Mexico City has come up with the long-awaited suggestion of switching off the car engines and getting to office in bicycles once in a month. People will at least get to know the otherwise invisible impact they and their cars have on the roads. Sidney made history when most of the lights in the Australian city were put off for a while.
Back home, we find even youngsters kick starting their bikes to reach their offices, which, in most cases, is within 2 km. When we talk about the power of youth and the thinking generation, we are nowhere in terms of environment consciousness quotient.
To my dismay, I find so many young people filling their mouth with 'paan' and spitting it willfully all over the way they walk. 8 out of 10 cinemas in India will have paan stained walls and chairs. (I wonder why people don't behave so in multiplexes!)
Drunkards litter pavements and public places as if everything under the sun is their restroom. Smokers paint and taint the by-passers with the white threads of tobacco. Men urinate on walls and nobody walks on the platforms. Slum-dwellers do their 'morning job' alongside the roads. Buses come with stains of smoke as well as sweat, as the ratio seems to be one bus per 150 persons.
What took half an hour to travel 50 years ago takes one and a half hour today, and still we talk about improvements in transportation. Bumper-to-bumper traffic is a common site, with vehicles involved in a war for every square inch available. Bikers add to the woes by snaking through what is locally called the 'cycle gap'.
Where are we heading to?
3 comments:
Hi Vijay,
I like the way you think;) These days, you are writing on environmental issues. At some places you are pointing out problems and at some places you are providing solutions.Though the universe is vast, we have only a small Earth to live in. We living beings are very week and we require so many "favourable conditions", which are present only in Earth.I don't think, it is too much to ask our fellow people to preserve the environment.
It's a nice that you are echoing along with the environmentalists who also emphasize on cutting down of fossil fuels. Indeed it is not impossible. To drive a car is easy relatively when compared to riding a bicycle. But the latter is to be prefered if we ought to keep the world clean. I like the way you think.
What about PYTs that discard bubblegums under church pews?
Annie
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