Who'd Have the Heart to Kill That??

News has been a little slow over the last few days. I mean, it's suddenly all swine flu this and swine flu that, so I'm desperately looking for something else to write about. And then I came across this:

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's team on tigers is meeting on Monday, just a couple of days after the latest tiger crisis.

The tigers have been wiped out of the Panna Reserve. A Central team visited the Panna reserve in Madhya Pradesh and reported that there was not a single male tiger left in the park.

The high level team is warning of a new crisis - tigers in south India could be equally vulnerable.

The alarming statistics paint a grim picture of a dwindling tiger population. Just recently, two tigresses from Bandhavgarh and Kahna national parks were brought to Panna to breed with male tigers, but none were found.

"I am not denying its poaching, but we have no proof for that. If there is poaching we have to find new ways of controlling poaching," said H S Pabla, Wildlife Conservator, Madhya Pradesh.

Poaching, encroachment on tiger habitat, or simply negligence -- today in India there are just 1,400 tigers left. Just 10 years back, the number was 4,000. India's National animal is on the verge of extinction.

What the hell?? What kind of a sick bastard would want to kill something so cute, and obviously so majestic?

I mean, awwwwwww.

So tigers are scary sometimes. But everyone's seen The Lion King right? The lions that are not dark in colour or named 'Scar' tend to be good lions. They kill just for food, since they respect the Circle of Life and stuff. Granted, the movie was about a bunch of lions, but tigers are cats too and way more cooler since stripes > messy manes.

Whoa! Who'd want to even approach this beast,
let alone try killing it?

And what sort of retarded tiger reserve would buy tigresses for breeding without checking if there were any male tigers left in the first place? Do they not understand the basics of mammalian reproduction? And why are we restricting ourselves to cloning sheep and dogs when there are clearly already millions of them? Sometimes, humanity pisses me off to the extent that I wish we had remained apes.

At least that way, we'd get along with the tigers...
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Another Day Highlighting a Good Cause...

...that proves insignificant when compared to the economy, your job, your education, your mortgaged home and the cute guy next door who accidentally smiled at you this morning.



Cleverly Photoshopped images, like the one above, tend to trigger your tear glands and make you, temporarily, sympathize with poor, burdened Mother Earth. And a few moments later when you find out that the Kolkatta Knight Riders won their second IPL match this year (worthless win, though), the fact that the planet might become a ball of floating ash and dust in a few years hardly frazzles you.

Why this nonsense, you ask? Well, today happens to be Earth Day, not to be mistaken by World Environment Day, which is marked on June 5th. Or Arbor Day, on the last Friday of every April. Or the Bike-to-Work Day, third Friday in May. Or the Car-Free Day, September 22nd. Or World Habitat Day, first Monday of October. Or Zero Emissions Day, September 20th. Or Day for Water, March 22nd. Or Ecological Debt Day, September 23rd. Or Ozone Action Day, which happens at select times of select months that no one knows about.

Maybe life would be easier for environmentalists and the people they are trying to convince if they just had one freaking Earth Day and instead of lecturing people to be kind to Mamma Earth on that one day, just advocate everyday as one. Not that anyone is going to listen, but it's worth a shot.
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Go Green, Don't be an Idiot

Recently, we observed Earth Hour wherein we were encouraged to switch off all electrical appliances, including lights, for an entire one hour. You know, since one hour of Amish existence can replenish all of the Earth's resources. But this is no time for sarcasm. Granted, I almost strangled my brother over that one hour considering I couldn't even charge my iPod and all the ice cream in the fridge had melted, I was also intrigued enough to look up NDTV's Greenathon, a non-profit venture for environment awareness.

Commendable attempt. Really. They've made over 2.4 crores to facilitate villages with solar panels. They have their own anthem and everything. And then I saw this: they held a concert for promoting the cause.

Not that a concert isn't an extremely awesome PR strategy. It's just... thousands of megawatts of electricity go into powering those things, not to mention all those celebrities with their over-inflated senses of egos they had to house and the massive television audience they catered to LIVE. There was an argument that the hosts didn't mind this fact, since it reached a large percentage of the population and they made more than enough money to compensate. That does nothing but bring out the impression that those tools at NDTV believe it's OK to waste electricity if you can pay for it. And about it "reaching the masses" : walk along Marine Drive for a couple of minutes and you'll see exactly how effective this whole thing was.

Then again, NDTV might not be the biggest idiot of all, considering eminent personalities have done equally ridiculous things. Chris Martin, lead singer and overall douchebag of Coldplay, said that his band took the initiative to plant 10,000 mango trees right here in India to compensate for all those private jets they use to fly around the world, even though there is scientific evidence that no number of trees can cause carbon dioxide fixation to such a large degree that it compensates for their constant jet-setting.

I don't care about my carbon footprint, I just
want to eat roasted peanuts on my jet.

Even Al Gore, former Vice President of USA, organized the Live Earth concert in 2007 and flew in hundreds of thousands of celebrities, artists and crew, many of them by private jets. That basically released about 31,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide into the air for that one day alone.

If you wanna talk about carbon footprints, it doesn't get any bigger than this.
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