wish it were not so. Reading this book strengthened my resolve to use my voice and writing to break that vicious cycle of pregnant silence and bring out narratives from the point of view of a woman if not for the world, at least to my circle of influence and create a shift in the way things have been traditionally valued and acted upon, some of which are so outdated and devoid of logic. 

The entire book speaks volumes on various coping mechanisms that women have traditionally practiced dealing with violence, trauma, idiocy, and more, of this patriarchally structured society, including memory holes that are so relevant even during the #metoo movement where the trauma of rape, sexual abuse (especially Child Sexual Abuse – CSA) and harassment follows this pattern of a non-event because the society wants to erase the unpleasantness of such occurrences. By making them non-events and not recording them in the narrative of history/news, we, as a society, tend to forget the event completely, a few days (probably months) after its occurrence. This gives rise to invisible people – the unperson – those who were silent sufferers of the traumatic actions meted out by perpetrators (whether it is war or abuse) - one such story is that of Jyot a survivor of both these traumatic incidents. 

I could never relate to the heroic narratives of 1947 and 1984 as part of recorded history, without feeling the pain, suffering, and the feeling of emptiness when the question invariably popped ‘What was the point of all these?’. This book brings to light why I kept feeling that emptiness and why that question kept popping. Despite not being close to the places where these two historic traumatic events happened, it still has a wrenching effect in my gut. I can only imagine how much it must have hurt those who were strongly associated with these events in any form. 

The first few chapters that dealt with the 1947 partition narratives/perspectives, from the point of view of women and girl children were overwhelmingly traumatic to read without breaks. Yet they were descriptive enough for anyone who reads it to see what a woman/girl saw from her point of view. 

This book needs to be read by everyone to understand a woman’s point of view of how it is to be considered as an invisible being or as an object of possession every time a man wanted to prove his superiority! It also would serve well to be reminded that in doing so there is no manliness that is depicted, but only the childish aggression of patriarchy is exhibited, showing how immature the entire concept itself is. Women always bounce back to move on with life irrespective of the bad cards they might be dealt, not by life itself, but by the idiocrasy exhibited in name of patriarchy, religion, caste, gender, race, and more! This proves their high emotional intelligence – either developed by force of situational demands or by design and their ability to heal themselves and the world around them every single time, till it becomes too much for them to bear (the inter-generational trauma - which also is beautifully depicted through the book).

The radiance of the narrative by author Manreet Sodhi Someshwar is blindingly bright to go through all filtered glasses worn. 

This post is part of Blogchatter's #CauseAChatter - #GenderTalks

My happenstance with a Postgraduate Autowala

In my home, I and my 10-year-old son needed to calm our nerves for the benefit of the entire family. Both of us were stressed and showing signs of anxiety and attention-seeking behaviour for various reasons though. He craved social interaction in the structured school environment that helped in channelising his high energy into constructive tasks as part of the school day. With online classes, the individual connection with the teacher was lost and hence his attention too (from both directions). 

I decided to bring in a few changes in lifestyle by going back to the roots – bringing yoga as our daily routine was something, I was willing to try for both of us. I was glad that my son gladly agreed as he wanted to eventually get to, doing a headstand.

It was a Sunday afternoon in the last week of March 2021, almost a year after the first lockdown was announced in India for tackling the spread of COVID 19 pandemic. I had booked my in-person appointment with my college junior, who was a KYM certified Yoga professional who is practicing for at least a decade now, explaining both our requirements. She wanted the first session to be in person where she could evaluate us to understand our body types before coming up with a yoga routine. I booked an OLA auto and was waiting for it to arrive. 

My phone rang. It was the OLA auto driver, Annamalai. I answered the call. He asked me, ‘Is the pickup location the right one?’ in grammatically perfect English. I almost started answering back in Tamil, but then held back the urge and responded in English, to the surprise of my husband. He then asked me where I was headed, and I gave him that location as well. In five minutes, he came to pick us up. 

As soon as we started moving, my curiosity overtook my usual silence during rides, and I started my conversation with him asking my first question! Of course, this conversation was in Tamil after asking him if he knew the language but let me elaborate in English to share the flow of the conversation for the benefit of those who do not speak the language.

‘Is this role as an OLA auto driver, part-time?’

‘Yes Ma’am. How did you guess right?’ he responded.

‘You do not usually find auto drivers who speak English with the perfect grammar of the language. So, I assumed you were one among the many who enjoyed being Ola drivers part-time maybe because they loved to drive. What is your primary profession?’

‘I am a driver for the DCP of Chennai Police. I started that job just when the pandemic started in India. I studied Microbiology. I was a research professional working on the COVID 19 virus analysis and discovery to hasten the process to tackle its spread.’

I was floored by this information bomb he dropped. I just wanted to confirm what I already knew. So, I asked him, ‘PG or UG in Microbiology?’ and I got PG as a response. He continued, ‘I resigned from my job because everyone at home was very tensed that I was working under high-risk conditions and were worried for my safety and life. I decided that my family’s peace was important and only if I am alive can I give that to them. That instantaneous shift was enough for me to take that call, but life had to go on, and being the sole breadwinner of the family, I had to bring money to run my household. I decided to do any job that I could and that is how I joined as the personal driver for DC of Police for weekdays. With his financial support and my own savings, I bought this auto for my weekend and weekday evening income that will supplement my income from the day job.’

I was could not stop myself asking such an enterprising person sporting a positive outlook, ‘Couldn’t you take up teaching profession in Microbiology itself in colleges or move into a schoolteacher role? With the school moving to the online model, there is a need for teachers who can work with ease in adopting technology in their teaching style and engage the students through the tech platform and still make the class interesting and interactive.’

Without skipping a beat, in a matter-of-fact manner, he answered, ‘Yes. That is the next plan once things settle down. Currently, with so much uncertainty, it is difficult to land such a job immediately. Also, schools and colleges are running short of funds due to the sudden closure and economic slump. When all this starts changing, I will surely go down that road. Till then, I need a source of income and I took up a job that I knew how to do. It isn’t right to keep waiting for the right opportunity and not do anything to support my family which also needs to be cared for. Being an OLA driver pays me well too to support as my main income. Once I find myself a job of my wish, I plan to give this auto to my friend who can continue to ride and pay me a commission for renting my auto. This will supplement my income as well in the long run.’

I ended the conversation with a request to take a picture of him when I got off at my drop point, for which he readily agreed. My son had started to doze off by then. My yoga instructor’s place was a 45-minute ride from my place. I could sense that there was a smile plastered on my face. I was in awe of his attitude and his simplistic approach to life. 

We reached just in time for my appointment. I took his picture as requested and agreed (during the ride) when I got off. The entire ride he wore his mask and did not remove it at all. I thanked him and we went our separate ways. My son asked me why I took his picture, and I was glad that he asked. I narrated the whole thing to him. I also highlighted the small gestures that he exhibited right from

• The first conversation over the call in English showed that he was open for a customer who was not a local and may not understand the local language.
• Strictly adhering to the COVID 19 protocols (including covering his nose and mouth for the entire ride) during the entire ride despite the scorching heat during the middle of the day.
• His change-embracing mindset during adversity, picking up a job that pays him on a regular basis, till he finds the ideal job for his qualifications or a job that his heart seeks out. 
• His far-thinking ability to plan for the distant future too without being clouded by the current challenges.
• Most important of all, finding dignity of labour in anything that he is doing as a profession, an abundance mindset, and extending an empathetic approach to anyone and everyone in his life.

That day, I learned my lesson of gratitude, thankful for such chance encounters that life gives me through everyday happenings, where I have ample opportunities to find role models in everyday people. I learn about the right mindset, practical applications of theories that I studied as part of my degree, and skilling courses, perspectives, and a positive attitude. All this eventually ends in healthy mental wellbeing as we have life lessons in the form of narratives and incidents stored for future references.

Do you have any such everyday inspiration story from your life? I would love to hear them, expand my perspectives, and hopefully enable others who read me to benefit from the varied stories that I can share!

This blog is part of the Blogchatter #CauseAChatter challenge under the #MentalHealthTalks section.