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| Oct 29, 2006 5:20 pm |
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re: re: The History of Bangalore..Excellent |
Kiran Pereira
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Hi all,
Happened to read this thread today. Thought I must share with you something I discovered recently.
Did you know that there were once over 400 lakes and tanks in and around Bangalore?
• By the early 1980s, that number came down to 262
• By 1996,the number of wetlands in the Bangalore district had dwindled to 141.
• Today, there are around 80 out of which only 64 are "alive" as water bodies and even as we speak, more and more water bodies are being destroyed due to encroachments by land sharks, legal and illegal dumping of untreated industrial effluents and domestic sewage, growth of water hyacinth etc.
This article tells us how today we are courting disaster by disbanding our lakes and tanks and depending only on one water source that is nearly 100 kms away. Read more at ...
http://www.esgindia.org/campaigns/Tree%20felling/press/The%20Times%20of%20India_050604.htm
If there is one thing I would like to change in Bangalore, it would be our attitude of “Swalpa adjust maadi”.
Here's a powerful parable I read sometime back.
"If you place a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will immediately try to scramble out. But if you place the frog in room temperature water, and don’t scare him, he’ll stay put. Now, if the pot sits on a heat source, and if you gradually turn up the temperature, something very interesting happens. As the temperature gradually increases, the frog will become groggier and groggier, until he is unable to climb out of the pot. Though there is nothing restraining him, the frog will sit there and boil. Why? Because the frog’s internal apparatus for sensing threats to survival is geared to sudden changes in his environment, not to slow, gradual changes.
(We react much like the frog, don’t we?) We are conditioned to see life as a series of events, and for every event, we think there is one obvious cause.
Conversations in organizations are dominated by concern with events: last month’s sales, the new budget cuts, last quarter’s earnings. Who just got promoted or fired, the new product our competitors just announced, the delay that was just announced in our new product, and so on. The media reinforces an emphasis on short-term events – after all, if it’s more than two days’ old it’s no longer “news”.
Our fixation on events is actually part of our evolutionary programming. If you wanted to design a cave person for survival, ability to contemplate the cosmos would not be a high-ranking design criterion. What IS important is the ability to see the saber toothed tiger over your left shoulder and react quickly. The irony is that, TODAY, THE PRIMARY THREATS TO OUR SURVIVAL, BOTH OF OUR ORGANIZATIONS AND OF OUR SOCIETIES, COME NOT FROM SUDDEN EVENTS BUT FROM SLOW, GRADUAL PROCESSES.
Think about it: the arms race, environmental decay, the erosion of a society’s public education system, degradation of values in society…. All these are not sudden events but slow, gradual processes that escape our notice."
Source - Peter M Senge, The Fifth Discipline
Trust I have given you enough food for thought. If you want to know how you and I can make things better, PM me and we'll talk.....
Cheers!
Kiran PereiraPrivate Reply to Kiran Pereira (new win) |
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