The Great Value of Rubbish!

Its all about garbage!

Take the example of the highest garbage dump in the world. At 26000 feet, the last camp before reaching Mount Everest is strewn with some of the goodies of humanity. Last record estimates almost 3000 tonnes of garbage. Tents, food – cans, plastic galore, and lots of dead bodies of mountaineers ! Sir Edmund Hillary, who was the first to climb the peak in 1953, also admits that there is a lot of garbage there ever since!

The other hill resorts are competing with higher garbage figures. As a discerning tourist I am sure you’re still looking higher. I would recommend the trip to the moon. I am told that it has lost its virginity and looks like a teenagers’ room, strewn with discarded electronic equipment!

Garbage is an index of a successful civilization. Progress is about replacing the old with the new. And garbage is a measurement of the speed of progress.

Our status in society is calculated by our ability and speed of converting goods of value to junk. Cars, television, houses, toys, even spouses quickly become junk in the hands of the efficient.

However, I am told by the famous humanitarian Daisaku Ikeda that — “ Knowledge corresponds to the past, it is technology. Wisdom is the future; it is philosophy.” So if your knowledge is greater than your wisdom then you are in trouble. You are in danger of becoming junk.

No one is quite sure on how to handle this. What you know becomes junk and what you don’t know becomes wisdom.

The older you get the more difficult it becomes to do a spring cleaning on yourself. The fact that no one would give us a job today if we were old and experienced comes as quite as a shock to most us.The trick is to junk it all and show as new again. One stroke but not a stroke please.

Our late Prime Minister Mrs Indira Gandhi was careful about showing equal amounts of black and white hair on her head. But now, with Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Butox and unisex beauty parlours, trends are changing. The hot mail is getting hotter – with advertisements that any muscle can be increased by a few inches. (Though their small print says not That one because its not muscle but cartilage, Sir)!

Grow, Acquire, and Throw! More and more. And better than others.

There are specialists to handle junk disposal. Be it skin peeling, soul cleansing, file deletion or de-fragmentation of the hard disk. (Yours and Your computer’s). There are many others.

But don’t get too clean. Proliferation of rubbish is a sign of hard work and intellect. So it must show. And one must also not forget that the purpose of garbage disposal is only the acquisition of new garbage.

And garbage must exist at all times.

We cannot discard our brain just because we have a new state of the art computer. Though it makes perfectly good sense to. In evolution there is no haste. German anatomist Ernst Haeckel talks about recapitulation. The human foetus in the womb goes through several obsolete evolutionary stages .In the fish stage we have gill slits which is absolutely useless for the embryo which is nourished via the umbilical cord. But because sometime during our evolutionary steps, probably when we lived in the sea, we needed gills, we have preserved the genetic know-how.

Evolution is cautious. It is about addition not deletion. Older systems get modified to new ones – fins to legs, or legs to flippers or wings. That way we are sure that what makes us survive now is protected in spite of the addition of new structures. Our ancient brain, for example still remains even centuries after we added on the neo cortex. We are living examples of walking garbage.

We must fight against the environmentalists so that progress may survive . And constantly remind ourselves that all the eco- friendly civilizations like the Harappans, Greeks and Mayans have not survived.

And in the future we can proudly attribute it to our non bio – degradable shit !

Copyright © 2013, Lima Sehgal
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