Pani Pani re...

We all love & care for our beautiful planet or so we like to think.

A great majority of us would acknowledge that this lovely planet of ours is becoming an increasingly difficult place to live in. From the catastrophic fires in California to the typhoons in the Indian peninsula. We are all too familiar with the challenges and each of us in our own way is trying to contribute to make this world a better place for ourselves and also for our children.

On one hand, we are using more tote bags and less of the plastic ones. We have replaced the incandescent lights with the LED ones. We turn off the car engine at the stop light. We even buy that electric car which is the envy of the world. But on the other, we just shrug our shoulders at a task that seems just unsurmountable now. There is a sense of despair about the majestic glaciers of Iceland or the critically endangered pangolins of Africa.

What can WE do now to save our little world?

There is much that we can do right now to do our part, in addition to what we are doing and it won't cost us too much - either in cost or in time, the two things that we invariably look to when addressing most problems. The environmentally friendly thing is too darn expensive for us to do or we don't seem to have time to do the right thing. That brings me to what I am suggesting here – Saving Water!

Water? – But we are already doing our bit on that aren’t we? Yes, we all turn off the faucet for our morning and night time brushing routine (please brush twice). We are not taking a bath in our Jacuzzis or leaving the grass sprinklers on for hours. But there is one thing that we are not doing enough of, which we can do starting now.

We can shorten that time in the shower and save so much more…

I, too, had not fully appreciated this until very recently when I thought about this in…yes, in my shower.

I know everyone loves their time in the shower (including yours truly). It’s our very personal time. Nobody to talk to, no one to listen to, or to disturb us. That's where the introvert becomes the lion, that’s when the singer from deep within us comes out in the open to sing that Lata-Kishore duet, that's when the creative thinker emerges with those life changing ideas, that's where we sometimes cry - remembering someone we love and miss, that's your own corner of the world – with the warm water in cold winters and the cool water on hot summer evenings. Your shower is where you think about how you will save the world...precisely my point! - You can. We can.  We can save the world and we can do that by stepping out of the shower a little earlier. That’s it, simple enough. And you can do this starting today. I won't bore you with the stats and studies that show that during a 10-minute shower we may be using up to 50 gallons of water, or that you can buy a low pressure showerhead or a shower timer or even a showerhead with built-in timer on amazon for an amount less than a few cups of your favorite latte, or that you can have a healthy competition in your family about who takes the least amount of time in the shower and make the loser do the dishes. We are all smart and we can do all that & much more on our own. What’s Google for, anyway?

This is something that we can do NOW and it can have quite a large impact with nothing to lose......Well except that shower singer will have less time to sing, and in many cases, as I know for sure in mine, wouldn't that itself be a wonderful thing?

Sushant