Tasha Dhanraj wonders who’s got it right

My sister is off to Indonesia for two weeks to live with a tribe. I can’t even begin to imagine how she’s going to handle it. She never leaves the house unless her hair is perfect; she showers twice a day and while she was at uni she would come home whenever she could just so she would keep use of the toilet in her student house to a minimum. Now she’s on her way to live in a jungle with no electricity and will have to use leaves for toilet paper.

It’s not my kind of holiday. Last week I spent five pounds more than I needed to on toilet paper just because there was a special offer on the ones that smell nice…

“I could barely live the same way I lived five years ago”

The tribe, the Mentawai, live almost exactly the same way that they did one hundred years ago. They live in a communal wooden hut, they hunt and, despite attempts to make them live like the rest of Indonesia, they have no influence from the outside world as they have done for centuries. I could barely live the same way that I lived five years ago. Five years ago, I didn’t have a smartphone to keep me occupied on long train journeys. ‘Snakes’ might be a good game but you can’t play it for the whole trip from London to Edinburgh.

How did I cope before digital TV? Now, I have constant access to the extra channels which means I’m never more than a
few clicks away from a repeat of Come Dine With Me.

How did I keep warm in the winter, while still maintaining use of my hands without my slanket?
As much as I love electricity, medicine and microwave meals, maybe the Mentawai have a point. How much have the latest technologies actually helped me in my day to day life and how much have they just encouraged me to watch more TV, use more bandwidth and become more primed to suck advertising into my brain like a slug-ingesting pesticide?

The West has this desperation to drag indigenous tribes into the 21st century, but when we all spend so much time wasting away in front of electronic screens and without really going out and living life on this incredible Earth we have, it just makes me think: who are we to be telling anyone that we’ve got the good life?
Despite all this, I really don’t fancy using leaves for toilet paper any time soon.