By Dr. R. Balasubramaniam

My friend Ganesh posted an AI-generated presentation about fast fashion killing the planet yesterday on Instagram. Ten slides of curated statistics and moral outrage. I browsed through it at lunch while he sat across from me wearing an expensive hoodie bought last month to replace the one he purchased three months before that. The irony was entirely lost on him. The half-eaten paneer tikka on his plate, destined for the bin, seemed equally indifferent to his passionate captions about food waste.

You know people like Ganesh. Maybe you are people like Ganesh. On some days, I am Ganesh. These are the friends who lecture you about your carbon footprint while their own lives look like a masterclass in consumption. My college mate Priya does this beautifully. She will corner you at weddings and explain, with considerable patience, why you are a terrible person for not composting. She has data, she has passion, she has that tone that makes you feel guilty for things you never actually did.

Priya went to the Maldives last year. She posted pictures on pristine beaches with captions about protecting marine ecosystems. The resort required a seaplane transfer. I am not entirely sure how a seaplane figures into the ecosystem she was defending, but the photos received excellent engagement.

My colleague Rakesh sends office-wide e-mails about reducing paper usage. Long, detailed e-mails nobody asked for, copied to people with nothing to do with stationery supplies, with attachments explaining why we are destroying forests. He then prints these e-mails and leaves them on people’s desks to ensure they are read. I have seen him do this. The man owns four laptops because different purposes apparently require different devices. His old phones sit in a drawer like archaeological layers of consumer history. But he refuses to use a notepad in meetings because paper is sacred.

Anjali from our RWA WhatsApp group may be the final, fully evolved form of this species. She shares climate change videos three times a week, usually around eleven at night when nobody asked. Meanwhile her air conditioner runs eighteen hours a day because the heat is unbearable. I know this because I can hear it from my apartment. That steady hum represents electricity generated somewhere far away, probably by coal, almost certainly contributing to those very glaciers she worries about.

She ordered food delivery four times last week. Each meal arrived in packaging sufficient to wrap a small car. Half the food went uneaten. She posted about it once, noting that restaurants give too much rice. Not about throwing it away. Just about them giving too much.

Then there is Ramesh, my colleague’s cousin, who retired last year and made sustainability his entire personality. He holds forth at family dinners about how young people are ruining everything. He will talk for forty minutes about the environmental cost of smartphones while checking his own phone every three minutes. He upgraded to the latest iPhone because the camera is better for bird watching. The earlier phone, perfectly functional, went to some drawer to die slowly. The man has left more electronic remains behind than a small conflict zone. But he carries steel straws everywhere and makes sure you know about it.

Here is my problem. I cannot throw stones from inside this particular glass house. I travel for work constantly. Domestic flights at least once a week, sometimes more. I once tried calculating my carbon footprint from just the flights and gave up halfway because the numbers were depressing. I tell myself it is necessary, it is work, it is not really a choice. Which is exactly what everyone tells themselves about everything.

I stay in hotels that wash towels daily whether you want them to or not. I sit in conference rooms with the air conditioning set to arctic temperature because someone believes this signals professionalism. I order room service that arrives with single-use everything, eat half of it and the rest disappears somewhere I prefer not to think about.

The real trouble with armchair sustainability experts is not the hypocrisy, though that is annoying enough. It is that small, performative acts allow everyone, including me, to sidestep the large, uncomfortable truths. It is considerably easier to carry a steel straw than to fly less. Easier to post about deforestation than to reduce what you consume. Easier to judge someone else’s choices than to sit quietly with your own.

Real change asks something different. It asks us to use the old phone until it genuinely gives up, not until something shinier arrives. To finish what is on the plate or order less to begin with. To try the train when the flight feels automatic. It asks me, specifically, to consider whether some of these trips could simply have been video calls.

Perhaps that guilt is not entirely useless. Perhaps it is the small, persistent thing that eventually moves us from performing sustainability to actually practicing it. Not all at once, not perfectly, but genuinely. One inconvenient, uncomfortable decision at a time. That is where the real journey begins.

[Dr. R. Balasubramaniam is the Founder of Swami Vivekananda Youth Movement. ‘The Lighter Side’ is a series of satirical articles meant to bring a smile by highlighting the funny side of everyday life.]