The E-Story

The stage was set on a table top. Camakshi,deriving its name from camera and akshi (meaning eyes),perched himself on the centre of the stage with the help of its human facilitators and began narrating its ancestry. “My father was Game-Roy 3000 and my mother was Speca Bose,I can still hear her voice,” said Camakshi,the affable American-Indian mouthpiece of TRC,garnering attention and affection from adolescents as well as adults present in the “theatre”,which was actually a classroom in Pune University’s astronomy department. The clever wordplay on brand names did its job fairly well,engaging the audience and expressing the group’s bitter resentment towards big corporate contributors to e-waste.

Camakshi spoke simply,for it was speaking to the children. First,it explained what e-waste meant; a generalisation for all electronic devices (mobile phones,computers etc) which are discarded by its users. “One often overlooks,” said Camakshi,adding,“the fate of this waste,which contains environmentally hazardous materials such as plastics and heavy metals.”

To illustrate its point,Camakshi paints a story from the past. It recounts its days as the CEO of ‘Grapple’ Corporation,a firm that set the trend of “upgrading” its products every six months under promises of a more sophisticated product though the hardware and software are changed minimally.

Brand loyalists would jump to the corporation’s phoney claims,often disposing their “outdated” device for the latest.

Camakshi realised it had struck upon an ingenious formula and its greed knew no bound. It summoned its assistant,Minion,asking it to persist at the company’s current formula of mass conning. Aghast,Minion attempts to instil conscience into its “Master” by trying to sensitise Camakshi to the environmental repercussions of his ingeniously evil plan. Camakshi is impenetrable. Minion warns it would herald a revolution and is violently dismissed.

Minion returns as promised; a saviour of nature,wearing an aluminium-foil cape. He defeats Camakshi and takes him to Africa,one of the many under-developed nations that bear the brunt of the developed nations’ greed. Camakshi encounters the horrid: vast dump-lands of e-waste. A small creature,which the TRC crew affectionately calls ‘Chotu’,rises from the waste and dies in Camakshi’s arms. A didactic video ensues in the background,elaborating on the hazards of e-waste and its offences against nature and the multitudes of developing and underdeveloped nations.

Camakshi is transformed. So much so,that he is now the face of TRC’s environmental evangelism. At this point,TRC bowed to a spellbound audience,which was charmed by the group’s message and its simplicity. A point well made,Three Ring Circus.