This article came as a follow up to the lecture I gave on Climate Change and Punjab last year. Following a suggestion that I relate the issue of Climate Change to Sikh religion so that people can see a correlation, I wrote this article.
It was published in The Sikh Review in the month of July.
The pdf article can be read at this link
Does the media really cover issues like water? I was pondering over it when asked to deliver a talk at the seminar on “Water, community and the media”.
My little survey suggested that it is only the local newspapers and vernaculars who are concerned about water issues. You can watch the entire presentation here.
Alternately, you can go to this url http://issuu.com/bajinder/docs/water
Imagine granting loan to a beggar and converting them into entrepreneurs. While commercial banks seeks a collateral before granting a loan and imposes scores of conditions, here at the Grameen Bank founded by Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus, the bank arrives at the doorstep of the beggar and offers a loan without any collaterals or preconditions.
Sounds incredulous, but that is precisely what is happening. “The idea is that when a beggar goes from house to house begging, he/she also carries some merchandise along with – cookies, candies and the like”. The beggar can sell the merchandise to those very houses where they went. This way, the beggar has a chance to earn money and become an entrepreneur.
“This demonstrates that even a beggar can run business – forget about entrepreneurial people,” laughs Prof Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank.
Beggars have been quick to inform the Grameen Bank that they have already identified houses which donate money for charity and houses which buy merchandise from them. “Without having gone to a business school, they have discovered market segmentation”, Yunus says with a smile.
We have nothing to lose, he says since if a $ 15 loan can help a person come out of poverty, it is worth a try. Since the loan does not carry any interest. So in the eyes of the world, the beggar can never be a defaulter. Ninety seven per cent of the borrowers of Grameen Bank are women.
His faith that every individual has entrepreneurial skills has been reaffirmed.When the Grameen Bank launched the loan for beggars program, they had thought only about 2-3,000 beggars would seek loans. Today 120,000 beggars (mostly women) have benefitted from this program and 16,000 of them have stopped begging. “In fact they have come back for their second, third and even fourth loans,” Prof. Yunus reveals.
“People ask me what happened to the other beggars and I respond by saying that they are part time beggars and part time businesspeople”, Prof Yunus says. “After all it takes time for someone to quit his or her core business where he has to shut the begging division and build the sales division”, Prof Yunus laughs again.
There have been various poems on God. One of them was written by the former Indian Prime Minister, V P Singh. While the painter in V P Singh has been recognized, the poet in him has escaped public attention. V P Singh, who is a fairly controversial figure in Indian politics due to his decision to implement the Mandal Commission agitation has a website dedicated to him where some of his poems can be found.
I have been trying to find a poem titled Bhagwan (God). I seem to have lost it, but I am now trying a translation of the original (without having the original with me). In case anyone has the original please do send it to me, so that I can try a better translation.
God
God is everywhere,
So whenever I wish, I clench him in my fist.
You can also do the same.
Between the two, whose God is stronger
depends on whose fist is stronger.
It is a telling sentence. “I am just one person. What can I do about global warming?”
But Earth hour prompts each one of us to take action. The annual event hosted by WWF on the last Saturday of March now touches nearly 2000 cities. Though initially tried in Thailand it was Sydney in 2007 where 2.2 million households decided to participate in Earth Hour.
The simple idea is to turn off lights for one hour at 8.30 local time on the last Saturday of March. In 2009 it would be March 28. From ordinary households to the royal house in Denmark to the Pyramids in Egypt, lights would go out for one hour. Even Google is joining the event by promising to turn its home page dark that day.
Unfortunately the website of Earth Hour does not indicate that my city Chandigarh is joining in. Meanwhile at Facebook the profile pictures of lots of people including mine are changing indicating that we are joining Earth Hour.
All women are original and all men are copycats. This is what the poet Adil Lucknawi seems to say in this video. I presume the penname Lucknawi could be from the city of Lucknow.
For those who do not understand Hindustain / Hindi /Urdu, the post is based on the first two lines of the couplet. The translation goes something like this.
Neither beards, nor moustache; they only have hair on their head
Women are original, men are copycats.
Following Chandigarh, the state of Punjab too is considering a complete ban on plastic bags. While Chandigarh has already gone ahead with the ban on plastic bags, the Punjab assembly debated a resolution on ban of plastic bags last week.
The issue remains – will plastic bags be replaced by paper bags?
As has been the experience in Chandigarh, paper bags which had virtually disappeared from the scene have staged a massive comeback. By all standards, Paper bags are less eco friendly than plastic bags. Consider this
(1) Paper bags consume 4 times more energy during production than plastic bags.
(2) Paper bags produce 70 % more air pollutants than plastic bags.
(3) Paper bags produce 50 times more water pollutants than plastic bags.
(4) A kilo of paper requires 85 times more energy for recycling than a kilo of plastic.
(5) Paper bags weigh more plastic bags and consume more space in landfills.
(6) Finally, paper bags are not being decomposed because modern urban land fills at least in the US are designed in such a manner that they get little water and light. Hence most paper bags do not decompose.
A detailed comparative analysis was conducted by The Washington Post and it can be found here.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/graphic/2007/10/03/GR2007100301385.html
I do not blame the policy makers for joining the “ban plastic bag” bandwagon. Almost 11 years ago, the newspaper where I was working asked me to run a “kick plastic” campaign seeking a ban on plastic bags. In my youthful enthusiasm, I wrote a three part series. It took the city administration a decade to ban the plastic bag.
However, by 2009, greater research and for me greater access to such research has ensured that I am not enamoured by the ban on plastic bag if it is replaced by paper.
But what is unfortunate is that policy makers, both officers and political class are advocating a ban on plastic bag despite evidence to the contrary.
This must qualify as Climate Change. Walking past the busy Sector 22 market in Chandigarh, I was taken aback by an earthen plot dutifully wrapped in moist red cloth parked right in front of Nagpal Sweets, a famous budget middle class restaurant. I stopped and saw a couple of plates, a bucketfull of water and a few spoons and knives laid out on the table.
The shop was selling kulfi!. For those who are not aware kulfi is a frozen hardened kind of ice cream dessert which is served with falooda (vermicilli) topped with rose sherbet.
Now falooda kulfi is a favourite in North India during the summer season, but what intrigued me was that it is still the first week of March. I would have loved to enter the sweet shop and try some hot steaming carrot pudding or the gajjar da halwa. During winters, two of my favourite desserts are the gajjar da halwa or dal halwa (made with lentils). But instead of the hot carrot pudding they were selling frozen kulfi! Maybe, they still had some hot carrot pudding inside their shop, but the appearance of kulfi in March was too much of a shock for me.
Reeling under 28 C in the months of February and March and having done away with most of my woolens, I am reminded of my college days when during the last week of March, I would still be wearing a half sleeves jacket or a sweater.
(This is from a talk that I delivered last month on climate change).
Another telling example of how climate change has dawned upon us.
Is this the beginning of the end of print journalism, at least in the US?I am using the most abused cliche, apart from posting on a topic that has been written to death.Still when the Christian Science Monitor decides to make this announcement, I think it is worth noticing.
The Christian Science Monitor, a national newspaper in the US has decided to stop its print edition from April 2009. It shall now concentrate only on its web edition.
The news came from the Monitor itself (http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/1029/p25s01-usgn.html) when it stated “The Monitor shifts from print to web-based strategy”. It said
The Christian Science Monitor plans major changes in April 2009 that are expected to make it the first newspaper with a national audience to shift from a daily print format to an online publication that is updated continuously each day.
The Monitor will be celebrating its 100th year on November 25, and this could be a fitting occasion for change in strategy.
One reason could be declining circulation of US newspapers. The Monitor itself says
While the Monitor’s print circulation, which is primarily delivered by US mail, has trended downward for nearly 40 years…
The Washington Post quoted its editor John Yemma “Everyone who grew up with print, and everyone who worked in print like me, you feel a little sad,” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/28/AR2008102802132.html?hpid=topnews) while adding that
“The Monitor’s circulation is just 52,000 — down from 160,000 two decades ago — and its early deadlines are crippling. Since most copies are sent to subscribers by snail mail, all copy must be turned in by noon for the next day’s edition.”
So where does it leave this blogger…. time to change tack?
For most of us, including your faithfully, writing a book is regarded as a long laborious exercise. Having been brought up in a family where academics was de rigeur, book writing was regarded as the pinnacle of all achievements. Watching my father write books on a rickety old portable typewriter, followed by manual editing on the margins of carefully typed sheets was a fascinating part of my growing up.
Things changed, and then came the electronic typewriter – something that my father always dreamed of purchasing but could never do so. Finally the computer made the electronic typewriter redundant. Surprisingly though, my father’s book writing days ended the same time when the computer replaced our potable typewriter in our study.
The process of book writing is delightfully described in an article in the NYT.
It’s not easy to write a book. First you have to pick a title. And then there is the table of contents. If you want the book to be categorized, either by a bookseller or a library, it has to be assigned a unique numerical code, like an ISBN, for International Standard Book Number. There have to be proper margins. Finally, there’s the back cover.
Oh, and there is all that stuff in the middle, too. The writing.
Considering the fact that computers make book writing so much easier. It is not just editing and typing where computers aid in book writing, as Philip Parker reveals in this article in the New York Times. Parker has generated 200,000 books, and interestingly the NYT uses the word “generated” rather than “written”. The most published writer on the planet uses computer algorithms from available sources to compile a book.
An editor picks the years to be covered, but the computer picks the optimum model for extrapolating sales in various countries, and in alphabetical order produces a chart for each country. “It will then open a Word document and export the information into Word just like a real author would out of their minds, so to speak, or spreadsheets,” he says.
Parker describes how it is created in this video on YouTube
And now Parker is delving into creating acrostic poems, with the difficult portion being to assess the quality of these poems.
