Reasonable?

Was reading this blog by one of our ex-MPs. Going by the perks they are getting, I don understand why they should be paid a salary. After all, for us ordinary citizens, total perks form just a part of salary. For them, salary form a minuscule percentage of perks !!!

Try to use public transport…

Let me start with my experience on one fine evening this week.

I started from office, asusual, at 19:30 in office cab. By the time I reached Sarjapur junction, it was around 20:10. Winter has started and its really cold in the late evenings and early mornings (Dont know about nights. Thats the kind of sleep I used to have). Thanks to the government’s pro-traveller (!) approach, (2 flyovers under construction one in Agara and another in Sarjapur junction) my cab was made to wait in the signal for more than 20 minutes. And ours was not the only one, we were just one among the 200-300 vehicles in that junction. It was very hot and little suffocating. I was thinking that this was an unusual climate in a winter-start night. My cab crossed the signal after struggling for 4-5 rounds in the same signal and I was travelling in Iblur section of the Outer Ring Road. A sudden breeze of fresh and cool air started flowing around me and created a freshness in me. The whole stretch till Agara was really cool and fresh. It was all because of a large tract of land full of trees in that area, thanks to the Iblur Army Camp. It then stuck me that the heat faced in Sarjapur Signal are due to the absence of trees and a large number of polluting vehicles in that area, due to rapid rapid urban development. This is applicable to almost all the Indian cities.

Why not have a large number of trees all over the cities, all around the skyscrapers and on the sides of all the roads? This seems to be a distant dream as this may take a long time.

But we can do one simple thing to reduce this environmental degradation. Let us reduce the number of vehicles plying on the roads. Let us TRY to use public/community transportation whenever possible.