hoarding all the way...!

ever wondered why indians keep hoarding stuff in the house? it seems so difficult to throw out things well past their sell-by date; so unimaginable to give away stuff you dont use but may still be useful to others; and unacceptable to to take stuff to the tip and get rid of them for good.

everything starts with yoghurt containers. now, why does my wife carefully wash them and keep them stacked in a corner in the kitchen?

"well, they are the best containers when guests want a take-away after a meal at our house!" she grins, when i question her.

she also has other stuff that keeps accumulating. a bottle contains rubber-bands that she carefully peels from packaging, another box contains gift wraps that she carefully unwraps in a crease-free manner and stacks for future re-use, and a corner in the garden shed contains stacks of old disused pots that hasnt seen daylight for decades.

when i try to throw some of these away for good, she gives me a stern look and admonishes me with a curt retort, "it's all about recycling and being eco-friendly. don't you think that reusing this stuff will save the planet's resources?"

my son on the other hand hoards toys, balls and coloured pencils. it doesn't matter if the toys are broken and unuseable, if the football is punctured and has lost its bounce, or if the coloured pencil has lost its stub and cannot be used again. they pile up in a corner in his room gathering a bit of dust and all of his unidvided attention.

if I do try to throw any of his stuff, he would look at me in great anguish and with as much seriousness as a five year old could possibly muster and say something like, "daddy, i love my transformer, please dont throw it away. Pleeease?".

of course, i would have to sigh and change my mind.

my father is a completely different hoarder. he loves trinkets and tools. if he dismantles an old table to throw away, he would carefully remove all the nuts and bolts and keep them sealed in a plastic bag in the garage. if he discovered a piece of string or a wire lying around in the house, he would roll it up neatly, label it correctly and store it efficiently in a carboard box kept for knick-knacks.


the amount of junk he accumulates leaves me breathless. if i do question him on the utter uselessness of hoarding so much junk, he would just look away quite conveniently or look busy changing channels on the tv.

last month, the tap in my bathroom broke. the plumber said that it was an old model for which no one manufactured a washer that needed to go under the tap. my father just raised his eyebrows, quitely rummaged through his pile of junk in the garage, and marched triumphantly in with the plastic washer that was an exact fit.

my mother, who is an avid reader of books, hoards just that. old books, brown books, colourful books, torn books, used books, unread books, dog-eared books, crisp and clean books, and i-dont-know what other category of books sit on a shelf in her room. i thought she might like to give some of the books she had already read to charities like OXFAM. but no, she loves her books and wouldnt dream of giving them away."i keep reading them again and again," she declared in a very proprietary manner. "and i find deeper and deeper meanings in them every time i read them again."

now, i always thought that i was not a hoarder. i do throw away as much as possible. or do i?

my wife walked in to my study yesterday, and threatened to throw my desk out for recycling if i did not do something about the second draw. "what second draw?" i asked her puzzled. "it looks perfectly ok to me."

"does it now?" she smiled sarcastically. "look at the miles and miles of cable and wires and all kinds of things inside it. you probably dont need them, probably dont use them, and yet you cant throw your useless cables away, can you?" she enquired scathingly.

i sighed and spent two hours this morning going through old cables and wires. she was right - I discovered three earphones belonging to three old mobile phones that i have thrown away, six old telephone cables that i used for connecting pc to phone line during the dial-up days, and several old pencils and pens that refuse to write.

healer, i should have said to myself, heal thyself.