Switch Off???

With notices everywhere proclaiming 'Switch Off' in the most attention-seeking way, you can't help but do the very thing that's asked on these posters. Avoiding electricity wastage is probably one of the best ways to reduce the shortfall in electricity generation as compared to the demand, and the 'Switch Off' campaign pursued by the Rotaract Club on campus probably stresses on that.

One of the greatest problems with the world's campaign against Global warming is that we get too caught up in the bleak statistics and the doomsday scenarios. Okay, that does not mean I don't believe in such predictions. I just believe such unceasingly depressing predictions take away the most important factor in the campaign - the role of the individual. We get so caught up either sensationalizing the issue or following its sensational treatment at the hands of the media that we tend to ignore the little things we all can do to contribute towards tackling this giant of a problem.

At the same time, I wish people would also talk of issues like vanishing species, reduced tree cover, endanged ecosystems - a result of imbalance in species, and the like in the same breath as global warming. The only reason I say this is because there is a close relationship between everything I've mentioned above and to speak of one without the others is to present an incomplete picture of the environmental issues that plague us. Only, very few people actually manage to do that. Hats off to those who do! They probably are the ones who really want to make a difference.

60 Years of Independence

I'm afraid I don't have much to write in this post. Is it the case of a writer's block? Or is it that I've just run out of things to write about? Or do both these things mean the same and I've begun this post crapping?

For all the miserable net speeds in BITS and the related problems arising due to that, I've realized the truth in an argument that might claim there are no original thoughts out there in the thought-sphere. After all, whenever over the last few days, I've sat down to write something, whether it be my blog post or something else, I've realized midway with a jolt that whatever I wanted to say, it had already been said or it was being said even as I wrote it.

On to a different track now: Today is India's Independence day. 60 years of Independence - that's what all the headlines proclaim. I remember vividly the occasion when we celebrated 50 years of independence and the ten intervening years seem to have lost their discrete meanings and blended into one. I don't know how time flew by, but I guess it's been quite a journey for me since then. I'd like to believe that I've changed for the better during these times, having learnt a lot about things in general.

But of course, today isn't about me, nor about another of its citizens. It's about the country itself, about the promise we always have managed to show. And that makes me wonder whether ten years down the line, we will all be talking about the promise we show. After all we did the same ten years ago, and while the last decade saw a lot of progress on our part, the world too maintained its progress march, and we remained the rising, albeit the rising who ascend fast...