Before the Age of Abundance

Before the Age of Abundance kicked in somewhere around the change of the millennium, everything used to be rationed. Rationing was the norm rather than the exception. And there was nothing bad about it. There were many axioms which went behind the functioning of the world.

Recycling

No, it wasn’t like a socialist system. But there was a deep seated sense that resources were limited and had to be used conservatively. Recycling, without the buzz of this English word, was the norm. Nothing would be thrown. Everything would be recycled until it was barely visible.

Vegetables were cooked but so were their peels. Thus the Loki peels would be cooked with Besan. The Gobhi stems would be cooked with chilli and coriander. The potato peels were sometimes fried and the other ‘waste’ directly went into the kitchen garden.

Almost no jhola was made from a cloth specially dedicated to it. Any piece of cloth since its inception would see many reincarnations before it would be consigned to oblivion. Thus, the shirt of the father after at least ten years of use would be taken apart and used as the shirt of the son. When that was used to the hilt, the cloth would turn into a pillow cover or a small bag. When the bag was worn down it would be turned into a wipe. And only then would it die a slow gradual death.

Paper was precious. Newspapers were the staple of all trade. All houses that read newspapers would carefully stack them and along with a little use in the household shelves, they would all be sold to the ‘Raddi Wala’. The Raddi Wala would give a good price and the newspapers almost always found their way to the small shopkeepers and all produce would be sold in these recycled newspaper bags. The house adjacent to me had five women and all day long they would make bags from newspapers. They got a rate of 6 rupees per thousand bags. The rate would seem cruel or brutal in a consumerist world now which only considers human happiness as a factor, but 6 rupees used to be a lot in those days, and the women had no other paying job that they could take. Besides, the newspaper industry was hinged on this very concept that the papers would be recycled otherwise very few would have bought them.

Like the animal way of dying, nothing went to waste. Mass just changed forms, going through many stages, serving the same family for perhaps decades before finally going into oblivion.

I remember with a curious mix of nostalgia and happiness the fact that I received a gift of two ‘ink pens’ from my father when I entered sixth standard. Yes, it was a generation where fathers preserved their pens to be able to gift them to the next generation. That was how precious everything was. And it was not a sad thing.

The Seasonality

Vegetables like everything else were seasonal. There were very few exceptions like potatoes and onions. Even in my childhood cold storages had become the norm and potatoes and onions would be stored and made available the year round. Everything else was seasonal.

Thus winters were the season to eat. There were so many leafy vegetables. Other vegetables were also available more than other seasons. And thus we would wait for the winters for more than the relief in temperature that it offered. Winters were for feasts and fresh vegetables. Coriander would be available easily. Garnishing otherwise too was abundant in this season. But come summers, and vegetables would vanish from the markets except a select few. And so people would dry peas, chickpeas and other seeds for the summers and the rainy seasons. Summers were hard on vegetables but some of the juiciest of fruits like melons and mangoes were available in the season and mangoes alone were enough to make the summers enjoyable.

With the greenhouses and other genetic innovations along with great transport facilities everything started to become available the year round. At first people were shocked and even enjoyed the luxury of having mangoes in winters but gradually the sheer joy of biting into the first mango of the season, of eating the first cauliflower of the season disappeared. What replaced it instead was the consumerist nirvana of year round availability of any fruit or vegetable you wanted. And with it went out the joy of the new, predicated on natural seasonality.

Abundance is boring.

The Timing

Even when it was the season of something, even when individuals and families could afford a little something, it did not mean that you could have anything anytime. The concept of appropriate timing was deeply embedded into every routine and ritual. Everything was inappropriate, even tea, if it was not taken on time.

Thus, my grandmother guarded our kitchen like Fort Knox. The kitchen opened four times a day, for breakfast, lunch, evening tea and dinner. Only women could enter the kitchen and touch the food. Men had to accept whatever was given to them. You could eat as much as you wanted at the appointed time but day-long munching was unknown, let alone tolerated or allowed.

Similarly buying goods was also timed. You couldn’t buy anything anytime you wanted. Clothes were bought on festivals, marriages and other important occasions. And they couldn’t be bought all week long. There was a popular saying that ‘Som fate, mangal jale…’ which meant that it is inauspicious to buy clothes on at least five days of the week and thus only two or at best three days were reserved for buying new clothes. So even if you had the money, even if the cloth was available in the market, you couldn’t just buy it if you so wished.

The concept of affordability was thus subconsciously detached from financial affordability. Morality and ethics played a great part in it and it controlled impulsive buying. When people had the urge to buy something on an impulse and found it was the inappropriate day to buy, they often found that by the time the appropriate day came the very urge had subsided. Many an impulsive purchase was thus prevented. And people often realized that. As a result, the fun of the new was very much kept alive.

Gwalior was famous for Gwalior Mela which was held every winter in the month of January. Allimportant household items were bought mainly in fairs like these. Yes, there were other shops too, but the Melas were the real deal. People would save all year round to buy a fridge or an almirah in the Mela which gave special discounts. An unsaid convention made January as the buying season and if someone missed that month, he quietly waited for the next year.

People, back then, used to wait for their pleasures. And only too late do we find that most of the pleasure of a thing was in its attainability. The harder something was to attain, the more it pleasure was. And thus, it was a world where everything was achieved after a struggle, (for most of us) and thus it felt infinitely sweeter than something bought easily.

Come the Age of Abundance

The Age of Abundance abrogated these three concepts. What was the use of recycling when things were made so cheap that you could buy articles for everything separately? Thus the son buys a new shirt, as well as the father, and pillow covers to kitchen wipes to floor wipes are all bought separately in the supermarket. Hindus had traditional inhibition against such criminal waste of resources but they were gradually overcome by the market.

Seasonality went out the window when every fruit and vegetable was made available the year round, no matter at what price. Price stopped being an issue because for the middle class, ration and grocery became a minority expense. With the year round availability the sheer pleasure of the first fruit, the first vegetable of the season also ended. All vegetables became especially and equally bland.

With my plate, my choice kind of propaganda seeping in and with fridges becoming bigger and getting married to microwaves, people abandoned appropriate timing of eating anything. With no timing to eat anything, people started eating anything they wanted, anytime they wanted. Where even regular meals were an occasion of celebration earlier, even feasts have become stale and tasteless due to their frequency.

Beyond Mere Nostalgia

Why am I saying all this?

It is not nostalgia. I want to refer to the times which were so radically different from ours in approach that the sheer remembrance of them is fading from our memory. It is often that bad ideas are bundled as good ideas and sold as welfare. What we call progress is often an attempt to make our world more fragile, more harmful towards the environment, more materially abundant, and more spiritually impoverished. And yet it is taken as a Biblical truth, that progress and progress alone is the way forward.
May these hard and shocking times give us some sense. May Hindu ethics and morality once
again come to govern our common sense, which we have lost in our bid for economic progress.

Pankaj Saxena is an Author writing on history, Hindu architecture and literature. He is the founder of Bodha.