My yoga teacher inspired us yesterday to dedicate our practice to the Earth in honour of Earth Day. To make one simple change in our life so that we may tread a little lighter on this groaning planet. So I thought I’d share a list of 10 things that we have done in our home to try and be better stewards of the Earth:

1. Take your own bags for grocery shopping. This is so easy and yet I hardly ever see people carrying their own shopping bags. The thin plastic bags our street vendors use are the worst kind. They have very little reusability and tend to get stuck in storm drains, and end up in the ocean. I don’t want to judge, but there is just NO excuse for not doing this because it is SO unquestionably easy to do.
2. Take your own dabbas! I still get a good chuckle out of our local shopkeepers on this one but most of them are now used to it. Fish. Meat. Rice. Dry Fruits. Coconut Water. And occassionaly dahi. So far, those are the things that I now take my own dabbas for. So no plastic packaging for any of those. Hoping to find a place I can get my dals and lentils directly refilled into my dabbas too.
3. Don’t take-out. We are not perfect in this area but the fact that take-out food often comes in one-use packaging has really pushed me to be more organised about cooking all of our meals. I will also make sure there is enough food to pack a lunch for Robert in his glass dabba that he takes to work. If you must, remind your favourite restaurant not to send any of the additional condiments (pickle, salad, sauce, lemon slices, etc) that come in little plastic bags or tiny dabbas that you can’t really reuse. Reuse the foil wrapping, and plastic dabbas or make sure that they are cleaned, dried and go directly to your radhiwala, not in the garbage bin.
4. Cook! From scratch. Yes, it takes more time and organisation and a little bit of skill that really just comes from practice but your body will thank you for cutting out all that sugar and salt heavy packaged foods and your dry waste bin will be emptier too.
5. Separate your waste. We know this is kind of redundant because as of now, we don’t have the option of home-composting and it all gets mixed up anyways but the waste does get separated because we have a huge informal recycling industry. Unfortunately, the way it gets separated is that our garbage collectors literally stand in all of our muck to separate the reusables from the kitchen and/or other waste that we throw into one plastic bag. Put yourself in the non-existent shoes and protective gear of that man or woman for one moment and separate.your.waste. Collect your kitchen scraps/waste in a large bowl through the day and wrap in a newspaper at the end of the day. Have a separate bin for dry waste which doesn’t need to have a plastic bag lining.
6. Make your own toothpaste! Mix organic, cold-pressed coconut oil (we like Conscious Food for their packaging), baking soda, and clove oil and ta-da, squeaky clean teeth without any iffy chemicals and those pesky plastic tubes that can’t be reused for much. Our dentist totally approves of our homemade concoction by the way. Oh, and while you’re at it, make your own deodorant too!
7. Buy organic. As much as possible. But steer clear of the fancy outlets like Nature’s Basket that individually plastic wraps their produce. Find a local organic market (we LOVE our Farmers’ Market). Organic farming is so much more energy efficient than conventional farming and so much better for our farmers too. Yes, it is a little more expensive that your regular market but perhaps channel the money budgeted for a new unnecessary gadget into spending a few extra rupees for a healthier you and a healthier planet? It’s so worth it.No organic where you live? Buy local. Not oranges from California or Lemongrass from Thailand. It takes ridiculous amounts of energy and chemicals for this produce to get to you seemingly fresh. Bad for your health and bad for the planet. Better yet, if you have the space, grow your own vegetables!
8. Switch to natural or homemade soaps and cleaning products. So far, we’ve managed to switch to cleaner detergent and soaps (no plastic packaging!) from Rustic Art and simple vinegar + baking soda +essential oils for cleaning kitchen counters/floors. We mindlessly dump so many toxins into our water everyday. It’s worth thinking about the ingredients and chemicals that go into making commercial cleaning products. CommonOxen has a great resource list of common dirty chemicals to look out for and why on their website.
9. Ladies, switch to the cup to deal with Aunt Flo’s monthly visits. Apart from being plastic-heavy, disposable sanitary napkins and tampons, are factory produced, bleached and have all sorts of chemicals that you really don’t want coming near your lady-parts. There are many many benefits to the menstrual cup. Here’s a good start!
10. Never, ever drink bottled water. I am so anal about this, I would rather go thirsty than buy a bottle of water. But it’s all recycled by our super productive recycling industry, right? Actually, mostly these bottles get downcycled and it’s still plastic that is going to end up in a landfill where it will stay for hundreds of years. Apart from that, apparently it takes 1.39 litres of water to produce one liter of bottled water. And the big companies like Coca-Cola and Pepsi that produce this water are infamous for sucking the ground dry for their operations in already vulnerable areas around the world. Consider that your purchase of bottled ‘mineral’ water (and in fact all the other sugar-laden drinks produced by companies like CocaCola) sometimes forces villagers in places like Mehdigunj to have to walk a mile longer to access any water at all as their wells run ever drier. So remember to fill up your own reusable bottle before you leave home and stay away from mineral water like it’s the plague… because it kind of is like the plague.

It took a couple of days for it to get through my head that I just had to be who I am. The truth of how I kind of stumbled and fell into this photography stuff that I love, with all my emotions and random, yet passionate dreams that I honestly don’t know what to do with sometimes. I have no five-year-plan. Heck, I don’t even have a five-day-plan.

And the irony is the very people I admire and who inspire me are the ones who remind me time and again, to. be. myself.

So I wrote and I re-wrote and this is what transpired:

1. After finally making it to shoot another Creative Mornings event last weekend, I’ve had this burning desire to paint. Thanks to Prashant Miranda whose daily visual journal keeping inspired me to no end. I am a journal keeper too but for some reason it has become hard to write down my life lately and I’ve tried many times to start photographically journaling my days, but let’s just say when you are constantly working to organise your clients’ thousands of photographs, on a computer, the last thing you want to do is add more photographs. It’s unfortunate and I haven’t given up but it’s just not a good time right now.

Anyway, so I mentioned this to the hubs who tried to convince me to attend Prashant’s watercolour workshop yesterday, to which I answered, “I don’t even have any painting supplies!” Well, the man needs no more motivation to immediately look up the timings of his favourite art supplies store and we are off… to VT. About an hour later, we have emerged with a tiny metal box of watercolour paints, a few brushes and some beautiful paper.

My painting experiments may never be shown to another soul on the planet but God, I love how that colour spreads from the brush to the paper at different patterns and rates depending on the amount of pressure or water you apply. It’s magical.

This may be another of my whims but the good thing is the hubs is an artist with a lot of experience in painting and he tells me the paints will last us a good ten years and if by then, I have lost my interest, so help me God, our children shall paint.

2. Having satisfied the inner artists in us, we headed to Crawford market to satisfy my other the not-so-new-nor-secret passion. Food. More specifically cheese. One day, on one of my googling adventures, I came across a blog listing a place at the market where they sell really high quality cheese at wholesale prices. So of course, I had to check this out and while we didn’t find the exact same shop, we did find a wholesale cheese seller and it’s pretty much a piece of heaven. They have every cheese that I have ever heard of and it’s delicious and 30-40% cheaper than what you’d find at regular stores. It’s called Legend, shop # 118, 3rd Lane, Fruit Section, Crawford Market. You’re welcome.

3. Some weeks ago, a friend invited us to the book launch of Room 000 by Kalpish Ratna at the Maharashtra Mitra Mandal Library (aka Mcubed Library) in Bandra. We were intrigued. Both by the book and the venue. A library?! In Bandra?! How had we never heard of/seen this before?!

So of course we went and it was a fantastic event and we came back with a great book but best of all, the sweet sweet knowledge of this library. It is primarily a children’s library to which they quite recently added a ‘Grown Up’ section where you will find a fantastic selection of books, both fiction and non-fiction. I was most excited about the fiction section because I grew up a lover of fiction books and then married this man who has about 200 books in different sizes and shapes, none of which are fiction. So I started reading non-fiction and I love it but I also still love to escape into the world of fictional characters but a) we have not enough place in the world to call our own for both of us to keep buying books (yes, I’ve tried reading on a Kindle and I.just.don’t.like.it) and b) I usually don’t read a fictional book twice so a library is our perfect solution!

I can keep reading my stories while we limit book collection to non-fictions that we know we will keep going back to.

Words cannot describe how glad my heart is to have found this library.

And that is all for now.

So it was after a lot of patient waiting that I finally convinced the man that we needed to go to Goa. And I think I might have been successful in converting him to a beach lover. When I asked him if we could do this at least once a year, he said, “let’s do it twice!”

Mission accomplished.

Thanks to suggestions from some friends we found a super reasonable place to stay on Agonda Beach. Quiet, relatively empty and super peaceful. We basically just sat out on the beach all day reading, sleeping, staring at the constant ebb and flow of the ocean. Exactly what our flu-ridden, and tired-of-breathing-Bombay’s-polluted-air lungs and souls needed.

We are so grateful to have this beauty (inside and out) as a friend.

Your adventurous soul inspires me, friend.

This was SO much fun!

One of my many varied and somewhat unusual interests is Birth. And whenever I start to talk about this, or folks come to our apartment and see Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth lying on the couch, or I post stuff about Birth on Facebook, I get suspicious looks and awkward questions…

“So, are you like, planning to have a baby?”

“Do you have news!?”

“Is there something you want to tell us?”

The answer is no.

Not yet.

I definitely want to have many babies (although even the thought of more than two causes the husband to start palpitating) and someday live on a farm (organic of course).

Just kidding about the last part. Kind of.

So yes, I’m interested in Birth. Yes, it’s because I want to have babies and I want to educate myself on what pregnancy and giving birth is really like but honestly, my interest in Birth has its roots in a much deeper place in me. A place that thirsts for truth and beauty and from what I have learnt so far (from the non-sensational sources), there’s a lot of truth and beauty to be found in Birth.

The workshop was a Waterbirth Workshop organised by a group of midwives serving in Mumbai (JustLink Health Services) and conducted by these two amazing women:

Barbara Harper (right) – Founder of Waterbirth International and Dianne Garland – Clinical Governance Director at Waterbirth International. These two women, over the course of 14 long hours in the basement of one of Mumbai’s best Childcare hospitals (Surya Childcare), totally blew my mind.

I was really nervous about the workshop because it’s been a pretty long time since I was in a learning environment and honestly, I wasn’t sure I would make it through two days of well… listening. I would also probably be the most unlikely student at this workshop (not a doctor, not a birth professional, not an expecting parent!) Also, dumb as this may sound, I thought I knew quite a bit about birth already from my reading and how much more stuff can there be to know?

Yeah, that last presumption was pretty dumb because the truth is that Birth is so freaking blow-your-mind beautifully complex and amazing that even after 14 hours of learning, I think we probably only touched the surface of this mystery. As Barbara closed off the workshop on Sunday evening, she asked, “so do you have any questions? Cause I could go on for days”. That coming from a woman with some 30+ years of midwifery experience pretty much says it all.

But I didn’t just take away a whole lot of knowledge that I previously lacked from this workshop. It really impacted me in a profound way which my husband will testify to because of course I came home at the end of both days, almost breathlessly narrating as much of it as I could to him. At the end of day two, I was so overwhelmed that I came home and cried. Not out of tiredness (which I was) or sadness (so many women are denied the experience of this beauty) but out of sheer reverence for the amazing design of birth. Birth is poetry, and dance, and music.

Birth is a reminder that there is purpose in everything and we only have to be still and trust.

I don’t want to go into too many details about the course but if there are five things that I want everyone to think about regarding Birth, they are:

1. Don’t trust media’s representation of birth. Media loves to hype things up and sensationalise everything. As Ina May puts it:

Commercial TV feeds on the sensational and the danger-charged moment. Women who have little real knowledge of what birth can be are especially vulnerable to the negative messages embedded in these dramas. Women and girls raised on this sort of thing without a source of more accurate knowledge learn to equate labour pain with danger. Pain is portrayed as if it could be fatal.

2. Each and every baby only gets ONE entrance into the world. We have to strive to make it a gentle and welcoming one. Childbirth has great significance on all parties but can have a lasting impact on the child’s life, even into adulthood.

3. “Childbirth is not a football match” – Barbara Harper

Women don’t need to be shouted at to PUSH and yelled at as if she is an athlete at the end of a race. Vaginas and the hormones of birth are shy. They need privacy and a calm environment to open up and guide the baby out.

4. Statistics for rising numbers of C-sections around the world are pretty horrific. In some places in India, more than half of all births are delivered by C-section which is shockingly higher than the WHO recommended 10-15%. C-sections are convenient and often more profitable for doctors but it’s major surgery which definitely should not be conducted unless absolutely necessary. Babies learn to express resilience and so many essential reflexes through naturally moving through the birth canal. Doctors are doing a grave injustice by denying them this chance and being dishonest to mothers about their real options.

Look out for ‘cascading interventions’. Induction by synthetic hormonal injections leads to more painful contractions which leads to epidurals, which leads to other interventions, which often end up in the C-section you really didn’t want. Ladies, trust your instincts and seek out care-providers who give you the time and attention you need!

5. Don’t fight gravity. This is probably the simplest fact about birth that started me off on this journey of learning about midwifery care and Birth. Gravity aids your body and the baby to move down the birth canal and yet hospitals usually want you laying in a bed, legs up in the air, pushing with all your force against gravity. Think about it.

BIG Thank You to JustLink Health Services (Lina Duncan, Nhing Castillo and Rekha Gurung) for organising this workshop! And of course the staff and doctors of Surya Childcare.

So looking forward to putting my photography skills to good use to change the negative messages of Birth perpetuated by media.

There’s been a lot of eating of Kimchi around here. Mostly, nay all of it by me. In my defense, Rob’s been busy, traveling and working long days so there hasn’t been much opportunity for me to share the goodness with him. And boy is it good.

I remember Kimchi from my boarding school days. One of my best friends and once room-mate would bring it back to the dorm from home after the holidays and we would feast on the stuff. The association of Kimchi to my teenage years is so strong that it’s like a comfort food to me now. So you can imagine that I was like in food HEAVEN on my trip to South Korea for said friend’s wedding in July 2013.

I am constantly amazed by food (as you can probably tell by how frequently this is the topic of my blog posts.) Now that I am finally back in Bombay in a fully functional apartment again, I am having a lot of fun in the kitchen. Every day is like an experiment. And as I wrote on Facebook earlier this week…

My unofficial resolution for this year is to spend more (not less) time in the kitchen. A resolution inspired by one of my favourite writers on the topic of food – Michael Pollan. When I started cooking in earnest to keep myself and the hubs alive and healthy, I was delighted to find that even in this boxed-in concrete jungle of a city, I could be inspired and awed by the amazingness of creation in my kitchen. In the deep red of beets. The geometry of bhindi. The antibiotic power of ginger. Food is healing, humbling and inspiring. And I want to unleash more of that magic in my life, not less…

As Pollan says, “…it is entirely possible that, within another generation, cooking a meal from scratch will seem as exotic an ambitious – as “extreme” – as most of us today regard brewing beer or baking a loaf of bread or putting up a crock of sauerkraut.

When that happens – when we no longer have any direct personal knowledge of how these wonderful creations are made – food will have become completely abstracted from its various contexts: from the labour of human hands, from the natural world of plants and animals, from imagination and culture and community. Indeed, food is already well on its way into that ether of abstraction, toward becoming mere fuel or pure image…

…the best way to recover the reality of food, to return it to its proper place in our lives, is by attempting to master the physical processes by which it has traditionally been made.”

I definitely have an intellectual crush on Michael Pollan. He writes so clearly and seriously and somehow manages to make you laugh at the same time.

So this week I am grateful for Michael Pollan and Kimchi. Yes.

Photo by Niranjan R

As for one year of marriage… well, it kind of feels like nothing and so much all at the same time. I mean how do I sum up what it’s been like being married to my favourite guy in the whole world?

It’s been a little bit of everything. Life has been fun and hard and easy and frustrating and extravagant and low-key and enjoyable and painful and I am SO looking forward to as many more years as life will grant us of this life in abundance with Robert D Stephens.

And finally, one year on… some of my favourites from our wedding day – 15 December 2013

(Also, HAPPY HAPPY ANNIVERSARY to my brother and D, with whom we share this awesome day!)

Anyone else shocked that it’s November? I am. How can it already be closing the end of 2014?

Anyway, wedding season is upon us once again so the next couple of months are going to be pretty intense which I am excited about and also kinda nervous about. Treating my body with respect by eating healthy is kinda hard when you are frequenting weddings!

Still, I am grateful for

// LOTS of weddings coming up! Also lots of traveling. This month, weddings in Ranchi, Chennai, Bangalore and Jaipur! Phew.

// The wedding that Gen and I just shot this week in Vashi. It was my first South Indian wedding in a long time and I have to say I love all the intricacies of South Indian weddings and I am constantly amazed by how every part of India has it’s own little cultural signature in weddings. Of course, the difference between a great and an awesome wedding is made by the client and this one was most certainly in the ‘awesome’ category.

// Second hand book shops. I love book shops in general but with the bombardment of online shopping, book stores are becoming increasingly abysmal in their collections. After running some errands for Rob’s upcoming exhibition*, we stepped into Kitab Mahal at Flora Fountain and I went through a range of emotions in that beautiful space. First, excitement because I found a cookbook (Clean Eats; see below) that I’ve been wanting to buy at a discounted price, then disappointment because they practically had no stock of any of Vandana Shiva’s books that I was looking for, and then amused-disbelief at an expensive hard-cover glossy book about the band One Direction right at the front section. I guess this is what bookstores have to do to stay in business nowadays?

Anyway, so after we left the store, we headed over the second-hand book stalls on the street. This may be Rob’s favourite place in all of Bombay. In the storage under our bed is a massive collection of old books, many of which were bought at Flora’s bookstalls. I wasn’t too convinced that I would find what I was looking for but I did end up buying three books and I am now all set for the many hours of plane rides and sleeps at hotels this month!

// Clean Eats by Alejandro Junger. I’ve been on a kind of mission to figure out food these days. For general well-being and also trying to get to the bottom of some specific issues. I may be a little obsessed but the thing is once I know something my conscience makes it pretty hard for me to ignore. I believe our bodies are sacred ground and we are responsible to take care of them and eating responsibly is a HUGE part of that. Here’s a quote from the book that I really liked:

“Food is more than just calories; it’s information. And that information plays a much greater role than just providing us fuel for energy. Every bite we eat contains information that tells our genes how to express themselves. Food literally has the ability to turn our good “genes” on and our “bad” genes off…

The role food plays in telling our bodies how to “show up” is deep. Every year, through new research, we’re learning that the relationship is even deeper than we could have ever imagined.”

*This is the exhibition.Do mark it in your calendars! We would love to see you there.