There was a popular saying in my childhood that went like this: 'Waste not, want not.'

Waste not, want not

There was a popular saying in my childhood that went like this: 'Waste not, want not.'

It took me some time to appreciate the real meaning of it, whih is 'if you splurge extravagantly now, you will eventually end up in want. If you don't waste now, you won't be in need later.'

That advice is lost on people in today's age. Conspicuous consumption is the order of the day. Walk into a restaurant and check out the 'empty' plates and glasses after customers leave. On an average, they are not quite empty. More like half-empty, or half-full. In our childhood, such waste was disapproved of. It was said: 'Your eyes are bigger than your stomach. Take less.' But Today's culture demands that every item on the menu be ordered and quantities of half-eaten food be wasted.

In childhood our generation was scared into finishing everything with the threat that if we did not, then in the afterlife we would have to go about the streets of heaven with coconut shells full of our leftovers, hung around our necks for all eternity! But as a moral warning, it doesn't work in this day and age. The wasteful people don't believe in an afterlife.

Even their preferred means of packaging and garbage disposal in this life involve non-degradable plastic packets, as against degradable, organic materials like plantain leaves and coconut shells. People with no sense of guilt about overconsumption, in a country of starving millions!

Every evening as I go for a walk, various aspects of greed, of lack of self-restraint catch my eye.
Just check out the grossly obese children and their grossly obese mothers in their excellent (or, XLlent), designer clothes.

Overfed people whose excessive spending has mostly 'Gone to Waist'.u00a0 Everything is XL now -- from inappropriately large waistlines to inappropriately wide vehicles jamming up narrow lanes.

On the street, I daily dodge 'hilly' streetscapes -- broken pavements, potholed roads and garbage dumps. The garbage starts in well-segregated heaps. But, between the explorations of street dogs and ragpickers, it spreads itself in a slimy litter of plastic packets, plastic bottles and rotting eatables.

While on the topic of waste, there is another saying: 'Haste makes waste'. Waste of human life and limb, that is. The streets abound with tragic examples. Over-speeding autos, two-wheelers, and oversized SUVs, going the wrong way on one-way roads, causing dreadful accidents, trying to squeeze past in the wrong direction before the policemen on duty can stop them. Many an innocent, law-abiding passerby and an honest, courageous policemen have paid the price for someone else's wrongs, one who can't or won't 'waste' time following traffic rules.