The Butterfly Effect

[Music]

a seven-year-old girl looking at orchard

street for the very first time

i had never seen something so beautiful

it was christmas i had never

ever heard christmas carols before yes

my first trip to a foreign land

singapore i am 49 now

and i have these three precious memories

of singapore

number one escalators oh my god my

brother and i have spent the entire

holiday running up

on a down escalator please don’t try

that i think it’s banned now those were

our days your days are fortnight and

pubg

second is 50 shades of ice cream

i had ever only seen white brown

and pink and the third is my father

giving me

bubble yum yes chewing gum was allowed

in singapore at that time

and then telling me don’t throw the

rapper on the street i will get fined

what no one had ever told me

that i cannot litter on the streets

wow finds work and third

why don’t we do that in india so

no i did not become an activist no i did

not create reforms no i did not change

but what i did think was that if i

for seven days could take garbage stuff

it into my pockets stuff it onto my

knapsack

then there is no way i’m going to litter

my country

the brunt was of course borne by my

immediate family

and then my cousins i think during my

summer holidays my cousins would just

run away from me

and one of them even nicknamed me when i

went to singapore

coincidentally he lives in singapore now

so

this moment of mine that one thought

one fine impacted me my family

my extended family and then my friends

in college

i had to use a different strategy

because no way are they going to listen

to my tantrums

so i started shaming them

into stopping to throw garbage

what i did was i told them once if they

didn’t listen i went and i picked up the

garbage myself

and yes change did happen now you see

how it has grown

from me my family to my friends

cut to many years later i am 23 now i’ve

just got married and i’ve shifted into

this

large building with 56 families

and of course here comes holi my most

favorite festival

and why is it my favorite because it’s

in the month of march and march is the

time when you have final exams and yay i

don’t study on holi

so it still remained my favorite

festival and it is a very very tiring

festival because

you are eating the whole day you’re

drinking the whole day you’re dancing

the whole day you’re playing the whole

day

and by five o’clock you’re ready to drop

dead

but no at five o’clock i would get up

and i would pick up

all the garbage in the garden i did not

care about

whose garbage was it who littered why am

i the only person

and i continued picking up that garbage

and soon i saw

that everyone started helping me and now

it’s a culture

every holi even if people have gone home

had a shower they come down and they

help me pick up garbage

and one of my friends and my neighbors

utra she said hey let’s start

segregating garbage so we did all the

right things we bought this large

drum we spoke to the garbage collectors

we educated the house help we put all

the tick marks we got infographic

pictures

and you would think it works right hell

no it

did not work so what do i do

i start going with the garbage

collectors to collect garbage

every single morning for a month and i

now know

how many bottles of vine mrs bhatia

drowns and mr and mrs shah

say that they are vegetarian oh my god i

know exactly what i saw in their bins

so yes it did work to a certain extent

we had actually even got grey dust bins

and green dust bins and taught them

properly how to segregate garbage

but when i saw that it wasn’t having the

impact i started telling the house help

hey

can you please wake up the lady of the

house i need to speak to her

yes yes i know it is 9 30 really early

in the morning

but she needs to get out of bed so she

comes with all the nicest

hello how are you kiss case hug hug

what’s up with you

i said hey please can you really help us

we need to segregate

voila it’s done i think it’s done

because a the household did not want the

lady of the house waking up so early in

the morning and b should not she did not

want to be disturbed

so now i know you are calling me garbage

woman

but no i am changing the current

just the same way sabi changed the

current a dear friend of mine

extremely artistic said let’s go for a

walk

in the streets of bandra to watch the

street out or to see the street art

so 14 of us close friends we are walking

down the streets and we suddenly notice

the number of trees that are dead

we said we need to bring awareness so we

started

painting trees all around the area of

course dead trees

all around the area to bring awareness

and people started noticing that how

come these trees are dead

right outside plots that need to be

reconstructed

and redeveloped soon

the bmc chopped off all our beautiful

trees

no problem where can you stop any woman

no one has

so we started planting and we started

planting trees all over the places where

we had painted trees

the slide that you see right now are two

trees that were painted right outside

jamnabai

and here we have planted two trees

we have planted 400 trees in jehu and i

personally have planted 34 trees

on the fourth road and one day uh during

the monsoon day when i was planting

a tree i realized that my older daughter

is going to leave me and go away to

college and i said hey

why not let her plant a tree and grow

her roots into the city

i convinced her and 50 of her friends to

plant

friendship any trees in the jehu garden

and now today if you walk into the jew

garden

you will see 50 gorgeous frangipani

trees

so the point is to get noticed

and we did get noticed we got a lot of

media coverage

so what i’m trying to tell you is

whether you do it for a cause

whether you do it for your snapchat

story or your streak or your insta story

or you do it for a picture in the paper

just do it change the current

now in 2008 i joined

a gorgeous organization called cmca

children’s movement for civic awareness

this is an organization which teaches

students

active citizenship we know the

government is with us but we need to

make the government

work for us and here is the real here is

the time when i realized

that what an impact children can have

on the governance of this country and i

also realized what an

impact a teacher can have on the lives

so this is a time

where we teachers can really make a

difference

we are the ones changing the current for

our future

so during this time i was teaching in

four schools and

i was trudging along to billabong on a

rainy day and all those anyone here who

lives in jihoo

yes so you know exactly what happens

when it rains in jihoo and how flooded

it gets

i ruined three pairs of my shoes going

to teach that class and it was voluntary

right so and i was teaching them how to

file an rti

so i walk into class and i say okay guys

today is a day we’re going to save my

shoes

and of course they all look at me like

okay they’re in the eighth grade so they

look at me and saying crazy woman but i

say no we need to just

save my shoes we need to file an rti and

we are asking the government

to fill up those goddamn potholes there

and raise the level

lo and behold my shoes were never

wet again this is an impact

that now i have made locally

cmca has actually made an impact

nationally in karnataka

lots and lots of villages there was this

little girl called lavanya in her

village

there were no toilets as in there were

no attached toilets to her house but of

course the field had

superb human manure so she’s learned

through cmca that the government

has funded the panchayats to construct

attached toilets she goes home very

excited tells her father her father says

please go to sleep

do not waste my time i am tired things

like this don’t happen

so what does little lavanya do she

starts a

non-violent protest she stops eating

her father must be saying god knows why

i sent my little girl child to a crazy

school

to learn crazy nonsense but he

eventually

and my mother must be freaking out and

things like that he eventually goes

and a toilet is constructed

she dances tells her friends and my

friends 60 toilets were constructed

in her village news spread to other

villages

and now lavanya has become the brand

ambassador of the swachh

do you see how me my family

my community my locality and now my

nation

one thought an idea spreading so there

is this

documentary that we always made all our

students at cmcsc my most favorite

documentary it is by our

late president dr abdul kalam it’s a

letter written in 2017.

please i suggest you keep your bottle of

water ready with you because this

always makes me thirsty so it’s a letter

written in 2017 and it goes

when i was five years old my father and

i

used to wash the car with a hose pipe my

children

cannot believe we wasted water like that

i am 50 years old and am the oldest man

alive on earth

our kidneys don’t function properly our

life expectancy is 35 years old

sorry our life expectancy is 35

and a 20 year old looks like a 40 year

old

during our times we were supposed to

drink eight glasses of water

today we barely get half a glass

women had long beautiful hair

today we are all bald because we need to

keep it clean

it is very probable that you will be

killed on the streets

if you’re carrying a jerichan of water

there are water wars everywhere and

water is more coveted

than gold and silver my children

listened to stories of my youth where i

used to play in the fields

swim in the lakes boat on the dams

and they ask me dad where has the water

gone

i get a lump in my throat and i answer

i don’t know where but i know why

why the water has gone is because i did

not pay attention to the posters outside

my classroom

that said save water please

pick up your bottles have a sip right

now i just need to tell you

that as on saturday water has gone on to

the futures market in california

i also want to show you a couple of

slides

and i know i am sharing the space with

methapatkar

and baby greta but i just don’t know

how to say what can i do so this that

you see here

is an iceberg it is called alpha 68

alpha

it has detached itself from the

antarctic and it’s floating into

the atlantic ocean it is four thousand

eight hundred kilometers long

it is going to get caught very soon on

the low reefs

of saint george’s islands and then

you know what’s going to happen some

ecological damage

food chains getting skewed and of course

you don’t want me to give you a lecture

about

what happens if the food chains are

skewed in our school

we have started this club an

environmental club

called ecotopia

there’s a moment in your bones when

when the fire takes over blood is

running

heart is pumping as the battle gets

closer

[Music]

they can say what they want now

[Music]

it of course has many many little sub

clubs to it and we are going to change

and help change the

environment with it but my favorite two

are the movie club

because in every class you will look at

them

and there will be fifty percent of the

students who say do i have to lift the

spin

so yes this club is for them they can

come

watch movies we will watch movies like

water world we will sensitize these

children

so that they know this problem is real

so that tomorrow when they become

politicians or

or or big ceos they know climate change

is real

and the second is the thrift shop we

want to change the narrative

why is it oh man i’m wearing a versace

so cool

and not hey this is monikazz and this is

rachel’s

so let us make it a thrift

world and let thrift be good why are we

looking

at governments and industrialists to

change this environment

we know governments have to win

elections we know willing elections they

need money we know industrial let’s

provide money

so change the narrative it has to begin

with a you so this lady you see here she

is my mother-in-law she is 80 years old

and of course she found out

from the best possible knowledge source

whatsapp

that take this plastic bottle cut up all

your wafer packets biscuit packets and

stuff it into it

she started doing it to recycle my

question is why

i am sure in her lifetime the climate

and the planet is not going to change

is she doing it for her grandchildren is

she doing it for a legacy oh i’m leaving

earth to my grandkids or is she doing it

just like the seven-year-old me because

she can why are we cutting a birthday

cake

on our birthday why are we not taking a

pledge

for the environment every birthday i am

not going to take the elevator two

floors up

i am going to wear thrift clothes i am

going to take a

bucket bath once a week i will go

vegetarian for a week a day

a month whatever why are we not taking

pledges

if the average age of man is 75 years

and we start taking a pledge at the age

of 60 it’s 65 pledges into 365 days

into 7 billion people

let’s change the narrative from

what can i do to what can i do and i do

my best thank you thank you very much

and thank you for being here today