25 years ago- it seems like yesterday: Son remembering his father

March 16, 2015
It is the 25th anniversary of my father passing away. I remember the day in February when I got the phone call that my father was very ill. My manager at ZS, Jaideep Bajaj, was truly a kind soul- he allowed me to leave for India immediately. It was a day of omens- there was a massive snowstorm when my friends Chandra and Ajayan started driving me to O'Hare. We had to abandon driving, and park the car near a train station and take the train to the airport, as the visibility was almost zero. However the flight was canceled, and we had to return, pick up the car and drive back.
I did board the flight the next day, and eventually made it to Hyderabad.My father was quite sick, and he lived for just about a month after my arrival.
I could not understand the pain he was in, and how hard it was for him. Perhaps I was cruel, assuming he was not trying hard enough. Those days remind me of my weaknesses- unable or unwilling  to understand, short of patience, and not being kind.
I do remember the brighter days- dad giving me a beautiful HMT watch when I got into Little Flower Junior College, going to father' office for a cup of coffee when I was in St. Pauls, listening to sports on the radio with him, and playing table tennis. Father had a nice Decolum table made by our maestri- father designed the table himself. The table used to be our lunch and dinner table, and then during the weekends we would put some books as a net and play table tennis. He would allow me to win, even though I was a rather poor player. I remember having lunch in the canteen near SBI with him when I was in Little Flower in Abids. He would help me with my drawings for biology classes- he was a master artist, and would sketch beautifully.

The film that reveals how American ‘experts’ discredit climate scientists | Environment | The Guardian

The film that reveals how American ‘experts’ discredit climate scientists | Environment | The Guardian: "For Naomi Oreskes, professor of scientific history at Harvard, there’s no more vivid illustration of the bitter war between science and politics than Florida’s ban on state employees using terms such as “climate change” and “global warming”. No matter that the low-lying state is critically vulnerable to rises in sea level, or that 97% of peer-reviewed climate studies confirm that climate change is occurring and human activity is responsible, the state’s Republican governor, Rick Scott, instructed state employees not to discuss it as it is not “a true fact”.


Climate change: why the Guardian is putting threat to Earth front and centre
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In one sense, news of the Florida directive could not have come at a better time – a hard-hitting documentary adaptation of Oreskes’s 2010 book Merchants of Doubt is just hitting US cinemas. In another sense, she says, it is profoundly depressing: the tactics now being used to prevent action over global warming are the same as those used in the past – often to great effect – to obfuscate and stall debates over evolutionary biology, ozone depletion, the dangers of asbestos or tobacco, even dangerous misconceptions about childhood vaccinations and autism.

Scott’s de facto ban is, she tells the Observer, “a grim state of affairs straight out of a George Orwell novel. So breathtaking that you don’t really know how to respond to it.”"



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PM Narendra Modi has cut environmental funding for India: TRFN | The Financial Express

PM Narendra Modi has cut environmental funding for India: TRFN | The Financial Express: "Environmentalists in India have expressed alarm over the new federal budget of the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which they say heralds substantial cuts in environmental programmes and fails to address the country’s worsening pollution and vulnerability to climate change.
The budget for the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change for the fiscal year beginning April 1 has been reduced by 25 percent, from 22.6 billion Indian rupees ($360 million) to 16.8 billion rupees ($268 million).
In his budget speech, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley announced an increase in the target for renewable energy generating capacity, to 175,000 megawatts by 2022. But the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy will see its funding for the coming year reduced by more than two-thirds, to 3 billion rupees ($48 million).
“There is a disconnect between the budget speech and the allocations,” said Chandra Bhushan, deputy director general of the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), a research and advocacy organisation based in Delhi."



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Using Terms “Global Warming” and “Climate Change” Banned for Florida DEP Officials - Daily Science Journal

Using Terms “Global Warming” and “Climate Change” Banned for Florida DEP Officials - Daily Science Journal: "According to a report released by the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting (FCIR), the employees of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection have been ordered not to use the terms “climate change” and “global warming” in official communications. Christopher Byrd, an attorney with the DEP’s Office of General Counsel in Tallahassee from 2008 to 2013 stated “We were told not to use the terms ‘climate change,’ ‘global warming’ or ‘sustainability.’ That message was communicated to me and my colleagues by our superiors in the Office of General Counsel.”

The report revealed that it is an unwritten policy which came into effect after Governor Rick Scott, a global warming skeptic, took office. The state of Florida in the US is highly vulnerable to the effects of global warming which makes such prohibitions for Florida officials noteworthy. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2014 wrote “Human influence on the climate system is clear, and recent anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are the highest in history. Recent climate changes have had widespread impacts on human and natural systems.”

Doug Young, president of the South Florida Audubon Society and a member of the Broward County Climate Change Task Force explained “I told them the biggest problem I have was that there was absolutely no mention of climate change and the affect of climate change on coral reefs. The two young women, really good people, said, ‘We are not allowed to show the words, or show any slides that depicted anything related to climate change.”"



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Why the Greens aren’t despondent despite the derision | Zoe Williams | Comment is free | The Guardian

Why the Greens aren’t despondent despite the derision | Zoe Williams | Comment is free | The Guardian: "There is something distinctive about the authentic ovation: the applause that is neither dutiful nor orchestrated, but occurs in the spirit for which it was invented. I don’t know how you can tell, but you can, and that is what greeted Green party leader Natalie Bennett at its spring conference on Friday.

My droll Guardian colleague John Crace suggested that they were giving her a standing ovation at the start in case she messed up and they couldn’t, in conscience, do it at the end. But it was a statement of support, of love, if you like. There is no crisis of confidence in the Green party.

There are no huddles of people, saying “all lost, all lost” with their eyes (well, about the environmental apocalypse, maybe, but not about the party). There is no sense of starting every day with a compromise, nor a great taboo to step around, where the one idea that unites them is the one they can’t say – and on this last point it contrasts instructively with the Ukip conference but it is strikingly unlike any other party’s.

Natalie Bennett comes good amid conference chaos
John Crace
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On that difference between the Greens and Ukip, the Mirror produced some helpful data at the weekend, comparing the two: 1,300 Green conference delegates, to 500 Kippers; 55,000 Green members to 42,000 Ukip; a typical age group of 18-24 among the Greens, and 60-plus in Ukip."



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Indian state of Maharashtra bans beef - FT.com

Indian state of Maharashtra bans beef - FT.com: "Narendra Modi, prime minister, has bemoaned what he calls India’s “pink revolution” of rising meat exports, and expressed hopes of bringing a national ban on cow slaughter.
India’s consumption of bovine meat — including both beef and buffalo — has fallen over the past decade, as rightwing Hindu groups have campaigned to discourage lower-caste Hindus from eating it. But exports are surging, and are now estimated at about $5bn a year."



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China pulls smog documentary offline after internet storm - FT.com

China pulls smog documentary offline after internet storm - FT.com: "A documentary critical of China’s air pollution was pulled from major domestic video websites after becoming an internet sensation the same week as a national political meeting in Beijing.
Under the Dome, produced by Chai Jing, a former anchor at the main state broadcaster who left her job last year, was no longer visible on Youku, Tudou, and Tencent from Friday afternoon. The video had racked up more than 166m views on Tencent alone."



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Don't look away now, the climate crisis needs you | Naomi Klein | Environment | The Guardian

Don't look away now, the climate crisis needs you | Naomi Klein | Environment | The Guardian: "he world’s governments have been talking about preventing climate change for more than two decades; they began negotiating the year that Anjali, then 21 years old, was born. And yet as she pointed out in her memorable speech on the convention floor, delivered on behalf of all of the assembled young people: “In that time, you’ve failed to meet pledges, you’ve missed targets, and you’ve broken promises.” In truth, the intergovernmental body entrusted to prevent “dangerous” levels of climate change has not only failed to make progress over its 20-odd years of work (and almost 100 official negotiation meetings since the agreement was adopted), it has overseen a process of virtually uninterrupted backsliding. Our governments wasted years fudging numbers and squabbling over start dates, perpetually trying to get extensions like undergrads with late term papers.

The catastrophic result of all this obfuscation and procrastination is now undeniable. In 2013, global carbon dioxide emissions were 61% higher than they were in 1990, when negotiations toward a climate treaty began in earnest. Indeed the only thing rising faster than our emissions is the output of words pledging to lower them. Meanwhile, the annual UN climate summit, which remains the best hope for a political breakthrough on climate action, has started to seem less like a forum for serious negotiation than a very costly and high-carbon group therapy session, a place for the representatives of the most vulnerable countries in the world to vent their grief and rage while low-level representatives of the nations largely responsible for their tragedies stare at their shoes."



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Don't look away now, the climate crisis needs you | Naomi Klein | Environment | The Guardian

Don't look away now, the climate crisis needs you | Naomi Klein | Environment | The Guardian: "voice came over the intercom: would the passengers of Flight 3935, scheduled to depart Washington DC, for Charleston, South Carolina, kindly collect their carry-on luggage and get off the plane. They went down the stairs and gathered on the hot tarmac. There they saw something unusual: the wheels of the US Airways jet had sunk into the black pavement as if it were wet cement. The wheels were lodged so deep, in fact, that the truck that came to tow the plane away couldn’t pry it loose. The airline had hoped that without the added weight of the flight’s 35 passengers, the aircraft would be light enough to pull. It wasn’t. Someone posted a picture: “Why is my flight cancelled? Because DC is so damn hot that our plane sank four inches into the pavement.”

Eventually, a larger, more powerful vehicle was brought in to tow the plane and this time it worked; the plane finally took off, three hours behind schedule. A spokesperson for the airline blamed the incident on “very unusual temperatures”.

The temperatures in the summer of 2012 were indeed unusually hot. (As they were the year before and the year after.) And it’s no mystery why this has been happening: the profligate burning of fossil fuels, the very thing that US Airways was bound and determined to do despite the inconvenience presented by a melting tarmac. This irony – the fact that the burning of fossil fuels is so radically changing our climate that it is getting in the way of our capacity to burn fossil fuels – did not stop the passengers of Flight 3935 from re-embarking and continuing their journeys. Nor was climate change mentioned in any of the major news coverage of the incident."



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Cool Cities, Elmhurst College co-sponsoring environmental film - Chicago Tribune

Cool Cities, Elmhurst College co-sponsoring environmental film - Chicago Tribune: "The Elmhurst Cool Cities Coalition and Elmhurst College are co-sponsoring a showing of the environmental issue film "Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret" at 11 a.m. Saturday on the college campus.


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The showing is part of the fourth annual One Earth Film Festival, which aims to create opportunities for understanding climate change, sustainability and the ability of people to affect those issues.

"Cowspiracy" is one of 40 films to be shown in 30 venues around the Chicago area over the weekend. The Elmhurst showing will be in Illinois Hall at the college, 190 Prospect Ave., Elmhurst.

The feature-length documentary by Kip Andersen looks at the environmental issues surrounding animal agriculture and questions why leaders in the environmental movement have not been more critical of the industry.


The film's website describes it as revealing "the absolutely devastating environmental impact large-scale factory farming has on our planet and offers a path to global sustainability."

Barbara Lonergan, of the Elmhurst Cool Cities Coalition, noted the message of the film festival fits with the volunteer organization's focus on environmental issues and sustainability.

"This is our first year, so we started with one movie," Lonergan said, adding that a number of members brought the film festival to coalition members' attention.

The coalition focuses on energy efficiency, resource conservation, renewable energy, solid waste reduction and pollution.

"Right now we're working on home energy efficiency," Lonergan said, of community education efforts, which typically include a monthly meeting at the Elmhurst Public Library. Recent meeting topics have included understanding climate change and tips on home composting.

Saturday's film screening will be followed by a short question-and-answer session with environmental consultant Shyamala Rajan. The adjunct professor at Roosevelt University teaches a course on global climate change.

The session will be moderated by Gurram Gopal, an Elmhurst College professor of business administration and a member of the college's Sustainability Committee.

Tables set up in the lobby will offer more information on sustainability issues.

The One Earth Film Festival, sponsored by Oak Park-based Green Community Connections, hopes to draw several thousand viewers to venues, including movie theaters, libraries, universities and other locations across the Chicago area.

Those viewing films during the festival will have an opportunity to vote for their favorite. The winning film will be screened in partnership with the city of Chicago on Earth Day, April 22."



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