No, there’s no spelling mistake in the headline and I’m not going to talk about any chance sighting of the great white beautiful resident of Arctic regions. (Given that chance, however, I would talk about it, too.)
This is a post about a man, his childhood dream, his perseverance to realize it and, finally, his global mission to keep one of the world’s biggest and remotest pieces of wilderness, Antarctica, out of the clutches of the wildest and weirdest of species – homo sapiens.
When Robert Swan was 11 years old, he saw a video about Antarctica. From then on, he knew he had to go see it – no matter what. Around the age of 22, he began raising money for his trip ($5 million to be precise), thinking it would take two, maybe three, months to do so. He was quite confident of his abilities of persuasion. And persuade he did, but it took him a little longer than he had imagined – seven full years. During this time, recalls Swan, he even drove a taxi to support himself and often got laughed at for his crazy ideas. But never once did he let go of his childhood dream.
Swan was in Delhi recently to address a motley audience gathered for a talk organized by 9.9 Media. The rather smallish room was bustling with people who had come to listen to Robert Swan. And the big draw? Not that he’s decorated with an OBE (Order of the British Empire) but the fact that he is the first person in history to walk to both the North and South poles.
As Swan began his story with impeccable humor, masterful narration and exemplary humility, the audience was all ears. There was a sense of adventure and achievement in the air, even though listening to the tale about walking the white wilderness in an air-conditioned hall was no match to actually doing it in extreme subzero temperatures while lugging hundreds of pounds of survival supplies.
It was in 1984 that Swan embarked on his first polar expedition, titled ‘In the Footsteps of Scott’, to the South Pole. (The title is in honor of Robert Falcon Scott (1868-1912), a Royal Navy officer and explorer who led two expeditions to the Antarctic regions.) He and two fellow travelers, Roger Mear and Gareth Wood, completed the first ‘unassisted’ 900-mile walk (without any dogs, radios or other means of communication) to the South Pole on January 11, 1986.
Ever since, not only has Swan undertaken several expeditions to both the poles but also managed to evolve his childhood dream into a noble mission – and, in the process, inspire and motivate business folk, corporations, young people and anyone who would care to save what Swan calls ‘the last remaining piece of wilderness that nobody owns,’ the Antarctica.
He knew he just had to do something about the polar regions when, walking to the North pole, the color of his eyes changed and the skin began to peel off his face – thanks to a hole in the Ozone under which Swan and his team happened to walk for several days. Swan learnt of the reason for his condition when he came back, and decided he must spread awareness about ‘climate change’ (his preferred term to ‘global warming’, which he says tends to confuse people).
Initially, Swan talked to people about the effects of climate change but it did not receive the attention he had expected. “People don’t accept or appreciate negativity easily and are often turned off by alarmist talk,” he says. So he started lecturing on team-building, motivation, success and other positive aspects of his journeys. And the results, too, were positive, as more and more people came forward to help his larger goal of saving Antarctica and attracting investment in clean, green technologies.
Toward the end of his talk, Swan flashes a number before the audience: 2041. Besides being the name of his company and the address of his website (www.2041.com), 2041 is the year when the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty expires. As per this treaty, no mining is allowed on Antarctica. But come this year and things could change.
It is the mission of 2041 and Robert Swan that things change for the better and Antarctica remains what it is – pristine, unexploited, unowned, unfought-over-for by corporate or political squatters-spoilers…
I do hope this mission is achieved much before the deadline and, for once at least, ‘our story’ – as Swan calls the whole enterprise – has a happy never-ending.
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Sunday, August 15, 2010
The India of My Screams
I was looking for something to write on India's Independence Day today, when this idea just struck me...
In many schools in India students are often asked to write an essay on 'The India of My Dreams.' Having done my own share of such juvenile writing in school days, I just thought it might be time for me to put out a little writeup with a slightly twisted but perhaps more realistic title, 'The India of My Screams.' So here it goes...
We used to be a sort of sleeping giant before liberalization began in the early nineties. But ever since we've 'woken up,' we don't seem to stop screaming - for one reason or the other.
First of all, none of our geriatric leaders had the vision about how to really go about liberalizing a country as vast as ours - so they took a patchwork approach to it, doing a little here or a little there, but never enough anywhere! And I feel sorry to say that even to this day, we don't have a single leader who can pull the country out of the morass it is in (And even if there were, he or she would find it difficult to steer things their own way in the midst of coalition politics).
So while the incumbent Congress government won on the promise of doing something for the aam admi (common man), nobody knows what it is they've done. And the common man? He's screaming to be heard against rising cost of basic necessities.
Our infrastructure - be it roads, power, water, electricity or sewage - is screaming, creaking and, as we've seen during recent rains in Delhi, weeping too. We have made it a fine art of always allowing infrastructure to lag behind current needs. Lag not in number of months or a couple of years, but lag in decades - perhaps centuries! Has any of our rulers heard of the term 'town planning'? I seriously doubt it. Have they wondered at the mess they have been able to create in and around what many call the Millennium City (Gurgaon)? I have. At least one person wouldn't be complaining (Mr KP Singh of DLF, the biggest builder in the area and the country as well)! The so-called builders of modern India have 'malled' our cities but, in the process, also 'mauled' its infrastructure, the environment and, often, the local inhabitants and the underprivileged...
Our people, especially those ensconced in cars, keep on screaming, too, and they often use the machines they sit inside for several hours each day for screaming. It's called honking and it's a favorite pastime of drivers in most places in India. Never mind that the guy ahead of you is not in a position to move in the bumper-to-bumper traffic, let's honk! Or so goes the popular mood amongst motorati.
Even within the malls, people just cannot help screaming. On most Saturdays and Sundays, they shout their throats hoarse, trying to catch the attention of the cashier at the food court. Then they go to each 'cuisine' counter (the cuisine often being industrially made formula food) and again scream to be heard and served. When they have had 'a good time' hopping from counter to counter for food and are ready to head home, there's a long line of vehicles waiting impatiently to get out of the mall's cavernous clutches and onto the crowded roads. Of course, there's plenty of scope and opportunity for honking and screaming, and most people find it hard to give it a miss.
The situation is no better for those who don't - rather, cannot - go to the malls. They often wait in queues for the water tankers to come. Meanwhile, they scream at each other for breaking the queue or putting two buckets instead of one in their 'occupied' position. On other occasions, they gherao (surround a place for a demonstration) the local power distribution center, demanding that they have had enough going without electricity for the past 10 or 15 hours. There is a lot of screaming going on here, too...
That's not to say that our leaders and rulers are immune to shouting and screaming. But they are much used to it - there's so much screaming and blaming going on in the Parliament and in state legislative assemblies that nobody notices any longer. Many of our leaders are often seen sleeping or snoring amid all this din - most probably dreaming of their multi-million dollars stashed away in Swiss accounts. After all, foreign education of kids, separate lucrative businesses for kith and kin, and other desirables in life come for a cost - and a lot of screaming, apparently...
Mera Bharat Mahaan! (it's a customary salutation in India to show respect and appreciation for your country - the countrymen be damned!)
In many schools in India students are often asked to write an essay on 'The India of My Dreams.' Having done my own share of such juvenile writing in school days, I just thought it might be time for me to put out a little writeup with a slightly twisted but perhaps more realistic title, 'The India of My Screams.' So here it goes...
We used to be a sort of sleeping giant before liberalization began in the early nineties. But ever since we've 'woken up,' we don't seem to stop screaming - for one reason or the other.
First of all, none of our geriatric leaders had the vision about how to really go about liberalizing a country as vast as ours - so they took a patchwork approach to it, doing a little here or a little there, but never enough anywhere! And I feel sorry to say that even to this day, we don't have a single leader who can pull the country out of the morass it is in (And even if there were, he or she would find it difficult to steer things their own way in the midst of coalition politics).
So while the incumbent Congress government won on the promise of doing something for the aam admi (common man), nobody knows what it is they've done. And the common man? He's screaming to be heard against rising cost of basic necessities.
Our infrastructure - be it roads, power, water, electricity or sewage - is screaming, creaking and, as we've seen during recent rains in Delhi, weeping too. We have made it a fine art of always allowing infrastructure to lag behind current needs. Lag not in number of months or a couple of years, but lag in decades - perhaps centuries! Has any of our rulers heard of the term 'town planning'? I seriously doubt it. Have they wondered at the mess they have been able to create in and around what many call the Millennium City (Gurgaon)? I have. At least one person wouldn't be complaining (Mr KP Singh of DLF, the biggest builder in the area and the country as well)! The so-called builders of modern India have 'malled' our cities but, in the process, also 'mauled' its infrastructure, the environment and, often, the local inhabitants and the underprivileged...
Our people, especially those ensconced in cars, keep on screaming, too, and they often use the machines they sit inside for several hours each day for screaming. It's called honking and it's a favorite pastime of drivers in most places in India. Never mind that the guy ahead of you is not in a position to move in the bumper-to-bumper traffic, let's honk! Or so goes the popular mood amongst motorati.
Even within the malls, people just cannot help screaming. On most Saturdays and Sundays, they shout their throats hoarse, trying to catch the attention of the cashier at the food court. Then they go to each 'cuisine' counter (the cuisine often being industrially made formula food) and again scream to be heard and served. When they have had 'a good time' hopping from counter to counter for food and are ready to head home, there's a long line of vehicles waiting impatiently to get out of the mall's cavernous clutches and onto the crowded roads. Of course, there's plenty of scope and opportunity for honking and screaming, and most people find it hard to give it a miss.
The situation is no better for those who don't - rather, cannot - go to the malls. They often wait in queues for the water tankers to come. Meanwhile, they scream at each other for breaking the queue or putting two buckets instead of one in their 'occupied' position. On other occasions, they gherao (surround a place for a demonstration) the local power distribution center, demanding that they have had enough going without electricity for the past 10 or 15 hours. There is a lot of screaming going on here, too...
That's not to say that our leaders and rulers are immune to shouting and screaming. But they are much used to it - there's so much screaming and blaming going on in the Parliament and in state legislative assemblies that nobody notices any longer. Many of our leaders are often seen sleeping or snoring amid all this din - most probably dreaming of their multi-million dollars stashed away in Swiss accounts. After all, foreign education of kids, separate lucrative businesses for kith and kin, and other desirables in life come for a cost - and a lot of screaming, apparently...
Mera Bharat Mahaan! (it's a customary salutation in India to show respect and appreciation for your country - the countrymen be damned!)
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