Fuck Earth Hour.

Earth Hour.  One hour out of 24, one day out of 365.  Lights out!  Fans on, stoves on, air conditioners on, trains running, buses running, factories running, planes flying, ships chugging on crude oil, power plants still burning dirty coal, but lights out.  The man who started this movement called it just "symbolic".  Problem is, it's the wrong symbol.

Not only does it send the message out that putting out lights somehow helps the earth, it also eases some guilt out of our collective ecological consciousness.  It somehow sends out the message that by just putting ourselves in darkness, we are somehow, symbolically, at the very least, reflecting upon how life would be if we didn't have to burn any energy at all.  All this, while a lot of people lit candles to show their ubiquitous support of anything these days, ostensibly however, leaving a bigger carbon deposit into the atmosphere from burning wax!

The message going out has more to do with becoming unproductive than becoming efficient.  Cutting off power to devices doesn't stop thermal power plants, which are the majority in the world today, from burning fuel.  Lights are a very small percentage of our power consumption anyway, and indeed a very, very small percentage of our energy consumption.  What we actually achieved is a whole bunch of people in the world were less productive for an hour than they would normally be. 

Why do we love the symbols more than making actual lifestyle changes?  For example - one acre of land can support twenty vegetarians but only one and a half meat eating humans.  Bottomline, being vegetarian is enormously beneficial to the planet - by a factor of 5 at the very least, over being non-vegetarian.  Why aren't we giving up meat eating for the right reasons?  Because there is no convenience factor there!  There is no lazy gesture that we can sign on to, like the new fancy hogwash of buying carbon credits.  How it makes a difference to the atmosphere if money exchanges hands is mind boggling!

If we want a symbolic ritual, we could give up meat for a week.  Call it Earth Week.  No meat.  God, that ought to send some businesses scrambling for cover!  Imagine the animals that won't have to be killed, the meat that won't have to be refrigerated, or transported.  Oh, wait a minute!  What about the animals having to be fed until the feast the week after?  See?  If it isn't long term, it isn't going to work at all.

Let's look at this from a very Indian perspective.  Where I live, we've had a regular two hour power outage for over two years, so we're already way, way ahead of all the clowns out there celebrating this stupid Earth Day.  If I took the symbol seriously, I'd say I wouldn't have to participate in this Earth Day for another two generations and I'd still have less guilt!  So, let's leave the symbolism aside and consider what the real messages going out are.

This Earth Day was first thought about and started in Australia - today the single largest exporter of coal to the single largest consumer, China.  In other words, the one country that is going to feed the energy hungry beast called China, with the most polluting of all fuels, is the one that came up with this retarded idea of an Earth Day!  And why the heck are we celebrating this, when we are already much more environmentally friendly with hours of power outage all over the country?  Shouldn't we emulate perhaps Nepal, which has 16 hours of power outage a day?  What kind of environmentally conservative mindset wants to emulate countries that have reliable (read overproduced) power supplies?

The USA and China have the two biggest carbon footprints in the world.  India is languishing way behind in that department, and for once, we can be thankful.  But there are fashionable idiots all over the world who are busy sending out wrong messages.  And our idiots are grabbing them and really thinking it makes a bloody difference!  We apparently saved 916 megawatts of power during the Earth Hour according to some estimate.  With just lights, if we managed so much of a saving, how come this will never reflect in any power production budget?  It won't because we didn't produce any less, we just consumed less!  If we actually produced less, the environmental ministry simply has to cut a deal with the energy ministry!  India would shut everything down and be the most environmentally friendly.... yuk, India would be the "most green" country in the world!

If this doesn't make sense, think about this - our power plants, mostly coal fired thermal units cannot run below capacity just because we anticipate all our fashionable clowns switching off their lights for an hour.  Hydroelectric plants never run below capacity, for there is nothing to save except stored water, in some cases.  Lights are less than 15% of our power consumption, remember?  So, we continue to pump out as much electricity through the generators at the thermal power plants, and we'll be damned if some idiot downstream switches off his lights or not!  Now, let's look at the numbers this symbol actually stands for - 1 hour out of 24 is 4.16% of a day's consumption.  Assuming we had ALL lights off during this period across the country, that is, that would be 15% of 4.16% of a day's consumption - or 0.625% in a day.  Divided over the number of hours in a year, that was a royal saving of 0.0000171% of our annual production.  When was the last time you were happy saving 0.0000171% of anything?  No wonder no power plant around the world takes this Earth Day with even a symbolic reduction in production.

Saving the environment must be the same as saving money - not until we figure out how to do this, do we actually have any chance of building a lasting interest in saving anything.  Coal and oil are doing very well, because they are still very cheap, considering how much it costs for us to mine as a percentage of how much money we can make from the mining.  Until solar power and wind power and all the other sources of energy come down in cost, we don't have any chance of realistically bringing about a change in usage habits.

For some reason, it was fashionable for the White Man to destroy entire continents in his search for a comfortable life.  It was okay for him to dig out all the world's resources and burn as he wished.  Now, all of a sudden, he wants to sell us new technologies since he realizes he ultimately doesn't control too much of the world's oil.  Up came this great suggestion from none other than the foxes in the USA - let's bring all the world's forests under a global management system.  Well sorry White Massa!  In fact, fuck you.  That didn't work out very well, so now we have this widespread media onslaught that the environment is really important and that we cannot poke holes in the ozone layer, but only since the White Man is the one who is first going to get skin cancer by the dozen!

Sadly for Whitey, the rest of the world is pretty savvy when it comes to alternative technologies - there is no breakthrough infinite energy source for whitey or anybody to control.  And a very brown Arab community still has plenty of oil, and the Venezuelans aren't likely to hand over their big oil resources to the Yanks or the Brits either.  Nor are the Kazakhs or the Iranians. And many OPEC countries are considering switching from the US Dollar to the Euro to peg their oil and gas on!  Not the British Pound!  With so many countries in the EU, we don't have to worry about any controlling interest in the currency itself.  In other words, Whitey's control of oil has eroded bloody fast.  So he's looking for something new to control, but we must first be made to fear that shit that looms in the unknown future.  Disaster is easy to subscribe to.  Well guess what?  If we had no power and no oil, we in India will simply ride our bullock carts and ride out the disaster.  Whitey cannot.

But Whitey can scare the shit out of us.  Because we have idiots who believe everything Whitey tells us.  Their freaking press looks so classy, they can't possibly lie, can they?  Yes, they can.  And we're falling like ninepins for the bullshit they spin out.  Their lies are all geared towards feeding some industry or the other.  They've even invented diseases and told the whole world to get vaccinations for diseases that don't even exist!  Look at our poultry industry!  Crushed by thousands of vested interests.  Luckily we have realized that broiler chicken is no good and are back to raising free range chicken.  Same with genetically modified foods and brand new diseases like ADD!  How come the new generation suddenly has a disease, a disorder, that none of our ancestors had, well up into this century, this generation of parents!?  Whitey lies.

So fuck Whitey when he tells us to use resources carefully.  All of a sudden, those are global resources, huh?  Every culture uses whatever it can afford to use.  We don't have to sacrifice anything for anybody.  We are already very judicious with our decisions and look at how well our regulated banking system did not flinch with this global crisis Whitey had to endure with crashing, burning and pain!  We may be terrible in many ways, but we know how to take care of our shit when we really have to.  We don't need to add to the pain we already have without enough electric power.  We have done enough.  To hell with Whitey.  Fuck Earth Hour.

BSK.

The Convenient Absence of Quality

Vinnaithandi Varuvaya, a film by Gautham Vasudev Menon, is being hailed as a work of "class" in The Hindu by an ostensibly reputed reviewer. Karan Johar's My Name is Khan received 5 out of 5 stars in the Times of India.

What stands out is that both are mediocre films but have been released in an ocean of trash, making the ordinary seem exaggeratedly noteworthy. Thankfully, some of us have reference points that are wider than the collection of movies infesting our A city theatres at this given time, we are exposed to better fare than the reviewers that reputed newspapers seem to be able to get these days, and we can continue to have our honest opinions about mediocrity that comes packed in glitz - from pictures to pizza, literature to music. We don't have to be fooled. But "we" are in the minority and getting smaller.

This is the age of the salesperson, the consummate professional who can lie through her teeth, in complete ignorance or in complete shamelessness, and make it sound like a million bucks. There is a whole generation of consumers out there who can't tell the difference, and even worse, don't want to make the effort to see the difference. All they know is trash. But they can tell glitzy trash from dull trash. The marketing machine is here to add glitz to anything we want to sell, so if you can afford the glitz, you can produce trash and absolutely hope to get away with it.

An extended vaccuum in quality can actually lower standards, push down expectations, and finally result in a worse quality of life. Reviewers can be bought by the dozen today, a few crores of money spent in bending opinions doesn't seem to be money badly spent. Every advantage is to be had commercially by dumbing us down, homogenizing our viewpoints, and reducing the average level of knowledge and questioning of what we see, hear and are willing to be sold. The number one sellable after sex is "Freedom"! As soon as we're ready to measure our freedom in what we can afford to buy, we are suckers by the million. And we're being had royally.

Look at the number of times AR Rahman has done something ostensibly "patriotic" and it is easy to see why some wise men have opined that patriotism is the refuge of scoundrels. Even a lousily rendered "Vande Mataram" cannot be questioned for quality, because it is about something that is supposedly above reproach - his patriotism! Holy cow, YOUR patriotism! It is just like our inability to tell a lousy singer in a temple to stop torturing our devotion with the snarling effort of religious hysteria. We don't have a smoking chance against the power of stupidity, noise, and overwhelming ignorance. Patriotism takes advantage of all of these. All reason can be drowned by anything patriotic, especially if it sounds like an iceberg humping a mountain full of tin boxes.

India is headed towards a quality oblivion, quite simply because we are becoming a culture of reducing effort. We want to strive less, ignore more and be blissfully happy. The traps are all here - we truly belong in our own illusion of a great country when we obey, and only when we obey the machine that tells us so. After all, when all of your friends tell you My Name is Khan is a great movie, isn't it just cool to go along? Maybe they are right! Of course, this line of thinking is easy when you know only as much as they do, and all of you collectively know very little anyway. Our mob mentality is geared perfectly for dumbing down. Win over a part of the mob, and the whole mob will be yours! This is how the British took over the whole country! In any case, we're proud to belong to the Indian mob waving the same flag that some other rather original people held aloft not that long ago.

Access to information has not translated to access to knowledge as far as India is concerned. Our youngsters live in a deluge of information, dished out by other youngsters working for mindless media outlets that man the stations sending out SMS messages, advertisements, promotions, and a whole host of hideous, tasteless, unchallenged overtures of nonsense, juvenile sexuality, and sheer lies. We are also sold this constant message that India is on the "march forward" and our young clowns need only hear that they are as good as any in the world! It is a turnout of gargantuan amounts of ignorance.

We have the USA to look up to, for any reference we need on the level of dumbing down we are happy to subscribe to. If something is good enough for the Americans, we're okay with reaching anywhere near that. Why else would Vinnaithandi Varuvaya have whites and blacks dancing together behind our hero? This is our director not wanting to be politically inferior to any American film maker, as if anybody would notice this fool's film in a world panorama! But still Gautham Menon wouldn't want to hurt Tarantino's feelings, would he?! This disease is so deep rooted, he wouldn't even know if it was pointed out to him.

Coming from the new age Indian upper middle class family is the bane of all originality - it is not encouraged at all. Parents who have "set up" their children for the future have no chance of producing any offspring that are capable of any truly original thought processes. Protection from all the insecurities of life can only lead to dead emotional intelligence. That is where most of our mediocre crap comes from. But then, that is where the reviewers of that crap come from as well - get a good school education, get a good college education, get a half decent hold of your English language presentation, and guess what!? YOU decide what everybody like you should be watching! The market is full of fools like you, so who can question your abject ignorance?! When we're adding forty million people to our middle class each year, and are being taken aim at as one of the most reliable "growth" markets, we are ripe for this sort of dumbing down.

We have enough arrogance to think this sheer game of numbers actually gives us a right to feel powerful in some way. We are, but we are not empowered. We're simply "available" to dumbing down and being sold stuff to. The easiest thing to sell to us is the absolute right to be lazy, in thought and action, or thought and inaction! Everything is justified since we have collectively registered some undeniable "progress" on some global scale. But how have we grown when we have managed to put agriculture out of whack as a self sustaining industry, but are happy that we can call Dominos Pizza any time of the week in any Indian city? Dominos isn't even the best pizza we can make for half the money we pay those monkeys, and the lunatics they hire to deliver their crap ride their bikes on the wrong side of the street! What investment would the franchise owner make in the quality of work they put in, as long as they can ring their numbers in. This is India for us. And we're proud of this?

It is HARD to build a quality country, so we're doing what we know very well - build a quantity country. It is all about quantity. From our population to the measure of accomplishment. 99% of the money we have made through software development for the computer industry is about slave labour - doing other people's grunge work. Our creative content industry is busy making copies of movies made by other film makers in other countries - and not high concept action films either, but family drama! This is supposed to be our strength, our family system and our values and what not., but we don't have one thing any more - sincerity! We don't have a quest for truth that is at the core of all art! We are liars and thieves and crooks in the world of art and we won't be coming out any time soon, especially in cinema.

The absence of quality is pronounced and upon us, but it is not going to go away anytime soon. No producer is going to bet his balls or his money on a film that asks us to be intelligent, sophisticated, or even remotely thoughtful. We all have no chance but to actively contribute to more dumbing down. After all, when stupidity is conveniently available to everyone and it can be sold and made money from, why shouldn't we celebrate the convenient absence of quality!?

The Electric Car Myth.

It's been known for a very, very long time that energy can neither be
created nor destroyed. It can only be converted from one form to
another. The same goes for matter - we can neither create matter not
make it vanish, no matter what it consists of, pun intended, with what
we know .

In humanity's unending search for convenient solutions, we're being
pushed this idea that electric cars are better than those driven by
fossil fuels. If you want to only look at how much smoke is coming
out of YOUR car, then yes, an electric car would indeed be a good
choice. But if you have any concern for how much less your electric
car might pollute the earth as compared to your petrol or diesel beast
- not much.

The question to ask is - where does the electricity to charge your
electric car come from? If it comes from a hydroelectric or nuclear
power plant, you won't pollute the earth any more by charging your
car. The percentage of the world's electricity generated by nuclear
power and hydroelectric power is small compared to thermal. Thermal
energy accounts for nearly 70% of the world's electric power. That
means - coal or gas is burning to provide the thermal energy.

Nuclear power generation and hydroelectric power generation have
something in common - you can't step up the power output at will. In
fact, hydroelectric power is woefully dependent on rainfall and
natural water flow, and is fast becoming unpopular because of its
unpredictability. Nuclear power on the other hand, is incredibly
clean, very reliable, but has a very long set up time and several
other factors to consider and hurdles to overcome.

Solar and wind power are still too small in contributions to really
make a difference yet. So, we're left with thermal power and its
production is on the increase worldwide. If any new demand is to be
quickly met, chances are, we will be burning more coal or gas. There
goes any chance of buying an electric car to help the planet! In
fact, if you and I buy an electric car today, we have a great chance
of putting that entire demand for extra power on a thermal plant. It
will have to be cranked up and we will be forcing more pollution upon
ourselves!

The good thing about your petrol or diesel beast is that it drinks
fuel only when it has to do some work. The horrible thing about your
electric car is that if you charge it fully and don't drive it, it
will get discharged! That's right. The batteries will simply waste
away all the energy in a useless internal reaction. So, you're more
likely to be charging it even when it is not going to be used - tring,
tring, tring - more electricity consumed and more thermal energy in
some distant plant wasted.

It would be great if you could run your electric car by charging it
with your own windmill, but we're not quite there yet. Or solar
power. Every house could have its own solar panel to charge our
electric cars. We're not there yet. The least we could do is to put
solar panels on our cars to at the very least, keep up with the
natural non-use discharge of the electric car's batteries, and
charging them to some extent when the car's parked in the sun. But we
won't do that anytime soon, because electric cars are already
expensive and solar panels will push their prices up some more.

Moreover, petrol and diesel car engines and body structures are made
of metal - one hundred percent recyclable. Electric cars contain
batteries - NOT one hundred percent recyclable, yet. It costs
electricity to make batteries, and digging up chemicals, like lithium,
is also environmental damage. We don't know to what extent we need to
rape this planet to get some efficiency.

Ah, that's the catchword - efficiency. Our cars weigh anywhere
between 700 kilos and 2000 kilos. That's an awful lot of weight to
move a measly 200 to 400 kilos of human weight. Clearly, we need our
cars to become lighter. Motorcycles are brilliant at this. They
carry a significantly higher weight as a ratio of their own weight.
No wonder some of them turn out astronomical fuel efficiency figures,
even in regular usage.

In terms of fuel mileage, hybrid cars are showing up as the best bets
without having to sacrifice range or performance. Essentially, except
for "plug-in" hybrids, these are driven by entirely by fossil fuel
engines, and really cannot claim to be less impactful on the
environment, especially when they carry such enormous batteries as
well. Hybrid cars also have two technologies built into them - the
internal combustion engine and the electric drive mechanisms, so they
are inherently heavier than their single technology counterparts.

The Reva, India's fully electric midget of a car looks so ugly you'd
have to be masochistic to buy it. The team behind that monstrosity
should be out of their minds. to imagine we would put up with that
level of ugliness. That thing better be cheaper than a bicycle to run
if it looks that bad. It isn't. No respite anywhere!

Now, reality. Every manufacturer in India seems intent on putting out
more and more cars, many of them making bigger and faster,
comfortable, luxurious, even ostentatious. Nobody seems to really
worry about what impact this will eventually have on our environment.
I am always amused when news of a new "launch" comes out. What the
hell is there to launch? And whatever happens to the cars that are
launched into orbit? Plenty of amusement is in store in the year to
come.

The Toyota Prius hybrid is priced at Rs. 27 lakhs. Most certainly,
Indian money of that size should not be locked up in one car, no
matter how great. Luckily, not many of us will want to spend so much
on just one car. One of the most successful car models in the world,
the Prius, is about to realize its first marketplace mistake. While
it is priced at close to or just higher than the average car prices in
other countries, it is priced way above most cars in our market. If
you have 27 lakhs, buy a lovely car for 7 lakhs, drop 20 lakhs in a
fixed deposit, get ten percent a year or two lakh rupees a year in
interest, and you will have about 8,000 rupees a month that you can
burn 200 litres of petrol with! At the end of a few years, you will
have almost your entire investment left! How could the Japanese have
missed this simple equation?

If we get more nuclear, wind and solar power, we will actually clean
up the air, but we must also do away with batteries. We simply
haven't figured out how to do that, and in fact, we will be digging up
the earth for all its lithium soon enough. No matter what we do, we
will impact the planet. Breathing included. However, we can turn
vegetarian and help enormously, since one acre of land can support 20
vegetarians but only 1.5 non vegetarians. No wonder livestock farming
is much more damaging to the planet than all the planes, cars, and
ships put together. This would demand a change in lifestyle for a lot
of people, and the food industry is definitely not going to discourage
meat consumption anytime soon. There are no products to be sold by
industries to a renewed interest in being vegetarian. It is also
cheaper to be vegetarian.

So, what can you and I do practically, to show our concern for the
environment? Simple - just do whatever gives us the most value for
money spent. Per person, buses are cheaper than cars only because so
many of us travel in a single bus. It is also the most
environmentally sensible thing to do - take public transport whenever
possible. Anytime we're willing to drag along a thousand kilos of
metal and rubber to transport ourselves, we're killing the
environment. It is really that simple. It is the same with
vegetarianism - it is the more efficient AND economically sensible
choice.

But our lifestyles demand much more from us than to be ecologically
sensitive. We'd really not benefit from slowing our lives down to
protect the environment. But there's a natural order to even this
mayhem. It is commerce that is driving new technologies, not some
fear of disaster. So, even when electric cars eventually get to make
sense to us, they will first have to make economic sense. For now,
let's not get conned into any consciousness or activism that our
wallets don't agree with.

BSK.