Treehuggery

NAKED WOMEN. Do I have your complete and undivided attention now? Thank you.
Sorry to burst your bubbling bubble but I have some preaching to do. Bear with me.

I came up with a pretty funny blogpost idea (even if I say so myself) and I was typing it out (at work, as always) when this guy walks up to me and proceeds to rent a gaping hole in the delicate chantilly lace of my world.

I don’t know what prompted it but he tells me to go to Google Maps, switch to satellite view, and check out Bangalore. When I’m done, he tells me to take a look at the Thar desert. This is what the comparison looks like:

Can you see how Bangalore looks like a bald spot in Karnataka’s green head? It alarms me that my adopted city, formerly known as... wait for it... the GARDEN City of India, no less, is on its way to looking like a damn desert.

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

I have always been a treehugger and unapologetically so, and I’ve vowed to do more from today as well. Considering I have a LARGE number of Bangalorean blogger friends, I’d love it if each one of you to do your bit, a little bit for the city that is your bread and butter, your home. Simple things like...

• Turning off the faucet when you are brushing
• Switching off the lights and fan when you are in the other room
• Disposing waste sensibly
• Dropping ticket stubs, chocolate wrappers, and the like in the nearest dustbin or stuffing it in your bag to throw out at home
• Reusing supermarket bags for groceries
• Limiting the number of tissues you pick up from the dispenser

….will go a long, long way in helping ourselves. You know the drill. I'm not asking you to care about the environment, I'm simply asking you to do small tasks in the course of your daily life.

If you can go one step further and plant saplings and use eco-friendly products, nothing like it. If you can question why the BBMP or the local corporation is cutting down a tree, I’ll worship you. If you can prevent them from cutting it, I’ll be your slave for life.

Passenger sang, “Only miss the sun when it starts to snow....”
We won’t understand the value of that tree until you have to stand in the blazing summer sun while the traffic moves at a snail’s pace.
We won’t miss how comfortable the Earth is until… it’s not anymore.

If you are asking how one person saving a tissue a day will make a difference, I’ll give you the same logic that Sourabha, my beautiful ex-colleague, gave me: three hundred people in the building saving one tissue a day will be 1500 tissues a work week, 6000 tissues in 20 days. Tell me how many trees they came from?
If that isn’t significant enough a number for you, I don’t know what else can be.

We already are bequeathing a world filled with hate, religious differences, racism, intolerance, and a billion other idiocies to our children. Lets make an effort to NOT leave them in a world that is slowly rotting into non-existence. Lets make an effort in our own small, little lives.

PLEASE?

Linking to Jess's #IBOT and Natasha at Turn It Up Tuesday

Edit: 'Ed Sheeran' changed to 'Passenger'. Thank you, Rupasi. Pardon my being an ignorant ignoramus, people.