A writer recently paid a very rich tribute to his mother’s cooking skills. He called her a ‘real cook’. Though I rolled my eyes when I first read that sentence, I realised that he had a point. He had grown up in a home with resource constraints and saw his mother create delicious meals with…
Sanjana is a smart, working mother of two. Three years ago she read about cloth menstrual pads and was impressed with how easy to use they seemed to be. She had been having trouble with disposable napkins because she developed rashes every month. When she read more about the disposable pads, she also realised how…
I was taking an extremely circuitous route to a destination last weekend and I wondered for a minute about the simple things that could help me tread lightly on the environment in spite all the miles I was racking up. Most of these ideas are within our living memory – we have seen parents and…
Mindful Living and Everyday Choices Life with a toddler severely constrains my grocery shopping expeditions. Instead of browsing through the store, looking for stuff I need and buying a number of things that I don’t, I now make a detailed and painstaking list each month. This labourious exercise has had an interesting side effect, though.…
Quick tips and ideas for getting little ones to participate in and explore the natural environment At some point, toddlers outgrow the phase where they want to lick, bite, chew, and taste everything. When your child reaches this point, she is all set for her introduction to your garden and composting bins. It is also…
When my son was an infant, we received about 20 tonnes of baby powder and baby soap. On the face of it, these are relatively non-controversial and potentially practical gifts. In the past three years, however, the powder has been used mostly on carom boards and the soap has been given to people who showed an…
Composting organic waste gave me a closer look at all the trash I was generating. Which then led me into the rabbit hole of segregation and wishful thinking (I began to hope that I lived in a place with an integrated waste management system). In case you live in a city or town that segregates…
Municipal corporations of large cities usually find it hard to recycle dry waste, even when it could be extremely lucrative. One of the reasons is that most urban waste is mixed. Materials that can be recycled are in the middle of festering piles of biological matter. Waste segregation and composting can make a huge difference…
Online shopping brought organic gardening into my life. Living in a slightly remote area, far from my traditional hunting grounds, I began to look for websites that deliverednallennai and ulundu to rural Assam. For some helpful reason, the e-commerce portal asked me if I wanted to buy Alick Percy-Lancaster’s book A Sahib’s Manual for the Mali. I would have bought…
In his TED talk, Shekhar Kapur said, “We are the stories we tell ourselves.” It seems like this statement has a resounding ring of truth. Louder, perhaps, than any other philosophy I have read. And so, this week, with the Red Hills Reservoir running completely dry, and water tankers finding their way back on to…