The story of stuff

The story of stuff as narrated by Annie Leonard is an eye opener for every single human being living on this planet. Essentially there is food for thought for every one of us. The story is clearly not blown out of proportion; in fact it only explains us how grave the situation is.

There is no denying of the fact that in a bid to make tons and thousands of consumers stuff we are actually depleting the natural resources (trees, water, oil, minerals etc) at an extremely brisk pace. Not only are we eating up the natural resources, we are also polluting the environment .The developed countries lead by the United States are consuming bulk of the world’s natural resources. These countries are also the leaders when it comes to contaminating the environment with toxics. The products that we are producing are also toxic and it really is TOXIC IN AND TOXIC OUT as far as our manufacturing plants are concerned. The most glaring part of the story is that human breast milk which epitomizes purity is also contaminated by toxic which means the entire food chain is contaminated.

We have progressed; but at the expense of clean air, clean drinking water, forests, mineral resources and mostly importantly our moral values. We are really not living in an era of intellectuals or philosophers; instead we are living in an era of consumption. The world’s leading economies are focusing on how to keep the consumer goods rolling in the market. It is so cruel that in some parts of the world we are focusing on luxuries and in most underdeveloped countries people do not even have basic necessities of life. We seem to be embroiled in this economic war and in the process getting our priorities wrong.

Designers surely design the products very smartly these days. The modern gadgets which include our laptops, I-Phones etc become obsolete within six months as the new ones have new and better features. We somehow consider it our moral obligation to buy these latest devices every six months in order to keep up with the flow of time. It is horrendous but true, our field of vision is only confined to BUYING MORE AND MORE STUFF and we are oblivious to the different stages the stuff goes through before it comes in to malls. Our ignorance is our loss as more consumption also means more pollution and more anomalous changes in the eco system.

It is high time that leading powers of the world understand the gravity of the situation. The current manufacturing, processing and dumping system needs a massive revamp. It’s about time we acted for the better future of our generations.

Snooping Bosses

Our generation is living in very difficult times. Life is quite tough to say the very least. There is cutthroat competition in every field and so nothing but hundred percent effort yields desired results. Individuals have to perform literally out of their skins to achieve their targets. The term professionalism has now got an exaggerated significance attached to it. The employer and the employees have a very convoluted and intricate relationship in this era.

In the days gone by one would leave work at work place only but now with the advent of cell phones and communicators one can be traced even on the moon. There is nothing like seclusion or time to retreat. There are so many checks on the employees working in a corporate organization these days that one feels like working in an intelligence agency. To an extent these organizations are justified in spying their employees because they do not want their competitors to know their trade secrets, success formulas or patent designs. This constant probing and snooping can become an irritant for most of us but the trust level between the employer and the employees has deteriorated over the years.

A lot of us are registered on social networking sites like facebook, twitter or have our own blogs. We all are humans and in the spur of the moment can say a lot of things on any of these sites which are detrimental to the cause of the organization we are working for. Just recently the chairman of the cash rich Indian Premier League (Cricket) got sacked for revealing official secrets on his twitter account. Likewise an England cricket player, Kevin Pietersen was fined for puking out his frustration bluntly after being dumped for some games owing to his poor form.

I for one am not a big fan of too much snooping but somehow or the other it seems to have become the need of the hour in changing modern times where so much that we do or write is in public domain. No matter how many loyalty bonds or agreements the corporate organizations sign in with their employees they can never be certain about the allegiances of their employers. This has essentially made snooping inevitable as the stakes are very high in most cases. Our personal life is not personal any more whether we like it or not .This is the world that we have created where we have some of the most amazing facilities at our disposal but this development has come at the expense of invasion in our personal lives. We should actually learn to live with it and quit moaning about it once and for all.

Why things break?

It is a dreadful feeling when something breaks and this feeling is spontaneous and natural for most of us. The mourning associated with that broken thing varies from person to person and also on the value of the broken thing. If the windscreen of a brand new Rolls Royce is broken that would be more appalling than if glass of an old window is broken. The money factor obviously augments the grief linked with a broken windscreen of the RollsRoyce.

Developments in the field of material science have enabled us to understand the factors associated with the disintegration of ordinary things. Everything has a threshold point when it comes to the load applied to it. This threshold varies from material to material. By and large all things have breaking point or the fracture point as described in the scientific terms. Once the load or stress applied exceeds this brink the material collapses. The designers of various buildings and bridges have to ensure that they bear these things in mind whilst designing, otherwise the designed structure would fall part. Time also plays an important part in the falling apart of things, as recurring loading depletes the strength of the material. This type of failure is termed as fatigue failure and happens over a period of time. No one gets excited at the sight of a broken thing except for metallurgists who reassemble the pieces and trace the path of fracture backwards to the origin.  

 Relationships and marriages also fall apart due to an array of reasons. Unlike materials the human mind is more difficult to comprehend and therefore the exact cause of a relationship breakup is almost next to impossible to establish. There can be whole lot of reasons for a relationship failure. Sometimes we tend to jump the gun and make commitments before knowing the other person fully and when the reality dawns at us we realize how incompatible we are with each other. Sometimes we hear in the news that a certain Tiger Woods becomes a victim of domestic violence. The reason for the brutal beating at the hands of his wife is given as cheating upon her. Men are notoriously known for cheating upon their girlfriends/wives and a break up becomes inevitable in such cases.

Things just break either due to a mishap or naturally, as essentially everything; living or non living has a definite end.