It’s a message that will greatly annoy a rag-picker, especially a rag-picker who can read English. “We do not produce garbage,” says the door of Kaustubh Tamhankar, clearly establishing that the head of the family here is not exactly normal. The Thane based factory owner has fitted a grinder below a sink, which crushes garbage thrown into it. The mixture is then transferred to a small vermiculture basket and covered with a layer of dry soil. Earthworms thrive on this waste and help fertilise the soil. “I call this basket an Akshaypatra as the basket has been fed with garbage everyday but it has never been full.” The manure produced by the earthworms in this vermiculture basket is then used to grow plants. Though, for the past four years, the rag-picker hasn’t knocked on Tamhankar’s door, he has not severed all ties with him. Tamhankar cleans empty milk packe t s after use and sells them to pickers for recycling. “Plastic is not polluting in itself. It is our way of disposal that is polluting,” he says wisely.
   Tamhankar is part of a rising urban tribe who are taking extreme measures to save the world. Girish Shah, a diamond trader in Mumbai, keeps the lights off in his home for reasons far removed from economy. “I wanted to lead a chemical-free life,” says Shah, who found the answer in a chance history of the world. “I was inspired by how people lived before chemicals were even invented.”
    Guests at Shah’s house do not ring the doorbell. They pull a string attached to a bell. They are then ushered into a thousand two hundred square foot house with cowdung flooring. The
    walls are limestone. The Rajawadi furniture is finished with linseed oil instead of Fevicol. This house has no t e l ev i s i o n , washing machine, refrigerator any of the f a m o u s gadgets. And his kitchen is steel free. Metal utensils in his house have been chosen for their properties. “Copper is for boiling
    water, bronze for heating and brass for cooking,” he says. Cockroaches and insects are warded off with a traditional mixture of burnt neem leaves and cowdung cakes. He also wears hand stitched vegetable dyed shirts to office, which he claims are healthy for the body and light on the pocket.
    While a common feature of this extreme clan is an unmistakable love for the past, some do take things far. Mithun Shah from Ahmedabad is an image from history. He is always in a dhoti, kurta and pagdi. And his organic food shop has not seen electricity since 2001. At home, he uses manually ground sesame oil and diyas for lighting. He prefers to sit on the floor, commutes to work on a bicycle, brushes his teeth with neem wood, writes on slate and pen. Plastic is unthinkable. “When I visit the market, I always take a cloth bag. If I forget, I carry the stuff back home in my pockets.”
    His mother Ila proudly attributes her good health in the last four years to her organic kitchen. “If we can spend a hundred rupees a month on a movie, can’t we spare the same amount for our long term benefits? As a bonus, we are saving the earth too,” she says.
Simplicity in today’s world is costly and the children of the soil brigade are putting good money to get their way, even if this form of austerity is usually a post retirement phase. Sixty two year old R Rajagopalan’s Bangalore home is built on a foundation of a huge plastic bag waste pile collected from the neighbourhood. In the house built chiefly with mud, energy consuming elements like burnt bricks, cement and steel are minimal or absent. The entire ground floor has vaulted roof since domes and vaults minimise the use of cement.
    The mud walls he says saves his family from the electromagnetic radiation from overhead power lines. Thick rammed-earth walls stand on the side facing power lines. He also harvests rain water.
    Rajagopalan makes it a point to use the waste water from washing machine for toilets. An eight lamp solar lighting system and a solar water heater at his home ensure use of renewable energy. Waste material has been put to the best use as bathroom walls have patterns out of broken tiles and the garage roof has discarded computer keyboards in the filler slab. “I did not want to add just one more brick and concrete house to the Bangalore skyline,” he says.
    Finding innovative ways of befriending the environment is an unavoidable feature in the methods of such people. Parthasarathy, owner of a software consultancy enterprise in Secunderabad, has converted his backyard into a bio farm that includes vermicomposting, organic manures, rainwater harvesting and mulching. In mulching, leaves and flowers that get dropped from trees are collected around the base of a plant. This helps conservation of surface water near the roots by arresting evaporation and encourages propagation of earthworms. His love for animals has also seen him develop a water pit for stray dogs and birds.
    There are many like them, living on the periphery of blind city life, their every action measured with thought for the third rock from the sun. They are spending good money on a quaint life, sacrificing the pleasures that come with living like ‘others’, bearing the guffaws and sceptic smirks of friends and foes. In the end, at least they can say, they lived their way.