Chew on this

Something is chewing me up from inside so let's chew over it together for a while

Chew on this

Something is chewing me up from inside so let's chew over it together for a while. Now please don't say you don't have the time and would rather chew your own tobacco; because it concerns all of us. Besides, chewing one's own tobacco maybe history in a few days, for the Environment Ministry chewed out plastic gutka and tobacco sachets last Monday.

The Ministry of Environment and Forests, replaced the previous Recycled Plastics Manufacture and Usage Rules, 1999 with the new Plastic Waste Rules, 2011. One salient feature in the new rule bans the use of plastic materials in sachets for storing, packing or selling gutkha, tobacco and paan masala. Now, that is set to hit the industry hard, the prices might see a steep rise and worst of all, they might disappear from our lives.

Sorry for being an alarmist but it would be a huge blow to art. People would no more spit on government building walls, apartment staircases, rickety buses, auto rickshaws, crowded railway platforms, outside dustbins, cleanliness-obsessed neighbour's lawn..oh! you name it.

How will that government babu who has been pushing files in some obscure department for the last 15 years secretly fantasising of becoming an artist vent out his creativity? Imagine stark white and clean sarkari walls sans murals painted by hundreds of hard working employees. What horrors!

Would going for a walk in the park be the same without sachets of tobacco strewn all around? You start your day as usual; early morning put on your sneakers, enter the neighbourhood park and take a deep breath. And suddenly you realise the air smells different today. The familiar stench of human urine mixed with rotten tobacco is missing. Visualise the health hazards. Our immune system would go for a toss. Early morning joggers, dogs, cattle, squirrels wouldn't be able to adapt to the change.

But that's not all, foreigners would be roaming our streets lost and dazed. There would be no markers to guide them ufffd 'take a right from that bright tobacco stained dustbin' would fade out of our vocabulary. Stain removers and washing machine producing multi-national giants would move out of India. Dhobis will go out of business; Kiran Rao's films won't premiere at the Toronto Film Festival or get nominated for the Oscars anymore.

The awfulness of living in a city as clean as Stockholm or Oslo, with all our freedom gone to spit at leisure. I can't imagine horrifying consequences to this new rule anymore. I think I have bitten more than I can chew.

But you chew your cud over this while yours truly takes a break and deals with his nicotine craving.

"Exciting news! Mid-day is now on WhatsApp Channels