Go Green !!

As a kid I used to be such a pest if anyone was to drop a chocolate wrapper on the ground instead of in the dust bin ...i would glare down at them to pick it up and if they did not I made sure I gave them the guilty eye before picking it up myself and dropping it in the dustbin . Today in the morning walking along on a trail in a state park I saw someone had dropped a big McDonalds To -go bag on the side of the road . I picked it up and walked for a mile or so before I could find a dustbin to dump it in . I have always been a conservationist at heart picking up a few litters here and there and dropping them .

This year the conservationist in me has decided to do smthing about the litter we generate . Initially when I had come to the US I remember stopping into a friend's office and asking him to explain smthing , he took out a A4 size paper , wrote something on it and then threw it away . I instantly remembered the struggle we had to go thru to get A4 papers in during my undergrad . Understandably the latter situation was not due to some green ethics but basically due to lack of availability . Still it points to a important message , back in india we were not wasteful in our ways and would use/reuse things .

As more plenty has entered our lives so has wasteful spending . No wonder US is the biggest consumer on earth . I hardly find anything being recycled in this country . Tailors , cobblers , bartan waali all those classes of people are totally absent here . The idea is to just throw away smthing once you are done using it , or even if you dnt like it . Food , clothes , shoes , furniture , cars , this idea applies to all of it . And ya how I can forget my favorite topic plastic "Plastic water bottles" , seriously why does anyone on earth want to buy water . I still remember the days when we used to carry a bottle filled with water to school , well not here ... thirsty - grab a water bottle . A statistic I once read said the amount of water bottles american consume in a year can be used to make a road from the earth to the moon !!!! And ya adding to it the To Go culture ....a paper bag , 100s of napkins , plastic spoons , forks , big plastic pop cups etc etc

My idea has been to try and cut one plastic spoon , a plastic bottle and plastic bag at a time . I keep my own spoons and cups at work so that I dnt have to take a plastic spoon , carry a shopping bag each time I go shopping and my water bottle everytime I go out . Also trying my hand at recycling as much of trash as possible at home . I would in no way say that this is enough but it is first step . I guess it mostly a gift from my mom who has been a stickler for recycling ever since we were kids .

I did pick up a few books on recycling here and there and surprise all the things mentioned in it were all the things which we have seen our mom and grand mom's do at home . Although in their case all those ideas came up because of a entirely different need , a need to make do with what little they had available , in our time although the need is different the ideas still hold true I guess.

I strongly feel there is need to educate each and everyone around us about how our wasteful ways are impacting the planet earth and ya this is the only one we have so we better get it right this time around because as you guessed there is no second chance on this one.

The new age women(NAW) ...

Sitting in a group of people talking about women , you surely know what side I am on . I am always on the side of new age women , debating her responsibilities , her rights to freedom etc etc .

I was recently reading a book "Mother Pious Lady " which obviously warrants a new blog soon. I started thinking about what is definition of the new age women . We always find ourselves saying the NAW is the one who gets to choose what she wants in here life , she is no longer guided by what the man, in short the society thinks she should do and that is what defines her .

But if we were to closely analyse things ,is that really true ? I was just looking at all my fairer sex around me and analyzing what all of us spend the maximum time doing . The answer was right there staring at me - Shopping and looking good !!! . Beauty parlour visits , hair straightening , buying the new cute dresses in town , dieting ,gymming to get into the socially approved sizes and the list goes on . We are all pretty familiar with the sequence by now .

When we think of arranged marriage events of yester years where the girl was decked up in her best of finery for when the boy's family comes to visit her , asked to do a catwalk in front of prying eyes of the elder women of the boy's family , I am sure all of my friends "The new age women " can hear their inners churning with anger . Why are women being treated as show pieces , we the NAW will never stoop down to such levels . If a boy has to like us they should like us for what we are , the arguments are countless and never ending .

If we were to stop for a minute and look at all that we the NAW are doing the arranged marriage catwalk every day , every minute of our lives . We buy a new ( shorter!! ) dress every week , we do not allow ourselves to put on a ounce of weight , and at the end of the day all of us vie for same the approving looks from Non fair sex of the society .

USA is supposed to be the country of equal rights , men and women are equal , there is freedom of dress , speech etc . However the women have to come to regard meeting the societal standards of good looks also as one of their rights . She cannot face her partner without make up , the less is more now , showing some portion of the body is not enough , more needs to be shown each time . Even the lady who has all cures for souls in troubles , Oprah seems to offer the same mantra to women , high heels , color coded hair , tight clothes which you cannot breathe in , that is what is needed for you to find the real you .

Unfortunately I find myself getting to be a part of this race more and more everyday . I was once getting pictures taken for the so called shaadi.com and someone commented , pose delicately like a girl atleast for the picture otherwise no guy is going to marry you !!! . So is that all that is there to being a girl , posing delicately , wearing clothes that are super models have specified will be regarded as feminine , being size zero .

There is something that at a deeper levels makes us all feminine , our love , care , intuitiveness , the strength of character , our ability to place our families before ourselves . I hope our future role models can be so that we start to considerhoning these characteristics more important than

looking like some physically impossible divas.!!

Taking the bollywood out of our lives .!!

I was reading Midnights with Mystic and it got me thinking about the melodrama each one of us carries around in our lives. I guess mostly influenced by the emotional barrage that we see in bollywood movies :-) .

I have never been a very emotional person but have always had my moments of emotional outbursts . The happy moments I dnt really question but the sad ones I do . I think we as humans take ourselves too seriously at times and so when things do not turn out exactly the way that we want them to we start to despair coz this is not how we imagined our very own Bollywood movie to go .

Life is a just a beautiful story which we are watching playing on the big screen in front of us. We walk into the movie called life with no knowledge of how it is going to be and we live through it . Sometimes it turns out to be a awesome movie , other times a average one , but at the end of it that is what it is , just a movie that we are all supposed to njoy and then walk out off . So moral of the story eat all the popcorn you want , cry , laugh but at the end of it remember that it is just a movie which will end in the so called three hours . So why not make the most out of the movie and enjoy it to the fullest ?

I look at Bollywood movies that so dramatize the romance between the hero and the heroine, people going to the extent of killing themselves or giving up on their lives just because they lost a loved one . I often wonder after watching all that how much more of life could that person have experienced if they were not stuck in melodrama of that one single moment in their lives, if they could seen clearly through it and just said to themselves , "Ohh that turned out to be a not so ok experience , so let me just move on and see if there are any other interesting experiences to be had".

As some wise men have said most people have too many fanciful ideas about themselves and their future lives , if only the one person that you can be really honest with becomes you , right at that very moment all the melodrama will drop out of your lives .

My quest for my very own version of a simple , honest bollywood movie still continues :-)