(Image from the web)
The tough start thinking of alternatives. The queues in Bangalore petrol bunks are meandering and the wait for fueling up is bothersome. Which is why I thought that a recent post from this blog made a lot of sense. Scroll down a bit and check out the table on biofuels…
It’s been sometime since I’ve blogged- caught up with work and other stuff! But hey I’m on the moment I got time!
Here’s something happening in our area (at a park near Sandeepani school, Sanjaynagar, Bangalore). Some of us from the Art of Living Foundation have got together to plan out a ‘Go Green Workshop’ for kids on Sunday morning (June 29). Most of these green get-together happen in centrally located Lal Bagh, and it is often difficult for parents who live far off to tow their kids to the event. So we thought, hey, why not have some fun filled and learning moments in our own backyard?
We’ve planned painting, a quiz on environment/ecology, passing the ‘ideas’ basket as the key themes to the workshop. The rest will be a surprise! We also have goodies to go around…hmm.
If any among you live close by, do drop in and help us manage the kids (who knows, it might be the other way round!!)
Oh, and by the way, GG Mascot says ‘Hello’ to you!
GG’s been lovingly crafted with thermocol, loads of newspaper clippings, paint, post-its and what not. He’s going to go even more green on Sunday, when we display him at the park!
Image from www.flickr.com
Caught on this site: Shirakami forest, a UNECSO World Heritage site in Japan, would be affected by global warming. What a pity!
Image from Wikipedia
It is said that this vast forest land could vanish by the turn of the century due to global warming. Scientists warn that if greenhouse gas emissions remain at the current level, global warming will increase the damage caused by storm surges and cause torrential rain to fall more often.
The Shirakami Mountains are home to one of the world’s largest beech forests. However, these forests will decrease by 97.1 percent between 2031 and 2050 and vanish entirely after 2081, the study said, because the trees will be unable to adapt to the increase in temperature fast enough…
They were caught red-handed (or pawed!) on this blog. Spending a few bear, er, bare moments at the playground!
Maybe lil’ Jimmy can learn a few tricks from mama and papa bears! All he seems to do is sleep-wall(k) back home!
I guess either way, it’s paws and play!!
Seth Godin’s latest blog entry made a lot of sense- in fact, I thought he packaged it rather well.
These days, I find tea packaged rather well, in India. You find the oddest of flavors- like the one i had yesterday, green tea with chamomile. in a glossy package. The team of sprightly tea bags had a few wooden sticks for company- they served as stirrers. But God forbid if you drop the box- you will find yourself bending double in retrieving them! Some tea packets have these tiny read-me text artistically packaged a booklet with a few glossy pages. It’ll probably give you info which you know already like the benefits of tea drinking and how to drink tea in the first place. But it’s all the more fun to buy a tea box with a kit of such odd souvenirs. Who knows, they might even add a tea cup or two, in the box soon!
How do you pick a pot of peppery pickle off a plane? 
And manage to keep your fingers free of the hot red lava that emerges from within? In Andhra Pradesh, packaging pickles for wannabe NRIs is being an industry in itself. Years ago, I hauled a pot o’ pickle for mom and dad who live in the US. I was utterly dismayed when I opened the suitcase with the bottle and found it had leaked onto my clothes! Now all you need to do before hopping onto the plane, is to take your pickle to the nearest packaging joint in town. They shrink, wrap, polish the package like its fate is literally sealed within the wraps. Comes out like the Gucci brand of mango pickle.
Innovation is the in thing in packaging. Companies often call it ‘brandizing’. Marketing gurus sometimes say ‘USP’ (not to be mistaken for ESP which is also being packaged these days). Moms are packaged into ‘Mother’s Day ‘. Yep, packaging is in, packing is out.
Sometimes sadly enough, the earth’s package comes undone to give rise to earthquakes. Easy does it with natural wrappers. Don’t forget what dad taught you about global warming.
Ah, but some packages are by far the cutest and need no further innovation…
Pics from the web
Pic from web
Here’s an interesting article from the New York Times which throws light on the debate between the believers and the ones that don’t. Are the scales shifting towards the Omnipresent? And what is Neural Buddhism?
For a few Zen-sational moments in the super-conscious realm, it’s worth a read….
It was clearly a day for the bubble-gummers! Yesterday, VMware celebrated ‘bring-your-kids-to-office’ day. Dozens of tiny tots pottered in with their kiddy bags in tow. They stared unabashedly at the walls decorated with colorful balloons and streamers. Chomping sandwiches and cake, they walked all along the corridors taking in their parents’ office. They posed for cameras and prattled incessantly to anyone who would just listen. They scribbled on whiteboards and skated freely on the smooth flooring. The merry-making continued well into the afternoon, when they were whisked off home by their exhausted parents. Here are some pics captured while the party was on full-swing.
It’s All smiles for me!
Pic from the web
One year at school, we were asked to make a patchwork doll for Sister Wilcox, who was our school Principal. We all loved Sr Wilcox for she was so gentle and loving. Her English classes were superb, and we loved her British accent. To top it all, she gave us fair turns to play out our favorite Shakespearean actors during her classes.
So when we were told to get her a gift, we thought of all the stuff we could buy at the store. But never did we imagine that our teacher would ask us to make a rag doll!! The doll was to be around two feet in height. We set to work as fast as we could.
Anuja said she had lots of old clothes with nice Rajasthani patterns. She would bring a pile of clothes from home. Some of us who were not too keen on needlework opted to sort out the clothes and choose the best patterns. Santosh was good at stitching, so we persuaded her pick her team to use the sewing machines in the needlework room. Mamta said she and her friends would cut bits as Santosh’s team sewed them on.
Soon we had a rectangular shaped patch’d up bits of cloth which we would use as the doll’s gown. But what about the doll? Ah, we had clearly forgotten all about Ms Daisy Dee!
The work was really an uphill task, we realized, as we cut two strips of white muslin cloth in the shape of a doll. Then we stitched them together, leaving a hole to stuff cotton. Once the doll was plumped up into shape with cotton, we stiched on the eyes, nose and a nice large smile. Golden wool was served as her hair and we had to stitch each thread on painstakingly. And blue buttons did nicely as her eyes. Finally, we managed to stitch a blouse and the patchwork gown to match. We wrapped her up on gauze paper and put her in a box. Sister Wilcox really loved it, and smiled at us in her usual shy manner. We smiled back, but were mostly hoping that there would be no further needlework for the next year at least.
If making a patchwork doll were so difficult, imagine patching up a gas station to make a ‘recycle’ statement! To take a generous ‘patch’ of story which first came out in treehugger.com, New Yorker Jennifer March took up this project by inviting kids from all over the world to take part in selling the ‘recycling’ idea by covering an old gas station in Syracuse (N.Y) with colorful patches. Pieces of motif’ed cloth, crocheted patches, knitted scarves, silk screens, collage fibers were all used to make the pretty picture. All it takes is a wee bit o’ cloth and a whole lot o’ will.
Pics from the web
This year, as usual, Bangaloreans are complaining of an even hotter summer. Even as the trees were felled to make way for wider roads. Wider roads so that more traffic can be accommodated. More cars, scooters, autorickshaws spewing fumes and choking lungs.
Twenty years ago, a couple of sparrows built a nest in my home. I would sit in the room for hours and wait for the baby sparrow to peek out of its makeshift nest.
Now we don’t see too many sparrows. Nope, not in my home, at least.
I wonder how many of us in Bangalore switched on the TV this Sunday morning to watch ‘An Inconvenient Truth’. After seeing this movie, my respect for Al Gore and the makers of the movie increased manifold.
‘An Inconvenient Truth’, tells the truth like it is. Global Warming – the cause, the consequences. The policies and politics.
It’s the story of melting of glaciers submerging coastal cities. Of old ecological niches giving way to bizarre new ones. Of changing climatic conditions giving rise to new diseases like SARS, Avian Flu. Of the dreaded Malaria bug literally scaling higher altitudes due to global warming. And of an embarrassing truth called the rising population.
The story slowly unfolds as Al Gore narrates it. The players: The corporates vs the governments vs the common man. Did scientists team up to trivialize the problem to suit the big giant companies? What is the Kyoto Protocol and who is really following it?
‘Political will is a renewable resources. Each one of us is a cause for global warming but each one of us can reduce it as well with making the right choices.’
Al Gore speaks about how technology keeps changing but with it, habits must change too. Technology must cater to increasing energy efficiency and at the same time reducing Carbon dioxide emission – along with this there must be a corresponding change in habits.
‘Humanity is sitting on a ticking time bomb. If the vast majority of the world’s scientists are right, we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced.’
Yet another gore-y story doing the news rounds is the world hunger crisis which would actually occur as a result of global warming scare. In an attempt to reduce the petroleum consumption, more and more corn crops in the US are being diverted into the production of ethanol, and this is directly influencing the food chain. So if it is not global warming per se, it could be the world reaction to global warming that can create a change in global ecology.
So what’s in it for us? It’s time to carpool to work, folks. Say NO to plastic bags and reduce non-biodegradable waste accumulation. Plant more trees. Enjoy the breeze from the bio-friendly fan rather than the airconditioner. Take a little rough-riding on the non-A/C car. After all, you want your kids and grand kids to enjoy this world for a long long time. Right?
Now for a few astonishing facts from the movie:
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The number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes has almost doubled in the last 30 years.2 |
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Malaria has spread to higher altitudes in places like the Colombian Andes, 7,000 feet above sea level.3 |
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The flow of ice from glaciers in Greenland has more than doubled over the past decade.4 |
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At least 279 species of plants and animals are already responding to global warming, moving closer to the poles.5 |
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Deaths from global warming will double in just 25 years — to 300,000 people a year.6 |
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Global sea levels could rise by more than 20 feet with the loss of shelf ice in Greenland and Antarctica, devastating coastal areas worldwide.7 |
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Heat waves will be more frequent and more intense. |
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Droughts and wildfires will occur more often. |
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The Arctic Ocean could be ice free in summer by 2050.8 |
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More than a million species worldwide could be driven to extinction by 2050. |
Babita
Priyanka
Flash news on NDTV Channel: Father wants to sell son to save Babita, his ailing daughter.
Children are so precious. We’d do anything to see a smile on our kids’ faces.
So what can a father do if he cannot afford a life-saving operation for his daughter? And what would the son be feeling about all this? Not exactly the run-of-the-mill job search for sure. Into whose hands would he be sold? Is the hapless father actually selling his son’s life to save his daughter’s? I am not even going into the moral route here. There is no moral highground to take. It is just hard choices.
Yet another daughter, Congress Party member Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, met Nalini. Nalini serves a life sentence in prison for being an accomplice in the assassination of the then Indian Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi (Priyanka’s father). Priyanka desparately seeks closure for her father’s untimely death which happened seventeen years ago. Some call this party politics. I prefer to call it coming to terms with a larger-than-life loss. Or loss of a dear life.
At times, life seems totally connected. It’s almost like joining the dots- like adjusting the mind-lens a bit. Blow off the dust. And what do you see?
You see that the world moves through love. Love for a father, love for a daughter. Love for a victim, for the accused. Love for the body, for the soul.
Love for life. For death…
