"Kindly-use-a-dustbin"

   submitted by: Karan Saggi

"Don't throw that mess on the floor!" yells a mother to her 8 year old son. But when the same kid throws a plastic bag on the street, she doesn't say a word. Why should anybody admonish him now? The street is public property. Of course it is beautiful this time of the year with the blooming spring trees, but ostensibly, everyone has a right to use it as a trashcan. We tend to "use" things that we are responsible for, while "take advantage of" what others take care of. It’s nothing personal; it’s the way God made us. The same God also gave us the Earth. So by "taking advantage of " what Earth has gifted us, we are misusing something that belongs to us. For the more sophisticated readers, replace "taking advantage of" in the previous line to "polluting". In other words, by throwing that plastic on the street, the kid is trashing his own property. There, maybe now his mother will scream at him again.
A sense of ownership is what it takes for us to look after something. It is high time to realize that earth's natural resources are our own. We are responsible for any harm our activities bring to nature. I may go on and on and showcase all my knowledge on pollution but I know you already learnt about it, and about all the other nature degradation theories in school. So what is stopping us from making an effort to preserve nature when we know what's going wrong? Maybe we're just too busy with our office work or have family problems or are busy learning Latin. I call any excuse we make a NIMBY syndrome. "NIMBY" Syndrome or "Not-In-My-Back-Yard-Syndrome" is a common human disorder whose symptoms are selfishness, a tendency to trash others' territories and sometimes simply having an anti-plantation nausea. Patients generally get fever when their own place is messy but feel better when the same mess is dumped in someone else's region. If you have ever thrown any plastic anywhere except in the actual dustbin or done anything that invites malaria, you might have caught the disease. The cure? "Plant-a-tree" or "Use-the-dustbin" pills are available everywhere. If they are too bitter, homeopathy offers the "Please-plant-a-tree" and "Kindly-use-a-dustbin" medicines.
It is time we abolish our tradition of trashing the neighborhood and start preserving all that is there Earth has given us. But first, we need to stop pressing the snooze button and wake up to the alarming calls of pollution, or if it's too late, Nature will wake us up in its own unpleasant way.