Polythene bags – can we ‘out’ them with Yellow cloth bags?

There is this heart warming (whoops, is that a wrong phrase?) eco friendly news that the state of Haryana is to ban the polythene bags in total – no more nonsense of micron thick or micron thin business.  AFAIK, no one has been even fined for violation of the thickness rule and that rule as the Haryana government has realised is being violated at will.

That brings to mind the once ubiquitous cotton yellow bag (manjal pai in tamil) which was always used for shopping vegetables and such.  That yellow bag, it seems has totally disappeared from view.

Even a Google image search doesn’t turn it up, except in one blog post (a Tamil blog) where the author laments that she couldn’t find it in an image search and hence snapped up a photo of a bag at her home.  That sent me on a search through my home, and alas, there’s not one yellow bag to be found.

Here is the snap:

I’d never carried my school books in one, as written in one of the comments there, but did carry books to school in one of these jhola bags (called ‘jholna’ bag in Tamil), which too seem to be out of fashion.

The only problem was that in monsoon rain, you’re likely to get the books soaked (yes, we used to walk to school, right here in the heart of the metro).  But such soakings proved better than the ‘dog-ate-my-homework’ excuse.
:->

All said and done, the now ubiquitous polythene bags had saved my cell phone and my head from getting wet, countless number of times and that’s something we will have to face.

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