Compost and go green!

Just six months of composting my wet waste and look at the beautiful Philodendron growing in it! Definitely well fed! Come on, make your own compost and take some of it out of the landfills! This was my status on my FB page and I hope all the people who liked it and responded feel as strongly as I do. I was wondering where Bangalore was going with this massive amounts of garbage? We were just taking the stuff by the lorry load and dumping it in villages on the periphery of the city. The villagers have been getting ill with this rotting waste and the leachate has been percolating down into their acquifers. How fair is that? Why should they tolerate our laziness and our dirt? We need to segregate and compost. That's the simple solution out of this mess. Till it sinks into peoples minds, we will have stinking road sides and street corners where the accumulated dirt just lies teaching us a good lesson. We point our fingers at the west saying they are a consumer society and over consume wasting good food. Well they segregate and really nicely from what I have seen. So its time we stopped and cleaned up our act and pronto! Or we will all get Dengue, malaria, chickengunya, or go back to the dark ages and get plague.

A science journalist's dream!

Out of hundreds of journalists from across the globe, I was lucky to have been selected to go for my second ESOF 2012 in July to Dublin. The first ESOF 2010 I attended was in Turin.So what is this ESOF I am raving about? It is the Euroscience Open Forum which brings the best of scientists from across the globe to speak on panels and deliver lectures on the new programmes they have formulated in Science. So everyday was like going to Alibabas cave of knowledge and letting my brain soak in all the great new concepts these brilliant men and women had formulated for the world.

I heard about fracking which is a wonderful new concept to tap gas from shale. I heard about work on growing GM crops which everyone is dead against in the world. For once I heard the other side away from the rabble rousing Greenpeace elements.

I heard about how social media has become such a marvelous tool to share stories on science. About smart cities and smart grids when the grids back here in India are tripping due to over drawing of energy.

The venue we went to was in the fancy Dublin convention centre and we had a wonderful five days listening to the best in the world expound on various topics.

In the evening we had time to enjoy our Temple Bar Hotel a cultural hotspot in the heart of the city. Take a look at the pictures. Dublin is a great place and if ever you get to visit London, do take a trip to Ireland. The people are more friendly and less dour on that side of the UK!