Happy Earth Day !

It s been a long time since I updated my blog, or rather even visited my blog. Last couple of months I was just too occupied with my curriculum, dating my books day & night in hope of a decent CG thereafter. It seems dating is not my cup of tea...not even with my books. Marks ditched me and left me & my CG in a condition beyond repair. Anyway, I had a month’s break after my break-up with my marks & I thought I would return to my ever-loyal friend with no complaints & no demands...my blog! My vacations started and I thought of many blog posts but the only place where I spent my time writing turned out to be facebook. Numerous status updates, comments, photo & video sharing kept me busy and I never really took time out of this site to update my blog.

Today, as usual I spent hours on status updates of my friends. Some had silly jokes while some had poems...some heart-broken folks had ‘dard bhari shayari’ where as others had wishes for weird ‘day celebrations’. This is one of the new trends I have noticed on facebook recently. People would just crazily find some weird thing particular to that day and update ‘Happy XXXXX Day’. To add to it, some 20 people would like it and another 10 would share/copy it as their status message without even thinking twice if it actually had any relevance. Well I can list down top 50 crazy things on facebook but I would save that for my next post.

Today I saw some 10 people sharing about following Earth Hour. Earth Hour in India is on March 26th, 8:30-9:30 PM. I was about to share the same but then I paused and thought for a moment. Will I be actually following this? What is the purpose of following this Earth Hour? Is it to save electricity or is it to generate awareness among people and make them conscious about saving electricity. I think this would serve neither of the purposes. Even when everyone strictly follows this, the electricity saved in this one hour would not even be 1% of the electricity we waste daily. ACs in huge offices are on when hardly 10 people are working, lights & fans of each room are running ceaselessly when just one room is being used. Then why do we have to constrain ourselves for that one hour and live without light when we can save much more electricity by being a little cautious one full day and not waste electricity.

If generating awareness is the intention, then this Earth Hour fails even more miserably because many people don’t even think once about the electricity they waste. They just feel happy about the fact that they are also a part of the group that ‘celebrated the Earth Hour’.

There is a difference in the way I use electricity when current is there in my house and when the current is not there & inverter is being used. Not that I compromise any of the comforts when using inverter, it’s just that I don’t waste electricity because I know that once the inverter dies, life would be hell without electricity. It is necessary to believe that electricity would not last forever while using it. Only then will our natural tendency be to minimize its wastage and I think this feeling is missing in most of us. ‘Earth Hour’ doesn’t address this basic need & hence I feel it is not serving its purpose. Any campaign which induces this feeling of resource scarcity can only drive us save electricity in true sense.

I would try and treat every day as Earth Day and save electricity. Will you?

PS: This does not mean my facebook status would have ‘Happy Earth Day’ everyday ;)