Kindle that eco living

Living a green and environmental-friendly life sounds quite fancy but that is not so in reality. One might have to sacrifice a lot of things, habits and even change entire lifestyles. These two families in Bengaluru, like a few others, are putting in their best efforts to contribute to the environment by changing the way they live at home — growing fruits and vegetables in their vegetable patch, re-cycling and re-using to promote a more responsible living.

Rajesh Shah, a water conservationist who grew up in Mumbai and moved to Bengaluru with his wife in 2007, lives in their eco-friendly home in Whitefield, growing 90 per cent of their vegetables, in their own backyard. They even end up saving around 15,000 litres of water thanks to the rainwater harvesting and recycling mechanism in place.

“As soon as we moved to the city, we asked the architect to design an environmental-friendly home. After building the house, we wanted to reduce water consumption and see how much could we live on rain water, and experimented. Now, we take our kitchen and shower water, and use it in the garden,” Rajesh says.

Rajesh and Vallari don’t have to worry about managing time at work, and living an eco-friendly life as both left their jobs a few years ago. They reveal, “We decided to get out of the rat-race, and focus on our physical, spiritual and social life. But, we had to cut down on spending money, and hold back on eating out. We started eating more salads from our garden to save money.”

The family has also gotten rid of all their vehicles, and own four bicycles to travel, and often use public transport or share cabs. As Rajesh reveals this, he is taking a bus from his home on an errand.

On, the other hand, there is another family on the other side of Bengaluru, who built their environment-friendly home to be light, both physically and on overheads. Dasarathi G.V., who heads a firm that makes products for computer aided manufacture, built his home which he fondly calls Kachra Mane, which means scrap house in Kannada. Most of their home is built of kachra or scrap materials.

“Our house is mostly made out of re-used construction materials like pine wood and glass from demolished sites. We used less than 10 per cent sand, cement and steel for constructing our house, and no glaze tiles,” Dasarathi says. Dasarathi has been very environmentally conscious since he was a little boy, and now this thought has become a lifestyle choice which extends to his family as well. They recently sold their car and have started using public transport.