Earth Hour

Getting involved. This weekend is Earth Hour, or rather Saturday 27 March at 8.30pm is. Some of us are organising a local event which means I will have to get my newly bought camera (2 months ago) out of its box and try to work out how to take a photo with it! A band will be playing - they are not yet famous so cannot be found on the web but they are called The Dudleys and they are local. All the better. Residents in Grange are invited to bring a rug, candles, food and whatever else to a local park and enjoy the dark that once would have driven them to bed at an early hour, and now makes them turn on lights and watch TV. What do we do outside in the dark any more? How well can we see in the dark? This and other questions will be asked on Saturday night as people prepare to do something out of the ordinary. It is not very challenging as it is only for an hour, but imagine if we all tried to do without something we depend on for a whole day. The car, mobile phone, TV or radio, food, tea or coffee.... How quickly we would feel the effects of not having or using one of these items for a day, on both subtle and obvious levels. Make it longer and so much the better for noticing the effects. Perhaps next year. Meanwhile, we will register a small shiver (right word?) on the Richter scale of acknowledging that the planet has a problem.

A fine balance

I have read another book about India - A fine balance by Rohinton Mistry. It created a mix of emotions in me. On one level it was sad as the characters in the book, who you get to like, don't fare well. But interestingly, they deal with their misfortunes, largely hugely unjust (they are at the mercy of corrupt forces) with fortitude. In fact, as the final injustice is done, the youngest character resigns himself to his fate stoically and with dignity, and you wonder where he gets it from. Perhaps it is in the Indian psyche, because it is a foreign concept to someone whose life as a westerner has been relatively cruisy. Indeed anyone living in Australia would never experience what happens to these people. And the poverty! Bu they shine through. One of the characters, the most fortunate, does not 'survive' mentally and emotionally the ordeal that seems to be life. His life is the easiest of the four characters as his family is not poor - he has money and a good job (in the end) and he is young and goodlooking. But it does not save his mind and body. The message in this book? It is probably about attitude more than anything else, how you deal with fate. To understand what it means to be Indian is starting to intrigue me!