The truth about trash

TRASH is everywhere in Bangalore, indeed in any urban Indian city. Vegetable peels, tea leaves, dust, plastic, bulbs, used sanitary napkins: these are what one might find if one peers into the three-foot high concrete cylinders placed at every street corner.

Trash usually overflows from these containers. The cylinder may be partially full, but the area around is littered with garbage that includes plastic bags, knotted to keep the contents from bursting out in the heat.

Trash is simply matter, in a form unpalatable to those who produce it. Every article found in the trash has had, at least in the Indian context, some useful function, whether it be discarded food or the newspaper that serves as wrapping. Yet this waste becomes another person's wages. However, except for those who depend on it for their livelihood, most prefer to avert their gaze from these mountains of waste.

These humble monuments to consumption placed me in a peculiar predicament. Because I too shared this feeling of aversion to garbage. At every corner I wanted to take flight. I found myself holding my breath so that I would not smell the mass decomposing in the heat. I would turn the street corner, breathe out and be relived that for at least another hundred yards, I would not have to shrink from my environment.

But as one committed to being present to every split second of my life, it became clear that this aversion must become the subject of contemplation. Why this sense of alienation from the things that have nourished us, made our lives livable, even enjoyable? What sense of entitlement underwrote this narrowly utilitarian relationship to matter? Each pile of waste I encountered posed fundamental questions about the nature of matter, its social construction, our collective choices of how to live and their consequences. As evidence of our everyday actions, trash was an invitation to embrace the cycle of life in its entirety, to contemplate the food chain and our part in it. I began to rank it with the many shrines and temples: like them, it was calling out to me to live well, to act wisely.

Crucial to this aversion to trash is the widespread cultural disdain for matter and for the physical body as a particularly potent instance of it. This view may have had its origins in upper caste predilections but it is now shared much more broadly. It is only logical that this ambivalence extends to the phenomenal world more generally, especially that part which is not conceived as sacred. Thus, homes may be scrupulously kept clean but the dust emptied outside the door or compound wall. Likewise, ashrams may be spotless, but their toilets are another matter altogether. Few of those who can afford to employ someone else tend to clean their toilets or take out their trash.

Is it believed that God, sharing our prejudices, is to be found only in certain spaces, in particular kinds of matter?

It is a short step from rejection of the physical to its desecration in spiritual discourse. The exhortation to transcend body consciousness is a symptom of this perspective. We are urged to overcome the senses, to remember that "we are not the body". Controlling the body - its needs and desires - is said to be a pre-requisite to the realisation of spiritual aspirations. From this standpoint, humanness becomes not that which is to be gained through sadhana, but rather that which our yoga is intended to eradicate. Thus is made crude that subtle process by which the cultivation of spiritual practice opens the possibility of a gradual transformation of humanness such that it becomes congruent with - and not opposed to - divine consciousness. If one followed this oversimplified view to its logical conclusion, there would be no inherent purpose to incarnation or embodiment. We exist so that we may transcend existence. Small wonder then that both the physical body and by extension, the environment, are treated with such disrespect. For their value rests solely in their utility, in what each makes possible.

Mercifully, there is another important seam in the cultural ethos of Hinduism: the proposition that all matter is sacred and that everything, whether sentient or apparently non-sentient, vibrates with divine consciousness. The entire phenomenal world is held to be sacred and the goal of life is to recognise and experience the divine nature of all things. This fundamental truth is the bedrock of Hindu mystical teachings as also of the tribal religions. Belief in the inherent sacredness of matter has inspired rituals and everyday practices of both philosophical systems.

Both the positive and the negative attitudes to matter may be witnessed by observing those who are entrusted the work of waste disposal. On the one hand, hatred of matter is reflected in their conditions of work and the social ostracism they face on account of their labour. Their wages are low, are exposed to danger when clearing the broken glass and other sharp objects and live in the shadow of social discrimination. On the other hand, in their attentiveness and dignity, in the joy they often bring to their work, is present an embrace of the phases of life, of an acceptance of the pilgrimage made by matter as it surrenders naturally, unhesitatingly out of one form into the next. If we could but open to the truth that trash is simply matter in motion and as such, shares the essential quality of all matter in changing form, shape and function, we would be able to honour the waste we produce as well as those who tend to it.

It is time to accept our intimate relationship to trash, to recognise the sacredness of all fluids and substances, time to heal our distaste for that which makes our life whole and holy. Either that or we must remain predators of nature with an extractive and deeply profane relationship to Creation. Nature gives unceasingly. Matter must transform its form, that is a law of nature. To the extent that we, as humans, wish to refuse the full implications of our role in the creation/destruction/transfiguration of matter, we will continue to have an exploitative relationship to the phenomenal world. And this world, with its tendency to continually transform, will portend danger. Our refusal to live consciously on the material plane alienates us from precisely that which has sustained us and as part of which we must learn to take our place. Alienation produces distance and disgust, the very opposite of loving recognition, mutuality and gratitude, the only basis for relating to nature and to the phenomenal world.

The overflowing heaps of garbage thus represent the potential for an antidote to the seamlessly invisible violation of nature that is possible in many First World locations, where trash is bagged, bundled into containers, and hurtled out of sight. Few are aware of the effects of such sanitised efficiency on the

consciousness of those who seem to benefit from the sanitary conditions in which they live and from the efficiency of waste disposal in their communities. I am not suggesting that there is no need to seek more effective ways of treating trash in a cities like Bangalore that have grown so rapidly that the infrastructure has not been able to keep pace.

I am simply proposing that we use these bins spilling over with that which we have discarded, to contemplate our place in nature, the effects of our actions, our nomination of matter into the acceptable and the unacceptable, that which we will call our own and that which we pretend has no relationship to us as we pass it at the end of our very own street.

LATA MANI

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