India -- Full of Life

"India Rising, India Gaining, India Growing, India Blooming" shout the Indian media. For once, I agree whole-heartedly--in more ways than one. As the !ncredible India campaign would rightly have you believe, India is absolutely full of life : being here is a perpetual multi-sensory overload. However, today, my focus will be on a slightly different definition of "life" in India.

Tabling the discussion of pro-choice vs anti-choice, let's define life for now as a single functioning cell. The conditions generally required for cell growth are

1) Temperature around 35 degrees Celsius: check
2) Ample supply of water: check/double check during monsoons
3) Supply of nutrients (carbon/nitrogen): check (you don't want to know where these "nutrients" are coming from)
4) Lack of antiseptic toxins: check

Where am I going with this? Grab a fruit in Bombay, take a bite, and leave it out for 5 min. Even in your filtered-air, daily cleaned office, 10 fruit-flies will come to life. You can literally watch life happen.

Hence, in a country with such conditions, when people use handkerchiefs, re-usable diapers and cloth tablewipes/mops, no wonder people get sick so often!

While its may be environmentally friendly, India's luxury tax on paper towels, kleenex and toilet paper needs to end ASAP. Besides paper's compostable. Due the lack of a proper market, the situation has gotten so bad, I know people that import 'Bounty' from the US on a regular basis! Pretty please, Indian government?