Imagine paying 100 Kroner (Aprrox 750 rupees) for a haircut ! In India you will not pay that much for a whole year ! Well in one of the projects based in Copenhagen (Denmark) there was an unoffical item to the travel "checklist" - cut your hair short so that you can survive without a haircut for 2 months !
What a hair-raising experince !
My wallet has become heavier after coming to Singapore.. and it has nothing to do with the salary I get for the onsite assignment. Its the cards I have started keeping. In India it was just debit and credit cards. Plus the one than hung round the neck for access.So today I took the inventory and it looked as follows -
My wife keeps two extra membership cards besides the above for her membership of watsons and some other store that i don’t remember the name
The approaching Copenhagen summit on environment will debate one the biggest challenges of the 21st century..environmental degradation. We all know about the stories of low lying areas like Mauritius getting submerged in the sea in the not so distant future.While the Copenhagen summit is not likely to reach any global agreement on emission cuts, individual efforts at using better alternatives will continue to evolve. Solar and Wind energy, more fuel efficient vehicles and machines, control on greenhouse gas emissions, along with the three R’s of reduce, reuse, recycle. In the third world (like India for eg) we automatically recycle a lot.. there is still a market for old newspapers, bottles and milk pouches. In Singapore you no longer get any value for old newspapers and the like, it is too expensive to get the labour to do it.. so any recycling is a conscious effort. for eg - we have three recycle bins placed in each HDB complex for Paper, Plastics and Cans..and its up to us whether to use them or just dump everything in the kitchen chute..That reminds me ..(flashback to India) Its july august last year and my mailbox (the real one not the virtual) is flooded with Company Annual reports. I am a “BIG” investor, and a chela of the big bull, :-) which actually means, like many other investors, I hold small lots in close to 25 companies. As per legal requirements, a company must send out annual reports to all shareholders, so it end up spending anywhere between INR 25 to 250 on a report that it must send out to even those people who hold a single share in the company. Being a Finance guy (who drifted later into a software company), i manage to browse about 10 of them. I am sure many investors have no time to do even that. What a colossal waste of paper !In Singapore now they are thinking of sending CR Roms instead of the printed report. One can browse it on the PC and moreover it can be made more interactive rather than the drab paper copy. Can we have the same in India ?Unlike Singapore, in India the number of investors is huge.. Reliance alone has more than 3 million shareholders..so imagine the amount of shareholder communication it sends.SEBI can make the appropriate regulations so that-
Similarly there may be hundreds of other avenues where we can reduce the use of paper, and save trees. Lets be creative in identifying them!Its our choice what state we want to hand over the planet to the next generation. But if each of us starts contributing, it will be only a greener and cleaner one that they inherit. Lets start going green..NOW!
