Climate Change: Can we afford to be the ostrich when the storm is not temporary?

[Science is unequivocal about the impending danger the world faces and the proofs it has presented.  Our own experience of the last few decades corroborates that. When the crisis is knocking on the door and the knowledge to deal with it is available; what are the factors at the level of general attitude and belief that is preventing mass climate action? It’s our life and it’s our planet. Do we have any alternative? My take on Earth Day]

Let’s do a social experiment - randomly strike up a conversation with someone and ask them to list 5 problems that are facing Earth.

Most likely you will find mentions of COVID-19 first, overpopulation, poverty, communal conflict, war, and violence in various orders and combinations. You paraphrase the question and tell them that you didn’t ask about the problem faced by humans only; you meant Earth; with all its physical features and living beings. That might unsettle them for a few seconds, but the knowledgeable ones will rattle off terms like global warming, rise in GHG emissions, pollution of air, water, and soil, climate change, and blah blah.

That proves that the Knowledge regarding the danger posed by Climate Change is not limited to the laboratories of the universities and scientific communities but has reached the common people. The role of media in highlighting the issue is indeed laudable – it has alerted the world about the impending danger and brought it to the personal, national, and international agenda.

But has it succeeded in telling the world that their single-minded pursuit of happiness through material consumption and their depredatory arrogance to alter the face of the earth for its convenience, what is called the anthropogenic activities over the last hundred years that have brought Earth to this place? Also it is said that everyone must mend their ways if they want to invest in Earth to save themselves. The answer is surely negative. The gap between Knowledge and Practice is huge.

It’s time to assess if Knowledge alone of the impending danger is enough to change our attitude towards the things around us, our Beliefs that one day someone will find a solution to it which acts as barriers to us from adopting new practices and doing our bit which will contribute to the collective actions?

The newest IPCC report [1] paints a troubling picture. Climate change is already impacting every corner of the world, and much more severe impacts are in store if we fail to halve greenhouse gas emissions this decade and immediately scale up adaptation.

These days words like sustainability are mentioned in every written and spoken word by every possible type of organization - Corporations or Political Leaders. The words of the corporations try their best to show that they are doing their bit and in absolute compliance with the environmental norms of the country. Green Awards are bought and sold telling the world that we are the best at it. The words of the political leaders only talk about what we need to do soon not what shall have to be done.

The next few years offer a narrow window to realize a sustainable, liveable future for all. Climate change endangers the well-being of people and the planet and any delayed action risks triggering impacts of climate change so catastrophic our world will become unrecognizable. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called the IPCC report "An atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership.”

While the window for the world to do something is closing it has not shut entirely and there are tools that can now be quickly and cheaply deployed.

But some of these steps must be drastic, like a major transition in the energy sector by particularly moving away from fossil fuels, use of carbon capture and storage technologies, various demand management strategies like building compact cities where walking and cycling are easier, public transport is electrified, and buildings are retrofitted to cut emission.

IPCC for the first time also published a chapter on demand-side measures, which are in fact, lifestyle changes that can bring large reductions in GHG emissions.

These include low-carbon buildings, optimizing floor space, minimizing food waste, encouraging plant-based diets, shared mobility, greater use of electric vehicles, teleworking, and extending the life of products.

Science in the last few decades has unequivocally prescribed what needs to be done by the leaders, policymakers, policy implementors, industry owners, investors, and the public at large under the various categories of activities; what is missing is the serious determination at the level of individuals in their various capacities to resolve to catch the bull by its horn and not only preach but practice both at the organization and personal level.

One thing you are realising after talking to many. They all have heard about it, but they have not thought that they had contributed to it. This reaction is not limited to the common man. Everyone almost everyone waiting to be told what to do daily at the level of their organizational activities and lifestyle.

The knowledgeable and the privileged who have houses overflowing with appliances, wardrobes filled with clothes, and multiple cars spilling onto the roads after filling their garages are now thinking of buying an EV. This is one more consumption that satisfies their purchasing impulses but this time it is riding the moral high horse of being pro-environment. Many have already installed Solar Power Plants on their rooftops and the acquisition of an EV will earn them the Green Badge and a license to continue with their old lifestyle. Someone must break their heart by telling EV is not that green and they need to cut their unnecessary travel and to the SPV owners that their responsibility wouldn’t end after installing the plant, they must remember to clean the panels regularly to keep it working at its expected efficiency. That’s the kind of change in lifestyle which is needed. And it’s not easy to establish it across the society.

At this stage what we don’t want anymore is further scientific evidence or forecasts. We don’t need more activists led by a few green terrorists but millions of sensible people who commit themselves personally and through their organizational action to a dramatic lifestyle change.

Can they be us? Time to think about it on Earth Day today.

The Smart City Administrators and It's Over-smart Citizens

Let there be no mistake about the age of Bhubaneswar. It’s not 74 years young. 

It existed for centuries and was known by many names like Toshali, Kalinga Nagari, Ekamra Kshetra, Krutibasha Katak. 

The Temple City part and the new city whose establishment we are celebrating today are two different entities culturally speaking. While the former is fondly called Bhonsar and the latter by its more formal name Bhubaneswar. The residents of the temple city call the other part Capital and the denizens of Capital City Bhubaneswar identify the other part as Old Town.

The Capital City of Bhubaneswar is celebrating its 74th Foundation Day today. On 13th April 1948, Pandit Nehru founded this new city which was planned by the German architect Otto H. Königsberger in 1946. On 19th August 1949, the Capital of the State was officially shifted from Cuttack. 

Around the same time in 1949, planning for the city of Chandigarh was also started. 

In these many years both the cities have been shaped and molded by the people who lived there earlier, who migrated to it, and the people who administer it successively. While the City of Chandigarh still prides itself as a planned city where the civic laws are seriously followed and enforced, the deterioration of Bhubaneswar from a planned city to a collapsing urban cesspool forms the conversation of many of the old-timers who have seen the city as a breezy township to its present avatar which sees flooding of rods and houses during the rainy season and houses some 400 official slums.

That brings us to the core of the issue of looking at the role of people and government in making our urban habitations unliveable even after a massive infrastructure push in the last few years. Should we continue to ignore the attitude and behavior of people who inhabit the city and continue to push capital and hope for things to change on their own?

Time to introspect on the Foundation Day of our City.

Let’s, for the time being, ignore all other factors which have contributed to forming the urban mess we live in and look only at the roads and the houses which are built over them.

With wide roads, pedestrian pathways, road dividers, overbridges, multiple lanes, every crossing having traffic lights, speed cameras, and CCTV surveillance coverage, Bhubaneswar can pride itself on its road infrastructure. You can see hundreds of crores being spent to put up this international-grade infrastructure. 

After painting a beautiful picture at the night and a few hours into the day, the picture-perfect road of the city gets filled with Cargo Trucks carrying construction material, Intercity Speeding Buses, School Buses, and Private cars of various sizes, Autorickshaws, Bikes, and hand-drawn trolleys. Driven by frenzied drivers each claiming their rightful place through absolute wrong means. A few hours of driving on a busy thoroughfare at the peak hours can cause a heart attack to a driver who plays by the grammar of driving.

While the drivers have accepted and normalized this as a fait accompli, the policemen are busy collecting fines in their bid to enforce belt, helmet, mask, window film, and parking rules as if they have daily sales targets to meet. The city sees small to big gory accidents daily which leave people dead or maimed. Luckily the city is yet to witness an accident big enough that will stir the collective conscience of the people and the authorities to do something to mend the behavior of the drivers.

Coming to the structures which are on these roads. The city administrators are yet to find the correlation between the collapsed traffic condition and the nature of the buildings abutting those roads.

Commercial establishments like hospitals and shopping malls are allowed to operate on narrow service roads which can barely carry two parallel cars, legalised vending zones are allowed to operate on either side of the road till the neck of the crossings which occupies the total pedestrian path and occupies one lane for vehicle parking. 

Rule books are referred to in letters, not in spirit. BDA and BMC have their priorities and regulating urban development aren’t one of them. 

The city has some 400+ official slums. They enjoy excellent political patronage as their loyalty (votes) can be predicted as pocketed because of the strong quid pro quo. We picture the image of encroachers and squatters who have occupied public land and made it their shops and homes. Such encroachments are a result of urban migration and a lack of economic opportunities in our villages. 

So ingrained is this typical image of encroachment in people’s minds that someone who hasn’t done the above looks like a saint. There are various ways our over-smart denizens adopt to hoodwink the laws but still manage to keep land under their de facto control by preventing others from using it.

• Running a Commercial Establishment or a shop in a building meant for residential use.
• Unauthorized cordoning off of the front area of a building in the name of the plantation or by planting trees without gaps or huge trees inappropriate for avenues.
• Building platforms around trees and planting Gods under them.
• Erecting signboards by the side of the road
• Building raised platforms in front of plots above the road level and building ramps or steps to plots on public land
• Leaving high mounds of clay or building debris and abandoned vehicles on the road.

Utilities and administrative departments are not above the blame.

• PHED building manholes and inspection chambers well above the road level.
• Electricity utilities build space-consuming distribution transformer structures adjoining roads instead of using pole-mounted structures.

Practically, anyone who indirectly or directly prevents the government or general people from using the road and space adjoining it for commutation or such purposes amounts to encroachment. The above cases demonstrate how the enlightened citizens of our cities wilfully annex land abutting their houses for exclusive usage. One such occurrence on a road is enough to affect the general flow of traffic in the whole stretch. Here the administration takes an ostrich approach towards such events encouraging the number of such events to increase.

Proper buildings, un-encroached roads, vendors and squatters free roadside, and adherence to traffic rules and parking are few of the predictors of the general attitude of the citizens towards their fellow citizens and the efficiency of the law implementing authorities. Research shows that the more disciplined the city, the more liveable it is.

So, there is more smartness in being disciplined and enforcing discipline than waiting for the magician’s magic wand to turn our cities into a piece of heaven. 

Instead of blaming the center or the earlier governments and waiting for them to solve our self-created owes, shall we start the initiative of the good citizenry from our side first and expect the administrative departments like BDA, BMC, and the STAs to do their bit to make the city livable and the roads drivable?

Baby-Seat, Gas and Peta Garam And Our Resurgent Brethren

Flight 6E 785, from Hyderabad to Bhubaneswar took off 45 minutes late.

At 9.45 PM as soon as the seat belt signs were turned off, I chose to steal some sleep. The day had not been particularly kind to me. My eyes closed, and in a few minutes, I could realize that I am sitting amidst a bunch of men who were returning after a wild vacation.

Rows 9, 10, and 11 were almost taken over by them. The harder I tried to stay detached from their conversation, the more I was getting drawn into their world. How to miss the ringside view when I was at the center of the ring?

Observing that most of the conversations were directed at the one sitting at 9C I could guess that he is the leader of the pack. He demonstrated his knowledge and experience of doing many flights in the past by first taking the responsibility of ordering snacks for his fellow mates - he only knew how to order by speaking in a language the air hostess could make sense of. He also showed off his confidence by objecting to the quality of masala tea that was served. Having made the hostess apologize, he turned back to give a victorious look at his friends who were sitting behind him. His friends giggled and he took a bow by giving a broad toothy smile. I saw three completely black gutka-stained teeth. His alpha-male status in his pack was not without a reason.

Then he suddenly realized that he has forgotten to give very important instructions to his friends before they had started eating their snacks. He alerted everyone of a piece of white plastic locked to the back of the seat to their front. He said that it’s a food tray and not to be confused with a baby seat. One of his sisters-in-law had confused that to be a baby seat and had tried to make his toddler sit in an attempt to feed him. The naivete of his relative had left him red-faced. His friends joined in with a chorus of giggles.

After a few minutes, our alpha curled to the side and a few of his friends started giving him vigorous massages around his neck and back. His tee-shirt was wet around the neck. He was in acute pain. We naturally got worried about his health and I finding one of his friends sitting next to me calmly looking at the development in the front row, asked him what was happening. He told me that Alpha has been eating whatever he found available since morning. Now because of PETA GARAM, he has GAS, and because of this, he has JARA and now KAMPA. A good Samaritan sitting around him offered to give him some tablet he was carrying in his luggage.

I was curious to know more about these guys. They were 12 of them mostly from Pahala and Hansapal areas who for the last 7 days have been doing Mysore, Ooty, Bangalore, and now returning home after doing two days of Hyderabad. Many of them are doing real estate, transportation, and rasagola and civil contract business. They chose this time of the year for their vacation as many of them got their claims paid at the end of the financial year.

Some 15/ 20 minutes had passed in between. After taking the Tablet of India - Dolo 650; our alpha male had started feeling better. By that time the announcement of arrival was already made and the hostesses had sprung up to get the craft and passenger ready for landing some 25 minutes away. Things were much less tense and the air was filled with guffaws, serially getting up to go to the loo and exchanging their seats and also sitting at the partially vacant emergency exit. Their game which was attracting the hostess’s attention kept them excited.

All these times our Alpha was keeping quiet. He twisted his torso and swung his head to the back to ask loudly if anyone has checked what has been cooked back at home for dinner. On being told that its Chakuli and some vegetable curry without onion and garlic for Rama Nabami, our alpha male gave a disgusted look. He expected a bigger and better spread for his heroics and homecoming. Even immediately after his near-death experience, our Odia Bhai hadn't forgotten his first love - food.

Some days back a friend was lamenting how modern development has killed many micro-cultures in Old Town areas. But it was so assuring to know that they now exist 37000 feet above mean sea level.

Similar Slaps and it's Different Echoes

At a time when the deafening noise of the Russian bombing of Ukrainian cities has been relegated to ambient music status, two small incidents created some noise in the media. One was a slap by a celebrity actor at the Oscars and the same act by a faceless Swiggy Food delivery boy at a crowded footpath in Bhubaneswar.

It's interesting to analyze the two incidents for their similarities in the action and justifications of it and the dissimilarities at the level of echo it created. Both the perpetrators had their personal reasons but there was a vast difference in the way the organizations they are members of responded to it.

Will Smith the celebrated actor who was the nominee for the Best Actor award was in the front row of the 94^th Oscar ceremony and the world audience couldn't believe it when he walked up to the presenter Chris Rock and gave a dramatic slap across his face. That was at the other part of the world. Closer home, various social media channels were filled with the video of a Swiggy food delivery boy delivering perfectly timed slaps to a girl who refused to be subdued. In both situations, no one could immediately know what the provocations were.

The similarities of action ended here.

Will Smith got upset by a joke by Chris Rock where he pulled the legs of Jada Pinkett Smith, his wife. Smith as the husband felt it was his job to teach her tormentor a lesson. Our Swiggy boy had a different reason, he was taking videos of a couple who were having some altercations and the girl objected to it. He had his reason to justify his action and when he couldn't reason it further, he chose to let his slaps do the talking. He is conditioned to complete his task in time to get a good customer rating along with his fees. The most interesting part was his justification on camera for doing what any sensible man is expected to do – play moral police and restore discipline in the society by punishing the deviant woman.

Such rare acts of chivalry are not seen these days.

The audience of both the cases reacted as expected. Some supported and some suggested that both could have avoided the unpleasantness by holding back their anger. Many of Will's friends said that this matter will get sorted among themselves like family. Chris Rock refused to press charges. Will in his acceptance speech accepted his folly and asked for forgiveness and in an Instagram post sought forgiveness from Chris.

Though the matter looked to have been sorted out between the two and would have naturally died down like many other late-night party incidents; the Academy of Motion Picture Association in a statement told that the matter will be taken up at their board meeting about to be held on 18th April and appropriate decisions will be taken. As I write this article, the news of Will Smith resigning from the Academy membership rolled in. We know how Will must have been given Hobson’s choice of honorable resignation or suspension or termination for his unacceptable conduct. He must have chosen the former.

The echo of the two slaps at the institutional level is the most interesting part of this article. We don't know what stand Swiggy has taken as one of his contract workers was involved in an act which is just not misconduct but surely criminal. Also, what has been done by the police is still not known.

Public memory being short, we will soon forget this incident as a regular one that we see on the roadside these days? But institutions involved in this also forgetting this or letting it pass is a serious systemic flaw. How callous are our institutions towards their own rules and reputation that they chose not to react to this publicly? Does that demonstrate how accepting we are of conduct practically that in the rule book mentioned as unacceptable? We don't stand with the values which we mention in the letter but fail to accept in spirit.

In the background of these two incidents, it's necessary to analyze how we as members of various organizations and a citizen of society define what is considered unacceptable behavior and how far we go to enforce it neutrally without any bias. Are we uniformly unforgiving to any member big or small, important or non-important, famous or not so famous when it comes to their conduct?

We all are aware of the 'Tu Janta Nahin Main Kaun Hun' culture of the North and how law enforcer treats them differently in fear. We have an adage that says 'Panditanka pua Mankada Marile Dosa Nuhen' which points to the societal acceptance of considering the importance of the person involved in such acts before any attempt to penalise him is initiated. The higher the echelon he belongs to, the softer has to be the penalty for him. That’s an unwritten but accepted code. Our fear and respect for the people with privilege and importance don't allow us to bring them down to the ground and crush their career or public reputation. Society thinks that as he is from a good family this misconduct was an isolated aberration, and he should be allowed to realize and make corrections.  

That perhaps bares the contrast between our society and the western ones when it comes to fairness and integrity.