Caution long post coming up. A cynical society looks for soft targets to express its frustration; sadly we all are doing our share to keep it so. A best example of this can be seen in the festive season.Every year around this time, we see celebrities, news anchors and facebook activists exhorting people to skip diwali and dussehra, because it pollutes the environment, damages nature, etc. Well, The biggest, most dangerous cause of pollution that our world today is facing is exhaust from automobiles and thermal power plants, both of which pump millions of tonnes of co2 into the atmosphere each year. However we as a society are too hesitant to change our lifestyle even slightly to prevent this. Why? Because it involves forsaking the comfort of the air conditioner, which is a reason for Indias booming electricity demand. More than 70% of Indias electricity comes from coal based thermal plants, which emits more tonnes of polluting gases every single minute than the entire gunpowder smoked in dussehra in India. The concept behind Earth Hour is the same. If we switch off our air conditioners every night for just an hour, we can save enough coal to actually impact global warning! However, this is an inconvenient choice to make, and hence dussehra is a softer target. Ditto for Holi. Every year we hear fervent appeals to save water on Holi. But what about the rest of the year? Do any of us care to phone any authorities if we notice a pipeline leaking on the street.A friend recently told me that a washroom next to our college library has a missing tap.In other words, it is just a water pipe pouring out water. She says that it has been pouring water like this for over an year! And this too in the library of a medical school. The amount of water wasted in an year from that single missing tap must be sufficient to allow the whole of chandigarh to play holi. This is the condition of thousands of government buildings all over our country, some of which host the brightest minds of the nation. However, as we see, the 6 hours of Holi is a typical talking point for our people. Coming to the recent campaign of Swaccha Bharat .Within a single day of its launch, we have newspapers, news channels and social networks flooded with uploaded pics of dirty neighborhoods and surroundings, most of them questioning the capability of this campaign, and curiously Modi. Do we expect him to come and clean our neighborhood and its walls? A dirty India is not the failure of its prime minister, but a failure of its people. Thankfully, the Swaccha Bharat campaign has a safeguard.Every citizen has to commit 2 hours a week to clean his neighborhood. So guys, if you aint giving your 2 hours, dont complain.
Posted on: Fri, 03 Oct 2014 18:49:51 +0000
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