Is milk an unrecognised source of climate change?

I was watching Veer Sanghvi in a programme on “Travel and Living” the programme is about different foods of India, today he was speaking about India’s fetish for milk.

He guided me through a variety of facts – India was the largest producer of milk and yawn and yawn and yawn. I woke up when he began to meander through varieties of milk products – the zillions of sweets, clarified butter, cottage cheese, cheese, yoghurt and so on.

And then it hit me – milk can also be a cause of Climate Change.

No I am not talking about cows farting (http://www.danamania.com/temp/cow-fire.jpg), or about grasslands and all that. It’s all about the processes that milk and its products go through. It begins from pasteurisation, to the boiling of milk to make sweets to finally the process that makes the sugar.

If one were to calculate the number of sweet shops, the variety of sweets, Indians love for sweets and India’s population one would come to a climate change inducing amount of fuel used.

So what can be done to reduce the impacts of Indian sweet making on the climate? The first step for this industry would be to use jargons such as ‘energy efficiency’, ‘alternative fuels’ which every suresh, ganesh, ramesh is using. Maybe another thing to do immediately would be to reduce our consumption of milk. If we don’t do something now then we will have to do something more drastic like cutting on our sweet intake – but that may lead to Indians doing what they like best – burning things (buses, flags, effigies, people etc) which may be the last straw on the camel’s (pronounced climate) back.

Maybe it would be more palatable if everyone switched from incandescent bulbs to CFLs in the interim while the government creates a committee to study the impacts of milk on our climate.

If (with apologies to Rudyard Kipling)

If thinking of you could bring peace, there would only be 'make love'
If thinking of you could fill every pothole, suspensions would breathe easier
If thinking of you could reduce weight, there would be no guilt after a chocolate
If thinking of you could fill my glass of whiskey, I wouldnt have a waiter hovering around me
If thinking of you could give me a cigarette, passive smoking wouldn't be a health hazard
If thinking of you could fill my bike's petrol tank, Bush wouldnt have an excuse to attack Iraq
If thinking of you could clean a house, who would have heard of Cinderella?

If only thinking of you - - - - - - - - - -

Tête-à-tête

Terraces serve different purposes across different regions of India. In the north owners of houses build a suite (called a barsaati) on the terrace to rent out to bachelors. Such places are lovely because they come with a large terrace and sometimes with the owners clothesline too.

The concept of a barsaati is not so prevalent in the south. The terrace is used to hang clothes, put the water tank and dump unwanted stuff.

Occasionally terraces provide space for private conversation.

Childhood

Cycles unlike most times at school were a happy part of every childhood. Cycling to school, slow-cycling races (yes its an oxymoron but we had those too), picnics during summer holidays, or just cruising around the neighbourhood was what we did.

I remember inflating balloons and tying it to the strut of the rear wheel of my cycle so that it rubbed against the spokes. As the wheel rotated the spokes would rub against the balloon and make a god awful sound much like a cruiser without a silencer.

Then we would raise hell through our neighbourhoods until we got shouted out or our balloons burst.

I took this photograph in the evening, there were children around playing but none of them on bikes. Maybe because our apartment complex offered no place for them or maybe their parents refused to permit them to cycle in the by-lanes where vehicles zip by taking advantage of its emptiness.

Owning a cycle for a child has become an empty rite-of-passage.

Heroes to Worship

Every one wants to be linked to someone famous so that some of the glitter gets rubbed off on them – that’s why Pg 3 is doing so well. Here the nobody makes an effort to join the rarefied stratosphere of the somebody.

However in India there is another trend that is being noticed. Nobody's are including somebody’s in their everyday life for the same reasons. A case in point is the twist given to the predicament of Sunita Williams - the US astronaut stuck in space.

School children from unknown villages hold her mugshots and pray for her ‘safe return’ and the newspapers print this snap the next day. Well from this you could say that the Indian government's efforts to make accessible information technology to everyone has been successful but the truth of the matter is that some unknown school gets a photo in the papers by praying for a person lost in space.

No not just another person – a person who was once upon a time an Indian and through no fault of hers was born in the US – blame it on her parents who hoped to find greener pastures across the seas. This need to include famous people who are no longer residents of India into our everyday life stems from the fact that India does not have heroes of her own, that’s another reason why we also harp about the glories of ancient India. It’s easier to draw a connection to someone famous than to ensure a road to success.

The kind of heroes that are chosen also suggest a bias. No body in India holds a candle to Freddy Mercury, born Farrokh Bulsara, educated in a school outside Mumbai India, maybe because it was not infra dig then to search for Indian links or maybe because he was a gay rock star who died of AIDS.

The way things are going we will pretty soon be garlanding apes (our forefathers) for having cocked-a-snook at the food pyramid and for staying awake for the dawn of a new civilisation.

Chairs

The bus from Delhi to Chandigarh was a back-breaker. The seats did not recline, though they were at an angle, the angle ensured maximum discomfort. There was not much space between rows so one got the feeling of being in a cockpit and being surrounded by other cockpits.

I found a comfortable position for my back but the neck had a bad time. Not only did the rocking of the bus ensure my neck lolled around but the seats were devious enough not to give any support to my neck. The seat just sat back and watched my neck do bungee jumps whenever I dropped off to sleep which would ultimately end in my being violently plucked out from the land of nod.

The bus stopped for a snack at 1 am on the highway and I saw these chairs lined up on the road. They were made of cane. They all faced the road as if the road provided entertainment during the day.

Is Face-Off a remake of the original Don?

This thought came to me on a bus to Delhi from Chandigarh while being treated to the screening of the new version of Don.

The movie is about a gangster who is killed by a police officer. The officer chances on a down and out look-a-like and sends this double back to the dead Don’s lair to get information about the gang and its operations.

Now India is an underdeveloped country and Don was made in the late seventies early eighties so instead of using technology to change faces, Bollywood did what it is best at -giving people a chance to live surreal lives- and therefore chose to give some nobody to act like a gangster and bring the evil doers to justice.

A few years later Hollywood used plastic surgery to interchange the faces of Castor Troy and Sean Archer and the result was Face-Off.

I have watched ‘When Harry Met Sally’ umpteen times and loved it every time. Meg Ryans role in this and ‘You’ve got mail’ and for that matter in ‘Sleepless in Seattle’ are sure signs of changes in technology and the mindset of people about technology. In the former two movies Meg uses the computer at work, these are more like electronic typewriters with massive screens, in the latter movie she uses a laptop and uses it more for entertainment (its another matter that she finds Tom Hanks).