Sunday, September 20, 2009

The biography of a rag, a scrap piece of silicon, and a holey pocket

It is enlightening when I discover traits that I used to tease my mother about are the same set of traits that I cannot seem to shake off from myself anymore.

The basic philosphy carries in from my grandmother who told this little parable in Marathi, which roughly goes like this:
My mother had a sari which she wore for many years. When it became a little too worn to be worn, then she cut it up into two, and used them as light sun-curtains for two windows in the bedroom. When the curtains became a bit faded, she took them off, and used them as hair-drying towels, as they were soft cotton. When they got a little threadbare, they became dish-rags. The dish-rags turned into a floor mop, and finally when only strips of stringy cloth remained, they got thrown into the ragpicker's bag.

As is to be expected, the little story when told in its original colloquial Marathi, sounds much better than this dry version.

This is not as much of frugality as about innovation. Of finding multiple uses for a single item before its life is considered to have ended. Not use once and throw. But, use, reuse, use, reuse, recycle, use, reuse. My grandma and mom were using environmentally sustainable practices much before it was the new in-thing to do.

At least a fraction of it got retained into my generation. In the unavoidably resource-intensive field of semiconductor fabrication, I grin to myself when I use a single cleanroom wipe through a 6 hour process, use smaller pieces of silicon saving the scrap pieces for other dummy/test runs, reuse pieces when I can, and wonder what the heck is wrong with me since this is not even coming out of my pocket. Which reminds me, that I have a hole in this pocket I need to fix before I get too lazy and just go out and buy a new pair of jeans instead.

1 comment:

test said...

lovely parable.
its amazing how much alike our parents we become.