I have a friend in Melbourne who leads a perfectly imbalanced green life. His shower monitor is set to four minutes, he never leaves the water running while brushing teeth or washing dishes, he bikes to work, reuses every scrap of paper till it looks like a print of the matrix code and he seldom washes his clothes.

At his home, you cannot switch on a light unless you absolutely must see something and on a holiday he rejects artificial temperature controllers and hitches a tent and sleeps in the garden if he isn’t near the wilds. He shouts wildly at people if he sees them violating any of his rashly adopted green rules. As a result he has lost all his hair, most of his friends, and now works from home, no doubt, due to the stinky clothes.

Climate change is now obvious: We have all seen photographs of Shimla residents queueing up for just a bucket of water a day for one whole week. They turned money-paying tourists away from the gates, and almost beat up the government employees they could find. Our rivers are either flooded or dried up, or sometimes both in a flash of a month, and all of this is very truly dire. So I am all for green policing, as long as it is not governed by the spirit of someone who committed double suicide in the summer of 1945.

If I were to lead an ideal green life, I’d be riding a bike around instead of driving, except that I can’t ride a bike and will have to take time off to learn. But I can’t take any time off from my current work schedule and can barely afford holidays and, like all of us, have a million urgent things to do in the time off.

I could take the metro, you would argue, which is surely the next best thing. Divide the emissions by thousands and there you have a neat solution. Of course, neat is a word I use loosely here. My OCD doesn’t allow me anywhere near sweat and body odours and travelling by the metro or a bus in this city will definitely kill me before I can save the planet from sinking.

In the face of these grim realities, I do what a mere mortal can. I use a cab and with that one clever stroke I have generated employment and divided the dreadful emissions by, er, two. Hey, it’s better than driving!

It’s tough to lead a green life. If you were strict about it, you’ll have to stop eating almonds and avocados because growing them means using up the two litres of water left on the planet. Ah, that’s got you thinking, has it? Avocados use up about 1,000 litres of water a kilo — no wonder it tastes like nothing but water. No one who eats mashed avocado on toast should lecture about the environment.

My travelling habits score next to nil green points but instead of going mad trying to do something about it which might make my dreadful existence even more uncomfortable, I try to make up in other ways. I don’t eat avocados, I don’t play Holi, I’ve stopped using single-use plastics, I never leave the water running, I reuse leftover water after boiling veggies, I reuse paper, I haven’t added to the population, I don’t take detailed printed bills and have recently discovered that I have been practically feeding the babies of my fraudulent phone company (tip: CHECK your ebills).

The only way to be properly environmentally friendly is to adopt green policies in daily life step by step, weaving them in in a way you can sustain for good. Our planet’s environment hazards are here to stay and we need a lifelong change of habits — not a short and crazy bout of adopting all the things that people say will save the planet.

You could stop using the air-conditioner in the Delhi summer (as another crazy friend does!) but if it makes you miserable for five months of the year isn’t it better to cut the usage by half instead?

Keeping a score of our good and bad green deeds and getting pass marks is okay. That’s more doable and sustainable. If you do too much too suddenly and die of a green attack, you are no good to anyone.

If someone’s going to Melbourne, bike up to my friend and tell him this. He’ll be the one serially killing everyone who’s buying deo.

Kalyani Prasher is a Delhi-based freelance writer

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