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
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