A Sale with a social focus

On January 5, the third edition of Jumble Sale in Valmiki Nagar would give a zeitgeisty twist to the Robinhood legend by decluttering the lives of the haves and to fill those of the have-nots with essential items, creating a win-win situation

Sustainability exercises can scream their heads off. A typical case: massive bio-mining machinery massed up at a landfill to segregate and process legacy waste. You can tell what is going on from a mile away.

Sustainability exercises can also speak in soft tones, the message gently dropped into an ear here and another there. A typical case: a guild of volunteers sharing a club affiliation squirrelling away preloved items (that have turned white elephants to their owners) and, finally, quietly placing them in fresh pairs of hands. In rare instances, the whispered syllables of this unobtrusive initiative would multiply and assume the intensity of a scream.

Hold that idea in the crook of your palm and flesh it out with a name, an address, a date, people on both sides of the poverty line, wants and needs, and add a snippet of a back story to it, and the picture is inviting. On January 5, Thillayadi Valliammai Madhar Sangam would have dusted off a vast collection of items, painfully accumulateed over months knocking on many doors, and line them up for a sale, a Jumble Sale. In a zeitgeisty twist to the Robinhood legend, this sale would declutter the lives of the haves and fill those of the have-nots with essential items, creating a win-win situation. These volunteers are ruling out the alternative for these pre-owned items: slipping into the maw of a landfill. Initiatives of this kind might be moving inchmeal, their results hard to see, let alone quantify, but their significance cannot be pooh-poohed: they reduce landfills even before they are formed.

It is the third edition of the Jumble Sale by Thillaiyadi Valliammai Madhar Sangam, a ladies club with geographical coordinates in Valmiki Nagar, Thiruvanmiyur, but an ideological bent that makes it free-ranging.

Jayanthi Premchander, a member of this ladies club and one of the masterminds behind the Jumble Sale, explains how, between the first and the third edition, the initiative has grown in stature and reach and acquired something approaching a scream.

In its second edition, when the sale was scheduled to start at 2 p.m., the crowd had already begun to form by 1:30 p.m., eagerly standing outside like a tide waiting to crest.

“We were all a bit anxious,” Jayanthi recalls with a chuckle. “We had no idea that so many people would show up. It was like a floodgate opening!”