Renewal and Preservation in a Sustainable Global Environment Recycling of souls in Hindu philosophy The Greeks’ believe that you live only once- one life for each individual. After death they cross the river Styx and move to the after-life. Their philosophy states that each life is unique and new. In India, the Hindu concept of life is very different from that of the Western world. Here, one individual life is one among infinite. They too cross a river after death, but it isn’t crossed just once. It is crossed to and fro infinite times. The souls never die, they are immortal, only the individual body decays, the souls get reborn again and again. The same soul is lived by countless individuals, countless number of times. This can best be explained with a simple comparison. In a room full of earthen pots, the vast sea of lives can be related to the air present in the room. Each pot is one being and the air in each pot denotes one individual soul. The air it contains is its own, while simultaneously being connected to the whole. This is the concept of the Hindu soul. Every soul is a part of the one eternal supreme soul. Just like the air in a pot returns to the whole when it breaks, souls return to the infinite plasma of souls in the universe until it is born again. The same soul passes from one body to another for eternity. India is thus a country with a belief that even souls are recycled. One life may be ephemeral but the concept of life is eternal. It is perhaps this belief that echoes through the customs and traditions in our country and creates a firm necessity to renew and preserve.
The recycling wonder in every family When I was growing up, my sister and I were gifted some money, every month when the “newspaper-wala” came to our doorstep. I looked forward to this day tremendously, when his call to the homes echoed from street to street. A man with a set of scales and weights and large bag would squat at our doorstep and weigh all the newspapers and magazines that were of no further use, and buy them for a nominal rate. Similarly there was another man called the “kabadi-wala” (scrap-dealer) who came door to door buying domestic waste. I watched him segregate the waste carefully according to the material- the plastics went aside, the fabrics made a heap. Even the metals were further categorized into iron, copper, aluminium etc., each priced based on their individual market value.
When I grew up I realized the intricate network of recycling that made up this entire system that starts and ends with us- the consumers. The kabadi-walas we only deal with comprise of a small part of this system. They travel from home to home incredibly covering almost every household in a country of over a billion people. One can also spot a group of people called rag-pickers who travel from street to street picking up domestic wastes from trash cans or garbage- dumps. They too sell their stock to the Kabadiwalas. The