(Harish Bijoor is a brand guru and founder of Harish Bijoor Consults. This column first appeared in The New Indian Express on July 20, 2021)
- India burns its crop. India burns its garbage. India burns a lot it wants to get rid of. Let’s look around. Crop burning is a practice. Our food-bowl states grow crops for us. At the end of the crop, every plant has produced two things: Things we as well as our buffalos, cows and goats will eat, and stuff that no one will eat. This is considered to be fit to burn. And burn we do. In the crop harvest months, the entire country wears a pall of crop-burning gloom. There is a haze in our lives that one has come to expect every year come the season to burn. If rural agrarian India does this with gusto, urban and mini-metro India is not too far with its burning fetish. Burning (not controlled incineration) is par for the course in our big cities and towns alike. We love to burn dry leaves and twigs to warm ourselves in the winter months. We love to burn dry garbage all year round. It’s considered a great way to get rid of a voluminous mess. Burn up those mounds of leaf and garbage and within hours the ground is clear. All that is left is ash and plastic residue. The rest has gone into the air, polluting it along with everyone who breathes it all in…