Any bandwagon will do!

It's this post that I've been wondering about off and on while going about my daily days, and I couldn't figure out why I wasn't writing a comment, for it is a practice among others that I genuinely admire...I was simply feeling reluctant.

Two points: 1, Not all of my musings are directly connected to that original highlighted post although it got me articulating my thoughts. And 2, I very strongly believe in cultivating good habits.

So without poo-poohing biking, using public transport, or simply walking, and adopting other good habits, about which I will write soon but on another day, I would like to muse from the other side.

Why does decent, sensible, and sustainable behaviour have to be promoted as 'cool' or be battered into people's heads with senseless slogans? Why does making sensible life-style choices have to be promoted with a slogan "Be Cool. Go green."? And if that's the way they have to be battered in - is this something that can last?

I’ve noticed different sorts of people.

I know there are many elderly/old folk who have cycled in and out - fair weather foul weather and for more than half their lives. And I respect them as I respect the young people who cycle to work every day (or walk) without making a big song and dance about it or about any other life-style choices that they engage in, which simply are a part of who-they-are.

I know of elderly professors – kind and gentle and very matter-of-fact human beings – who say with a twinkle in their eyes, ‘It’s surprising how much of your grocery shopping, including a six-pack beer, you can fit onto a bicycle' (and this was definitely before the time that cycling was being promoted as being the new-thing-in-town).

I know of men who habitually recycle, compost (instead of using that wonderful garbage disposal that’s fitted to modern kitchen sinks which sucks up any sort of organic residue and sucks it down into its sewagey depths), walk as much as they can, eat non-factory produced meat, buy vegetables from the local farmers’ market and yet are not rabid nor dogmatic nor fundamentalist about their beliefs or their actions, and will even listen carefully when I express annoyance regarding people who do not put their shopping carts back into their proper places but leave them strewn around the car park outside grocery stores.

Then there are the other groups. Anything that’s doing the rounds – anything that is coolly radical, is seen as being coolly hip they will take on to with a gusto that is somewhat tiring if not sickening. Be that smoking or non-smoking, smoking pot or not smoking pot, getting a tattoo or not getting a tattoo, exercising or not-exercising, doing yoga or not-doing yoga, eating healthy or not eating healthy, being thin or being fat, being spiritual or not being spiritual, being religious or not being religious, having sex or not having sex, being a leftist or being another-wise-ist, wearing designer clothes or buying used clothes, driving cool cars or zooming around on trendy motorbikes or using a cycle or two-feet, supporting women’s rights or not supporting women’s rights (or whatever the new group is in town), supporting homosexuality or bisexuality or whatever-sexuality humans suddenly decide to label some years down the line as though it were a matter of life and death or not supporting you-name-it-sexuality, supporting a war or not supporting a war….it doesn’t matter what the issue is. Jump. Jump. Leap. Leap. Tear your shirts off. Wear arm bracelets. Wear T-shirts proclaiming your stance, slap on them bumper stickers and woo-hoo. Shout. Yell. Scream. And then lose your steam because you don’t really know what you’re blabbing about anyway or keep screaming about the same thing till you're 90 years old and have forgotten what it is that you’re screaming about. (Or else write academic papers that nobody can understand while some say ‘hmm, interesting’ while you read their incomprehensible papers and say ‘hmm, insightful.’)

When it comes to long-term, everyday habits (and more about these some other day) I will be suspicious and sceptical about the people who seem to leap and dance about and are all gung-ho about 'cycle to work day' and hand out flyers and are in-your-face and cycle 70 miles or more and then two days down the line you see them whizzing by in their humongous gas guzzling vans or else you spot them going into a coffee shop to get their morning coffee while leaving the engines on their stylish hybrid cars running . Otherwise you get the freaks who will not have a shower for a week (and, please remember, they use only toilet paper after shitting, as the author of the blogs on the right so eloquently put it) because they are ‘saving’ water or they will pee in the alleyway because they are saving ‘toilet paper’, or else you may get the 'whoever said that it was only men who can pee in alleyways' response. Or you might have the misguided and cruel animal lovers who go and release all the animals (who are being experimented upon in hideous and cruel ways and for many-a-times for making useless products too) from a science lab because they want the animals to ‘have their freedom’. Otherwise you come across very, very fat and not entirely non-nice people who are adamant about saving the environment (what about yourselves?)….plenty of other tales but these can do the rounds for now.

I am reminded, and it's not a disconnected thought, of what Gopal, and not non-humorously, muses in Anurag Mathur's The Inscrutable Americans, 'Certainly there was great merit in seat belts*. But typically the Yanks had made such a fetish out of it, that it annoyed every thinking person. It was like cigarettes. Gopal, who smoked very rarely, found himself defiantly lighting up in rebellion against the implicit national demand that he not smoke in public. It had come to a point now where he only smoked in public; he felt it was a democratic protest against the forces of fascism.'

(*There is great merit. I agree.)

And true enough after contemplating on these different aspects, sure, I agree that different sorts of people jump on different band-wagons - and more about that maybe some other day – but it’s still the same story.

I’ll write a post one day maybe about people I do admire and those who, I think, make a positive difference. For now as I keep wondering and saying over and over again: this muddled world of ours keeps ticking away simply because there are pockets of people and some lone individuals more like it – and some not famous by any worldly definition of the term – who are soldiering along and carrying the rest along no matter where the immediate winds blow.

It's a fine thing (probably) if some smart, brainy, clever, and directed individuals can foster good habits and/or practices by promoting some things in a mega way. And I’m sure there are some sensible people who are able to adopt practices in a balanced way after being told because they are able to view a habit/practice in a particular way, which is helpful, useful, beneficial, or good – to self and to others. Countries are different in some ways (and terribly similar too in other ways). People in countries – not so much but what irks one specifically is what one is exposed to every day or every other day, and it’s this violent, in-your-face extremism that’s been getting to me. My rising grouch is that very many times (in the U.S at least) some practices either become nothing but short-term fads or some sort of a one-day wonder or is drilled into the minds of people with some do-this-or-die hyper-mania or else when other idiotic practices too are promoted as being 'cool' or ‘not cool’ – different bunches of non-discerning people will jump onto it and go neighing around about town.

P.S: I'll be the first to admit that there are certain things that I too am absolutely picky and finicky about and there are some things I'm undecided about, some things about which I wish I were an extremist, and some others that I don't know much about. I absolutely admit to all that. At 35, I am an extremist and a fairly rigid person when it comes to certain habits and certain practices but they are not a woo-hoo bit of a mindless or thoughtless (no matter how intense) passing fancy.