For the beauty of the earth...

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has announced a goal of planting 7 billion new trees on the earth by the end of the year. Now, human-led climate change may be real or may be a hoax, but there should be few doubters that the loss of trees is a loss for all of us.
Forests and jungles get a raw deal from almost every side these days. On the one hand, swathes of trees are being cleared to feed the building-frenzy in parts of the world or for beef production to supply the fast-food industry. On the other hand, excessive protection is being blamed for supplying the fuel for the destructive forest fires in Victoria, Australia seen earlier this year.
The happy medium, it would seem, is to use trees wisely and at the same time replace the ones that have been felled. The latter, however, is somewhere that we've been lacking during our existence. Hence the UNEP's challenge to people everywhere to plant more trees.
While many of us may be struggling to contribute financially to such a cause, there may be a way for us to help out without having to spend money. A friend of mine sent me a link to a free search site called gearch.com. The people behind gearch have pledged to plant one tree for every 10 days that a registered user uses their site. And as you can choose your existing search engine (gearch is just a shell; I've set mine to google), you don't lose out on search capability.
I have not been able to verify independently (so far) whether or not these guys are legitimate, but if there is even a slight chance that they are, I'm taking it.
If you want to register with gearch, let me have your e-mail address and I can send you an invitation. Each accepted invitation earns one tree.
So, any takers?

Mind over matter

Chennai summers are slightly on the warmish and humid side (note the ironic understatement). Actually, Chennai's winters are also slightly on the warm and humid side, at least during the daytime.
This summer has been, incredibly, even warmer and more humid than Chennai's usual standards. But I did not notice it much. Well, let's say I chose to notice it much later than everyone else. While most people started commenting about the weather in April, I managed to refrain till a couple of days ago.
My secret? Habit.
For 14 of the past 15 summers, I have been out of Chennai, mainly in the US and UK where the height of summer isn't till July (some years in the UK, not even then). Even Qatar doesn't get outrageously hot till August. So, in my mind, April simply cannot be hot. Never mind that the temperature was nearly 100 F most of the time and that people were suffering from heatstroke (and worse) in parts of the country; it's April! Ergo, it cannot be hot.
Then came May, and with it came power failures at inconvenient times, and even I have to admit it's a tad on the warm side now (105+). Oh, well. It was cool while I managed to fool myself.

Weather you like it or not

What's going on with planet earth? The same time that the state of Victoria in Australia has been undergoing quite terrible bushfires brought on by a heatwave and drought, Britain is experiencing it's heaviest snowfall in almost two decades. Heck, next door to Victoria, parts of New South Wales have been declared disaster areas due to floods!

Even we in Chennai have not been spared. This past December was the coldest in several years with night-time temperatures plunging to below 18 degrees Celsius (65 Fahrenheit)!

Er, doesn't quite compare, does it? I mean, even New Kids on the Block were cooler than that.

Still, with all the weird weather of late, I wouldn't be surprised if residents of, say, Provo, Utah, suddenly woke up to find that it's raining men.

What's going on? #5

I apologise for not having updated my blog in about two weeks. The last time you heard from me here, I was giving my own, unconventional brand of Thanksgiving. I wrote that post late Wednesday night, not realising the drama that was occuring at that very hour in Mumbai. I also didn't realise what was going to happen over the next three days in Chennai.

As most of you will have heard, read or seen at the time (unless you were incredibly engrossed in Thanksgiving turkey), a co-ordinated series of terrorist attacks took place in Mumbai between the 26th and 29th of November, 2008. Approximately 200 people (including nine of the ten terrorists) were killed, and many more injured.

While the nation (and possibly much of the world) watched with horror, one Indian city did not react with quite as much outrage. We in Chennai, and the areas to the south, had immediate issues of our own with Cyclonic Storm Nisha, which dumped record amounts of rainfall in a four day period. We had flooded streets, power outages and a general disruption of life in general. 204 deaths in Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka have been attributed to Nisha.

Happy Thanksgiving to us, I guess.

Now, two weeks on, life has returned almost to normal. The waters have receded; the roads are bad, but not as bad as I expected; there has been no appreciable increase in mosquito levels in my neighbourhood.

We have survived...and we will probably forget.

A friend asked me if there has been any great change in people's attitudes to one another in the wake of the terrorism (dubbed by some as "India's 9/11"), much like the US experienced in 2001. It's unlikely. For one thing, acts of terrorism are not new in some parts of India. Mumbaikars have experience this sort of thing on a regular basis since 1993. For another, there is no one single terrorist entity operating in India. While these attacks are being attributed to elements in Pakistan (like almost all of them are at first), some of them, like the 2006 Malegaon blasts, are perpetrated from disaffected domestic groups (similar to the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995).

Most of all, however, I think it's just impossible for cities of 12-20 million people to stop and mourn together for more than a few moments. There are too many hungry mouths to feed.

In July, I posted a summary of terrorist activity in India since 1993. Here is an update to that list:

• September 13, 2008 5 bomb blasts in Delhi markets, 21 killed, 110 injured

• September 27, 2008 2 bomb blasts in Delhi's Mehrauli flower market, 3 dead, 17 injured
• September 29, 2008 Maharashtra and Gujarat bomb blasts, 10 dead, 80 injured
• September 29, 2008 Bike blasts in Malegaon, 7 killed
• October 1, 2008 Agartala bombing, 4 killed, 100 injured
• October 21, 2008 Imphal bomb blast, 17 killed, 40 injured
• October 30, 2008 Assam bomb blast, 77 killed, 300 injured
• November 26, 2008 Coordinated attack in Mumbai, approximately 200 killed, 239 injured

I apologise for such a sobering post to start off the Christmas season, a season of peace and goodwill, but I felt it would be remiss of me not to acknowledge these significant events. I'll try to be more uplifting (and silly) in my future posts.