LESSON SIX

Waste Is Violence

I enjoyed the days I spent in Poona with Bapuji. Though I appreciated the solitude of the ashram, Poona was bigger than Sevagram, and it was nice to be able to walk through bazaars and shops again. We stayed there long enough that Bapuji arranged for me to have a tutor in town, and one day as I was walking home from my lessons, I saw some nice big pencils in a store window. I looked at the little nub of a pencil in my own hand and decided I deserved a new one. So I tossed the nub into the grass by the side of the road.

That evening, during my time with Grandfather, I told him that I needed a new pencil. It didn’t seem like a big deal, but Bapuji never missed a thing, and he pointed out that I’d had a perfectly good one in the morning.

“It was too small,” I told him.

“It didn’t seem that small to me. Let me see it,” he said, holding out his hand.

“Oh! I don’t have it. I threw it away,” I said casually.

Bapuji looked at me incredulously. “You threw it away? In that case, you will have to go find it again.”

When I reminded him it was dark out, he handed me a flashlight. “This should help. I am sure if you retrace your steps and apply your mind you will find it.”

Knowing there was no way out of this, I set out down the road in the dark, peering into bushes and gutters along the roadside. One person who happened to be out noticed me and asked if I was looking for something important. I felt ridiculous, but I told him the truth, that I was searching for a little pencil I had dropped. “Is it made of gold?” he asked with a laugh.

I got to the spot where I thought I had tossed the pencil nub and rummaged around in the dirt and grass. It took me two hours to find it—or at least it felt that long. When I finally grabbed it from under a bush, I didn’t feel like I’d found a treasure. It was still just a tiny pencil that I didn’t want. Surely when Bapuji saw it, he would understand that it hadn’t been worth saving and I had been right. I rushed home jubilantly and found my grandfather.

“Here is the pencil, Bapuji. See how small it is?”

He took it and held it in his hand. “This is not small. This can be used for a couple of weeks. I’m glad you found it,” he replied.

He put the pencil on his little table and smiled at me. “Now come sit beside me and I will explain why I made you look for it.”

I sat down next to him and he put his arm around me. “Wasting anything is more than a bad habit. It expresses a carelessness about the world and a violence against nature.”

Wasting anything is more than a bad habit. It expresses a carelessness about the world and a violence against nature.

I had previously thought of violence only in terms of hitting people, so I listened very closely.

“I want you to know that a lot of effort, money, and time are invested in making all the things that we use, even little things like this pencil. When we throw something away we are wasting the resources of the country and we are abusing the efforts of people who made things for our comfort and use.”

As I considered that, Bapuji asked, “When you walk around on the streets, do you see poor people?”

“Yes, Bapuji, I do.”

“Those poor people can’t afford to buy a pencil, while people like us, who can buy the things we need, waste a lot of them. When we consume too many of the resources of the world, we make them even more scarce for others.”

When we consume too many of the resources of the world, we make them even more scarce for others.

“Okay, Bapuji, I understand,” I mumbled.

I started to get up, but the lesson wasn’t over. “I have another assignment for you. And for this you will need even more than a little pencil nub,” he said, with a twinkle in his eye.

Bapuji asked me to take paper and pencil and draw a family tree of violence. He wanted me to see how so many of our actions are interrelated. This tree was to have two main branches—one for physical violence and one for passive violence. Every day he wanted me to analyze my actions and the actions of people around me and add them as branches on the tree. If I hit someone or threw a rock, I was to add a branch of physical violence. But he wanted me to be equally aware of habits and ways of life that hurt people, so every time I saw or heard about discrimination or oppression, waste or greed, I would draw a branch of passive violence.

For the next few days I worked very hard on the tree, and when I brought it to Bapuji, I proudly showed him how little physical violence there was. “I have my anger under control!” I said.

He nodded, and then we both looked at all the branches of passive violence I had noticed. “Passive violence is the fuel that ignites physical violence in the world,” he explained. “If we want to put out the fire of physical violence, we have to cut the fuel supply.”

Passive violence is the fuel that ignites physical violence in the world. If we want to put out the fire of physical violence, we have to cut the fuel supply.

Long before people talked about environmentalism and understood how we humans were affecting the planet, Bapuji recognized that the overconsumption of natural resources by some creates an economic imbalance for all. Materialism intelligently and compassionately used can help ensure a decent life for every person on earth. But materialism used to exploit and abuse creates an impossible imbalance. Yet since my grandfather’s time the inequities have only gotten worse. The world’s richest 1 percent now control more than half the wealth in the entire world. The affluent feel they have a license to take what they want and toss the rest.

“Our greed and wasteful habits perpetuate poverty, which is violence against humanity,” Bapuji told me.

Our greed and wasteful habits perpetuate poverty, which is violence against humanity.

Bapuji, who was opposed to wasting anything, even a pencil nub, would hardly know what to make of our current throwaway culture. Waste has become such a part of our lives that we forget to think about the bigger consequences. As much as a third of the food we buy in America ends up being thrown into the garbage, and more is tossed away by grocery stores before it can even be sold. We send more than $160 billion worth of food to landfills every year. At the same time, millions of children around the world go to bed hungry every night. My grandfather used to say that so long as there are tears in the eyes of even one person in the world, humanity should not rest. The security and stability of any civilization depends on the security and stability of every individual. If we could curb overbuying and waste, we could save millions spent transporting food that will end up as garbage—and instead bring it to the places and people that really need it.

I didn’t completely understand Bapuji’s lesson about the pencil nub until I got a little older and opened my eyes to the imbalances in the world. You may think that making a small change in your life doesn’t solve anything, but all those little actions add up. I always carry a handkerchief in my pocket, which I use instead of tissues or paper towels. Maybe it’s not changing the world, but think what a difference it could make if we all did it. One report estimates that if every aluminum can in the country were recycled, we could power four million homes and save $800 million per year. That’s a lot of savings from putting your beer can in a recycling bin rather than the trash!

And studies show that people feel good when they pay attention to the environment. Recycling has become so popular that most towns and cities now have recycling programs. Many of us bring reusable bags to the grocery store and carry stainless-steel water bottles instead of disposable plastic. In the global economy now, an action you take at home in suburban Indiana can have repercussions in the poorest villages in India. That’s true for big issues like fighting climate change and creating better agricultural solutions to feed the world’s hungry, but it’s also true in a very literal way for the smallest contributions we make. Instead of sending their gently used clothing to the landfill, people are choosing donation. So it’s not unusual to see barefoot Indian children wearing T-shirts with the logo of the Chicago Cubs or New England Patriots, T-shirts donated by people halfway around the world.

My grandfather believed in the power of the individual to change the world, but I understand why people wonder if their personal efforts can really mean anything in the bigger world. We read that levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are rising faster than anticipated by even the most pessimistic climate-change scientist. Before too long the impact on the environment could be devastating. But what use is trying to lessen your own carbon footprint when big companies and airlines and cars are continuing to be the main cause of the trouble? Perhaps the best answer came from Bapuji’s own mother, who had no education but gave my grandfather a foundation in solid wisdom. She knew the ancient Indian and Greek philosophy (which was later refined to good science) that everything is made of small, discrete parts called atoms that come together to form everything around us. She taught him that “the atom reflects the universe.” From the smallest act to the largest, what we do in our own lives becomes a mirror for what the greater world will look like. Take care of your own surroundings, and the world will be a better place.

Affluence can solve many problems, but greed and insensitivity create many more. Bapuji didn’t need much more than a desk and a pencil and paper to inspire people and transform the world but most people now gather material goods at an alarming rate. We buy and buy and then don’t know what to do with all we have. An entire industry has arisen around helping people organize the stuff in their homes. The books and consultants (yes, there are organizing consultants!) usually say the first task is to throw away most of the stuff you’ve collected because you don’t need it. But this begs the real question: Why did you buy it in the first place?

Making purchases—whether shoes or sofas or diamond rings—may bring short-term gratification, but the pleasure fades quickly. We get used to what we have, so we turn around and buy more, hoping for a new thrill. But no amount of stuff can fill the empty space in our hearts. We need to learn that we will find much more joy in things we create than in things we buy and discard. When I was growing up in South Africa, our house was made of corrugated iron and wood, and it was slowly rotting away. There were gaping holes in the foundation at ground level that my dad tried to fix, but the patches never lasted long. We had no electricity, and in that snake-infested area, slithery creatures often found their way through the holes. I was always terrified when I got up to go to the bathroom at night.

Eventually my dad decided that we needed a new house. He brought home sand and cement so we could make the concrete blocks to use for building. We were so excited at the prospect that we all got involved in making those blocks and baking them in the sun. It took a whole year to build the house, and it felt like a huge accomplishment when we finally moved in. Sadly, that was the same month my grandmother, Bapuji’s wife, died; my father named the house in her honor: Kastur Bhavan (house of). I was very proud of that house because I was part of building it.

Bapuji didn’t need material goods to have an impact on the world; none of us does. The one time I tried to make myself more important by showing up with something expensive backfired on me in a humorous way. It occurred after my grandfather had died and Prime Minister Nehru invited me to join him for breakfast at his home.

Nehru and my grandfather had great respect for each other when they worked for India’s independence, and Bapuji considered it a great occasion when Nehru became the country’s first official prime minister. When my grandfather was assassinated, the prime minister gave a moving speech to the nation, saying, “The light has gone out of our lives and there is darkness everywhere.”

I appreciated that despite the pressures of his office, Prime Minister Nehru stayed close to our family after Bapuji died, and I was happy for the breakfast invitation. His daughter, Indira Gandhi, and her husband would be there too. (Despite the coincidence of the name, he was no relation to us.)

As I didn’t have a car then, I figured I would take a taxi. But my uncle, a well-to-do businessman, insisted that I must not arrive for breakfast with the prime minster in a lowly taxi. So he lent me one of his corporate limousines for the day, complete with a driver. When I arrived, Nehru wasn’t at breakfast, and I asked Indira where he was. She explained that he ate fast and he didn’t like to finish before everyone else and sit and wait, so he always arrived late so everyone would finish at the same time

At the breakfast we had a warm conversation about my grandfather and current politics. Nehru was working hard to mold a viable foreign policy and create some of India’s great educational institutions. (We didn’t know then that Indira would follow him for her own two terms as prime minister.)

Afterward Prime Minister Nehru and I stood outside talking, waiting for our cars to pick us up. His pulled up first. It was very small and unimposing, and right behind it came my huge limousine. Nehru was very familiar with my grandfather’s beliefs, and he looked at me in surprise. “Aren’t you embarrassed to have such a big car when mine is so much smaller?” he asked.

“I’m not embarrassed at all,” I replied. “You own your car, and mine is just borrowed.”

We both laughed, knowing that possessions don’t define us, whether they are large or small. What mattered for the prime minister was not the size of his car but the power of his ideas. And my uncle’s corporate limousine, no matter how extravagant, couldn’t change who I was.

The waste of resources that Bapuji described was just the beginning of the problem. Even more shocking is how we waste and exploit living creatures for our own aggrandizement. Wealthy hunters still travel to Africa to shoot beautiful leopards and lions and elephants for sport. A Minnesota dentist sparked international outrage a few years ago when he killed a black-maned lion named Cecil who was considered a national treasure in Zimbabwe. But he didn’t face any charges because the hunt had been perfectly legal. He had paid tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege of destroying a gorgeous animal. Some poor countries promote safaris as a source of revenue—but that doesn’t make it right to kill these creatures. Taking advantage of a struggling country by exploiting its resources is among the most violent kinds of waste.

Perhaps saddest of all is how we toss aside individuals as carelessly as I discarded my pencil nub. One day back in 1971, my wife and I were walking through the very busy streets of Bombay, heading home after a social visit. Then as now, Bombay was an overcrowded metropolis teeming with people rushing by as beggars stood in the gutters and vendors sold their wares on the streets. Garbage that had been tossed onto the road often sat festering and attracting bugs. I was walking with my eyes down so as not to step into something unpleasant when I noticed a bundle wrapped in a colored cloth. I stepped around it, but when I saw that it was wiggling I stopped and called out to Sunanda.

In the midst of all the activity around us, we cautiously knelt down and unwrapped the cloth. Inside was an emaciated baby girl, not even three days old. We looked around to see if someone might know anything about her, but nobody paid any attention to us. My wife guarded the child while I went to the nearest store to call the police. They took a while to come because this wasn’t an emergency to them, and they later told us they found abandoned babies often. They took the little bundle from my wife and said they would bring the child to the Government Remand Home, a state-run orphanage. I was working then as a reporter for the Times of India, a leading daily newspaper, and I asked if I could come along. They shrugged and said sure.

I suppose if you see anguish all the time, you stop noticing, but I was stunned to get to the home and see dozens and dozens of babies and children who had been lost, abandoned, or orphaned. The police told me they made some attempts to find the children’s parents or relatives, but the numbers were overwhelming and the success rate was less than 5 percent. The children languished and sometimes died. I wondered what would happen to the baby girl we had found. The matron of the home explained that malnourished baby girls seemed to have more resilience than the boys and a better chance of surviving.

Still, the children at the home didn’t have much hope. Staff were poorly paid and often stole money or took some of the food meant for the children. Because it was run by the government, this home at least had some oversight. In small towns and villages, the mortality rate at the orphanages approached 80 percent. If the children did survive, they were sent into the world at age eighteen, often without a soul they could turn to for help or protection. Many of the girls were lured into prostitution, and many of the boys ended up in gangs, where they learned to commit petty theft and slowly graduated to bigger crimes.

I had learned from Bapuji that waste is violence—and the waste of young lives seemed exactly the kind of passive violence he had tried to teach me about during the pencil escapade. I knew I needed to do something. I visited many orphanages and shelters. At one I was surprised to see a couple with blond hair and blue eyes holding a little Indian baby. Talking to them I discovered they were from Sweden and had started a complicated legal process to adopt the baby they were holding. They introduced me to a Swedish man named Leif who had already adopted an Indian baby and had come to help them with the process. They needed some protection because unscrupulous middlemen often intervened to make money off the babies.

Leif and I stayed in touch, and he convinced me that many other Swedish families would want to adopt babies, but they needed someone honest to help them through the process. Would I think about getting involved? I knew Bapuji would want me to say yes.

Over the next dozen years my wife and I found homes for 128 babies—placing some in Sweden, some in India, and one in France. Our experiences ranged from exhilarating to heartbreaking. We would get a baby assigned to a family, then place it in a private nursing home for the three months it took to complete the legal documentation. Our hope was that the baby would gain weight and become healthy. Usually we were lucky—but at least a dozen of the babies died. I wouldn’t abandon them; often I personally carried their tiny bodies to the cemetery and performed their last rites. Once I walked several miles through the streets to get to the nearest cemetery, thinking all the time of Bapuji saying that we must end the inequality in the world.

The families who got babies were often thrilled beyond measure. We met one Indian woman who had been told she was infertile and couldn’t have a child on her own. We found her a baby girl and she was ecstatic. She and her husband treated us as though we were divine spirits for bringing such joy to their marriage. Several months later we heard that she had unexpectedly become pregnant, and tests showed she would deliver a healthy baby boy.

Sunanda and I were happy for her, but we were also worried. Boys are held in high esteem in Indian households, and now the baby girl would face a double disadvantage, being both adopted and female. We fretted that she would be relegated to a secondary position or maybe even treated badly. So we decided to have a frank talk with the parents and suggest that we take back the baby girl.

“She is our princess,” cried the mother. “She brought us good luck and we love her. We will do anything to keep her.” She and her husband both started to weep, and we realized they were genuinely mortified. We had to remind ourselves that for all the waste and violence in the world, there is still much good. We stayed in touch with the parents and enjoyed watching both children growing up happily together.

Most of the adoptive parents kept in touch with us and sent us photographs of the babies. An exception was a couple in Paris, who cut all ties with us as soon as they had their baby girl. They never responded to our letters, and after a while we gave up and just sent prayers that all was well.

More than two decades later, I got a message through the M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence that a woman in France was trying to reach me. I had no idea who she was nor why she wanted to talk with me. She called again and left another message, begging me to call her, and so I did. The young woman, whose name was Sophie, told me that she had been adopted as a baby, but her parents would never discuss her background. Whenever she asked, they said, “That part of your life is unimportant, so just forget about it.” Now twenty-six years old, Sophie had recently rummaged through her father’s old papers and found a document with my name on it and dated the year she was born. She concluded that I might be her biological father, or at least would know something about her past. So she Googled me and tracked me down.

I realized that she was the baby we had given to the French couple all those years ago. We spoke for more than an hour, and she sobbed while I tried to give her whatever details I could about her past. She asked a lot of questions that I couldn’t answer because I didn’t have any paperwork to remind me of her case. In India, Sunanda and I had lived in a 350-square-foot apartment and didn’t have the luxury of hanging on to records. The consultants who help people organize their stuff wouldn’t have had much to do with us: we threw everything away after a few months.

Sophie called three more times during the week. Hearing my voice was nice, she said, but she really wanted to meet me. She would plan a trip to Rochester, New York, where I was then living. Two days later she called back crying; she had discovered how expensive the airline ticket was and she couldn’t afford it. But life takes happy twists too, and I had some good news. I had just been invited to speak at the Edinburgh Festival and would be in Scotland for a week. Getting there from Paris was surely less expensive.

And so in Edinburgh I spent a week getting to know this lovely young woman. She called me her “spiritual father,” and now we keep in touch regularly. I am glad to have her as one of my children.

I’d had a similar experience some years earlier when we had a reunion of the Indian babies who had gone to Sweden and were now in their teens. Many of them said they wanted my help in finding their biological parents. “Ever since we started going to school, we heard all the children speak about whose eyes they have and whose hair,” one explained to me. “We don’t know anything about our parents. We don’t know what we inherited from our mother and what from our father.” I had not thought much about that before; most of us take those details for granted, but they become important when you have been denied a connection to your past.

However, as with Sophie, I had to tell them that the records of their birth were gone—if there had ever been any—and there would be no easy way to find their biological parents.

“Then there is this reality,” I said. “Your biological mother took the painful decision of abandoning you in the hope that you would be able to have better lives. Maybe she was able to continue her education and is now doing well. That is what she would want for you too. We rescued you with good intentions. In the orphanage you might have died before you ever got to this age. Now you have loving parents and some happiness and security. If you think we made a mistake and ruined your life, then please forgive us.”

The children gathered around and hugged me and Sunanda, all of us weeping. One teenager asked permission to think of us as her grandparents, and we said yes. That led to another girl’s saying delightedly, “You’ve solved our problem! Now we can tell everyone we look like our grandparents.”

Some years later we had another reunion in Sweden; the children were now grown up, most of them married and with children of their own. As I looked at them I thought how precious each individual can be if we take the time to nurture and care for them. Because every action multiplies, the small steps my wife and I had taken mattered on a grander scale than we realized at the time.

The passive violence of waste can be just as destructive as physical violence. Sometimes it is tempting to think, “I am just one of seven billion people. What difference can I make?” We are all connected in a great network. At a time when violence is rampant—on our streets, in our thinking and our speech, and in global politics—and peace seems ever elusive, we must recognize that nonviolence involves much more than restraint of power and reckless anger. It is deeply nuanced and rooted in how we view the world and approach each act. Bapuji sent me back to find that pencil nub as a lesson that we need “to be the change we wish to see in the world.” If you don’t like waste and how it contributes to inequity, if you are stunned that CEOs in America now earn two hundred times as much as the average worker, you have to start by taking a personal stand.

Bapuji disliked waste of any kind, but he could also have a sense of humor about the few things he did consider worthless and not worth saving. While I lived with him on the ashram, one of my jobs was to help open the sacks full of mail that he received every day. It was an important assignment. Long before recycling was in vogue, he practiced it every day. I was taught to pry apart each envelope carefully so that he could write his reply on the blank side and save paper.

Bapuji was in the midst of all the controversy that surrounded the potential independence of India from Great Britain. When he was at the Round Table Conference in 1931 discussing the future of India, a British official gave him a fat envelope. That night Bapuji read the letter inside, which was full of vitriol and misstatements. He removed the pin holding the pages together and saw that no page had enough blank space for a reply, so he threw them all away.

The next morning the official asked Grandfather if he had read the letter and what his response was.

“I saved the two most precious things in the letter,” Bapuji replied, “the envelope and the pin holding the pages. The rest was garbage.”

We laughed at the story, but it held a deeper truth. Bapuji worried that we waste our minds on things that don’t matter and forget to study what’s really important. He had no time for rancor and acrimony.

I sometimes think how much more Bapuji could have done had he lived a little longer. He felt deeply the need to fill his every moment with something that mattered, but he had the wisdom to know that we can’t predict how much time we will have. The ultimate and most violent waste is to squander any part of our day. At the ashram he had me keep a precise schedule, and my days from the time I woke up until the moment I went to sleep were carefully planned out. Now, as I get older, I understand even more completely what he meant when he told me, “Time is too precious to waste.”