Fact:

Leaving the tap (faucet) open when you brush your teeth in the morning results in a wastage of 7 to 12 litres of unused water per minute. 7 to 12 litres per minute. That is how much water we need to drink in a day. Add to that other stuff that you do in the morning where you leave the tap running: shaving, combing your hair, etc, and you get a figure that is absolutely ming-boggling.

Resolution:

I will turn off the tap when I am not using it and will turn it on only when I need it. For shaving, I will fill water in a mug and use that instead of rinsing everything under a tap.

The Story of Stuff kicks off the Super Clicks. This website starts off with an entertainingly told 20 minute video that will have you thinking differently about everything in your life. The video is fast and fun, and must be watched by children as much as by adults, for the facts raised by Annie Leonard are indisputable and will raise a lot of questions.

Although the website does have a United States leaning, the issues it raises ring true with every surfer. It provides a lot of further links, like any good website should, and you can find yourself spending countless fascinating hours reading about hard-hitting facts or about organisations in your area that are working to save the world in their own way.

So, spend some time going through The Story of Stuff. I assure you it will be a pretty good utilisation of your time.

An innovative practical way to decongest Bangalore

100 Feet Road is an important road in East Bangalore.

On one end, it connects to:

• CMH Road – a heavy business and commercial road
• Old Madras Road – infested with tremendous traffic including trucks on their inter-city sojourns

On the other end, an ambitious, but fairly ugly, flyover connects it to:

• Airport Road – erstwhile clogged, but no longer as clogged due to the shifting of the airport
• Domlur Road – usually sees free-flowing traffic due to lack of solid commercial establishments and signals
• Inner Ring Road -an important lifeline a few years ago, it seems to be reaching its peak capacity

Surrounding 100 Ft Rd lie the important residential areas of HAL, Domlur and Indiranagar. 100 Ft Rd itself has a history of being a residential district. But over the last few years, it has grown commercially. Long-time residents of the area have sold their houses to companies who promptly establish a consumer interaction point (also known colloquially as ‘shop’).

100 Ft Rd is not very wide, with two smallish lanes on either side of the divider. It sees fairly high traffic, and a lot of stationery traffic as well, thanks to all the establishments, including educational and medical. As a result, traffic moves quite slowly and buses have a torrid time negotiating their way through the road. Poor and irregular maintenance of the road has left it badly potholed and scarred.

Now that the airport has moved to the opposite end of the city, a fairly large traffic headache for the commuters and the government has been removed. This is the perfect time to take a long hard look at the surrounding areas and see how they can be developed. The new hotspot for infrastructure development is North and North-West Bangalore, but there is much that can be done with already developed areas in East and South-East Bangalore.

Bangalore, or any Indian city for that matter, has never woken up to the glory of a parking building. If an apartment building puts ten times the number of people on the same area, logic would dictate that a parking building would put a similar number of vehicles on the same area. So, considering that we have a traffic explosion and have to counter the parking problem, shouldn’t parking buildings be the way to go? Three buildings dedicated to parking should be installed near the 100 Ft Rd-Airport Road junction, the 100 Ft Rd-CMH Road junction and at the other end of CMH Road near Ulsoor. This way, people who want to explore 100 Ft Rd and CMH Road won’t have their cars getting in their way or others’ way. However, this does call for alternative means of transportation that are specific to this area.