Dear Mr. President...(yet again)

From

Sundar Narayanan
Just another dude

To

The Honorable Barak Obama
President
United States of America

Subject : Following up on my earlier letter about : Simple requests to do things that meet green standards, improve quality of life and make Americans happy

Dearest Sir,

This is my second letter to you, and yes, hopes are still high that you will bring about the much needed changes that the world and its people require.

To remind you, my previous letter was about:

a. phone chargers
b. bio-degradable diapers
c. Public transportation and
d. promoting healthy food

a. On the phone charger front, I am happy to say that the new iPhone 3GS, hooks up to my laptop with a USB interface and charges. As a techno-nerd-geek-whatever, I cannot be satisfied if only end of a cable finds common ground. We have to make BOTH ends meet!

I now have different chargers which are all USB on one side and still different on the other side.. (did borrow an iPod connector that does not belong to me to make the point here). Please see for yourself!

You see Mr. President, we need to make both ends of the USB cable thingys to be the same for all devices. The amount of money that goes into making different cables, and how eventually all these are going to end up in a landfill, not to mention the impact to the earth on making all those chips that go into these cables, the wires, the plastic, etc. etc. is pure waste. Keep pushing for the univercable! Please....

b. My daughters don't need diapers or pull ups anymore. However, there has been a significant increase in the number of babies in the families we know. So, please do find some money in your green initiative to distribute to the bio-diaper development folks. Last week we went to see a friend's newborn at the same hospital where the Little one was born and it looks like they have switched to cloth nappies and cloth covers for the baby cribs instead of the blue plastic lined disposable mats. People are taking this seriously, or so it seems!

d. As for healthy food, looks like the schools are still peddling pizza and grease for lunches. We do not know about the schools your kids are going to attend. Do go see what they get for lunch and you will know what I am talking about(maybe!)

c. The main reason for this letter is Public Transportation, and why item (c) came last. Recently my FIL came to visit us and he asked a few questions which left me groping for answers. This was his second visit to the USA. His earlier visit three years ago was a 20 day sightseeing trip and he was constantly on the move all across America. This time he wanted to spend time with us at home and see what our daily life was like. Verbatim, his questions were:

1. How can the richest country in the world have such poor transportation.

2. How come this country is so insensitive to the needs of the elderly and children? They cannot move around freely because there is no public transport and are dependent on the middle aged people to help them get around places?

3. How can a country be free of oil dependence if everyone has to use a car to go everywhere?

Very valid questions. To top things off some dude was talking on NPR about a book he wrote called 20 dollar gallon, or something like that. He said that highways in the US will close down, Walmart will go out of business, etc. etc. and people will just stop driving when gas price goes above 12 dollars a gallon.

Why? Why should highways close down? why cannot everyone share a bus and wont the buses use the existing highway system? In countries that could not afford fuel or make cheap affordable automobiles (India in the eighties for example), people used the public transportation system very effectively be it the cities or suburbs. When more people started getting money in their pockets, and cheaper cars were available, even those same cities started having issues with people treating public transport as a backup or inferior mode of transportation.

It will only be a matter of time before every Indian middle class household has two cars and Americans adopt public transport. It is almost becoming a role reversal. How India will provide the petrol for all those cars is a different question. Some dude in India / China is probably writing to their president right about now..

Seriously Mr. President, why not jump start public transportation in the USA? It will get rid of oil dependence. Put a system together, make it dirt cheap or free for the first year or two and let people see how it improves their life. The green impact alone will pay for it. Every day I see this bus standing at various signals near my workplace. It is called IT (intelligent transport ?) and is supposedly a "green bus". The bus looks like it can hold 40-50 passengers and there is usually one dude on the bus!!!!!! Where is the intelligence there?

You have to aggressively promote public transport. You have to make that network very very efficient. You have to sell it as a worthy alternative to cheap gas and inefficient cars on an overcrowded highway system!

That way my kids and older relatives who visit can move around as freely as I would (assuming that I will be using that same public transportation) and we won't care if the gas price goes to 20 dollars a gallon.

That might be the way to getting to your green goals, oil independence and improve the health of the Americans who use this system (when they walk the extra few yards to and from the bus stops!). Who knows, that might even lower the cost of healthcare!

yours truly

A slightly happier dude who is still waiting for an improved public transport system.

ps. In the first 16 years of my life, there was no cars. Only two feet, a bicycle and PTC (Pallavan Transport Corporation) buses. Life was good, when seen from a transportation stand point.

pps. If people can get used to decimated 401k's, pay cuts, increased cost of health insurance, worsening quality of healthcare, dropping house prices, increasing cost of living and more taxes, they can easily get used to public transportation. Please take my word for it.

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A few fail the many

Watched the movie "Who killed the electric car?" recently. It was a documentary and the fact that it was put on top of the blockbuster online queue drew a lot of criticism from the wife and my queueing prvileges have been revoked for even putting this movie on the list!

Being the pro-green dude that I have become, it was an extremely difficult documentary to watch. Even more difficult that the Al Gore documentary. If Al Gore's "An inconvenient truth" showed us where the world is headed and beseeched us to find solutions, this movie was a reality check.

The solutions are already there. We just won't let them out! The best part of the film was I got to see the Ovshinsky's (Stan and Iris) who between them hold 200 patents, came up with so many things that cross my world today be it solar cells, Nickel metal hydride batteries, fuel cells, Chalcogenide based Phase Change Memories (PCM's) etc. etc. It was my dream to meet them in person some day! The couple had actually come up with a cheap long lasting battery technology, that made the electric car, cost competitive against gasoline based cars.

Apparently, Chevron bought a major stake in their company and shelved the technology because it threatens the existance of the gasoline based car as we know it!

Why would I buy a Prius if there was an EV1 option? I do not know!!

This post is not about the electric EV1 or Prius or environmentalism or technology.

It is about how a few people who decide the fate of many invariably make decisions which do not comprehend the responsibility of that decision making. It is almost a disease with politicians today, that when it comes to making right decisions, they invariably do what is right (economically for them, in their minds, at that time, or for their interests) as opposed to doing the morally right thing (which would be the greatest good for the greater many, right by the planet, looking forward to the future).

I would also be the worlds greatest bigot if I expected politicians and leaders to do that when an average citizen of the world cannot do the same thing, more particularly, if I cannot do that!

Given a choice between spending extra to solar power our home and continuing with the power grid, we chose the power grid. Given a choice to sell the old car and buy a Prius, we chose to keep the old car as long as it runs and save money. The same thing happened with a lawn in the backyard vs. synthetic turf! So many similar choices where we could have made a difference to the world or aorund us where the economics of the situation trumps the dogooder options.

In a world where it is each man for himself, where states protect their vested interests by erecting dams to control river water flows, where humans murder fellow humans by the hundreds of thousands every year in the name of religion, resources, security, and many other such things which really have no boundaries if you look deep enough, there is no hope for the many to expect the chosen few to do right by them. There is not even much hope for the many to expect the other people described by "the many" do the right thing!

Why have I suddenly become so self absorbed, self deprecating, guilty, etc. etc. Well in a way, my internal justification for doing a lot of things in this life was that technology would make this world a better place. After watching this movie, it has become apparent that the only technology that will make it into the world and its people are those that do not threaten today's rich in anyway.

Now that is a depressing thought, isn't it?

ps. This does not mean I will curl up into a ball and go sleep in the dark. Far from it. Life goes on. One can always hope that Ratan Tata will make a solar powered vehicle that gives the "Nano" a run for its money, or the Chinese will realize that they could get out of oil dependence and pollution by going to small Electric Vehicles. Yes! We can keep dreaming. It could happen....

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