Carbon Detective: What is Carbon Footprint?

The fog is finally settling on the COP15 and I’m not sure if it ended up clearing or further muddling the burning issue of Global Warming. Some questions are nagging me - Is global warming an issue or not? Am I part of the solution if not the problem? How do I contribute?

Garret Hardin had given an influential concept of "Tragedy of Commons" way back in 1968. The article discusses how common resources get used, misused and what could be the means to utilise these common resources. It advocates “Mutual Coercion” or legally binding behaviour as one solution. However, that is beyond my area of influence. So what can I do?

One solution to reduce misuse is by being pro-social: By being more engaged in sustainable behaviour. This solution of course implies that I cut down my use of common resources, while my neighbour needn’t! Scriptures tell me that I must be happy and content in what I have. I should be happy drinking water off the tap, and not grudge the neighbour’s bottled water sourced from the Alps. However I’m living in the times of “neighbour’s envy, owner’s pride” and aspirational products are part of the market we live in. There is no running away from these products and the fact that my neighbours will also own them. But can I adjust these aspirations? What if by adjusting them, I gain? It might not be only philanthropy, but might bestow significant personal gains.

Before getting into all this, let me first understand the carbon footprint, its significance and is there a “right size” that fits me? Carbon footprint can be for an individual, a product, an organization or a country. There are many definitions of Carbon Footprint and we will use the following for this article:
Carbon Footprint = Primary Footprint + Secondary Footprint

Where:
Primary Footprint = Green house gas (GHG) emissions from direct burning of fossil fuels. This includes electricity used at home and fuel used for cooking, operating generators and in transportation.
Secondary Footprint = GHG emissions due to the products I use. The emissions associated with the manufacture, transport and breakdown of these products.

Thus carbon footprint can be a good size to know, but unlike my shoe size, calculating it is not an exact number. It does not cover all aspects like water consumed and air polluted but nevertheless it is a good tool to start the green journey.

Organised Retail: No Smile within a Mile

Its that time of the week when I have to go for the weekly grocery and vegetable shopping, and NO I'm not going to the Supermarket anymore..
I had enough of moments of truth and finally the truth has dawned that I'm not good enough to enjoy the benefits of organized retail.
The "moment of truth" in service marketing parlance is described as the moment when the service triad composed of the Consumer, the serving personnel and the service organization meet. In organized retail, the experiences I had with the truthful moments were never great, but I stubbornly trudged along from one outlet to the other - expectant that some day I will have a truly enjoyable moment.
Imagine a typical scenario:
It is Sunday morning, and I get ready for the trip. I collect the cloth bags (yes, we are trying to reduce our plastic dependance), the list is safely tucked in the pocket and the kids are secured on the back seat as we drive down to the supermarket.
The first hurdle is to find a parking slot. The store is big, but the designated parking slots are too few - and even on the Sunday morning they are full. We poke our noses into side streets and quickly occupy the one slot free.
Next hurdle is getting the empty cloth bags inside. The mighty security gurads are programmed to reject any bags from going inside. If we are lucky we might be allowed with the bags - else we might escape with a simple admonishment that bags need to be deposited at the entrance, to be collected later while the billing is in progress.
It has been half an hour since we entered this wonderland. Our trolley is half empty(we are optimistic people you know), to accomodate the planned items from the list which is still safely tucked in my pocket, as all of us have been stuffing the trolley with things that we don't need.
I refer to the list and ask one of the attendants where a particular item is stacked. It is always a dangerous question. It triggers a chain reaction where the query gets transferred from one attendant to the other and after a considerable delay the response could be don't know, don't care or it is out of stock.
Another dangerous question could be: "Do you have a fresher stock"? This typically happens with perishable items - with warning like "best within 15 days". In cases when the 15th day happens to be tomorrow, expect no sympathy from the attendant - come on you could still consume the item within today. Do you have to really trouble them with such silly questions as : do you have a fresher stock!
The trolleys are full with 70 percent of the planned items bought and we are in the final lap - just the billing is pending. The queue is long, some of the counters are closed, but attendants could have been the receptionist of a clinic for all you know. Typically they were the only ones in the service industry who could get away by being rude. Your appointment should come in 10mts from now, where 10 mts instead of being earth minutes are typically those of Pluto. (http://www.lpi.usra.edu/education/skytellers/day_night/activities/nightlife.shtml)
Coming back to retail - the attendants don't care - selling is NOT their job - they have a role: receptionist, customer care, billing, stacking - thats all - but who sells??
So, now I have come back to my friendly neighbourhood mom and pop store. The store does not have AC, it is not sparkingly clean - but it has a person behind a counter and not a role.
It has a person who acknowledges that I exist, who tries to make small talk - who at least tries to help and pretends to listen when I crib.

Something common between Brand and Religion

What?? The title looks absurd.
I had two completely free days - no not really - but then got bored of assignments, and normal routine work. They say Empty mind is Devils workshop - and we all know Devil wears Prada - and Prada is a well known brand - so one thing lead to the other and ended up spending time in Library and reading about brands.

Came across this book: "Sonic Branding" by Daniel Jackson.
The book discusses, Brand in general and Sonic branding in particular.
Like the way the author has brought out the concept of Brand.

So what is common between religion and brand (no offences meant to religion).
It is the belief of the follower that is important.
The book says:
Brand is Belief.
Belief comes when believers put in their emotional capital.
Hence, Brand is like religion. E.g Christianity- initially the evangelists had to struggle to get the converts – but once converts had bought in the idea – they became the ambassadors.
Now consider the e.g. of Coke and McDonalds.
What is coke – just a normal thirst quencher – like sprite, Dr. peppers, Thums UP. But if you look around – Coke stands for American spirit. It is “the original thing”. And getting coke in a country means that American culture has arrived.
Similarly MaC…

Loyalty and Choice

When are you loyal to a brand?
When you have enough alternatives to choose from and you still stick to it!

Such a basic idea - lets see whether it holds good in some other spheres:
1) You are loyal to your company when you have enough choices to leave - but you still remain
2) You are loyal to your country, when you have enough choices and still you remain

So what drives the brand loyalty?

Brand Loyalty Defined

”You learn that creating customer loyalty is neither strategic nor tactic;
rather, it is the ultimate objective and meaning of brand equity. Brand loyalty is brand equity.” Daryl Travis, Emotional Branding
So, what constitutes brand loyalty? According to Bloemer and Kasper, brand loyalty implies that consumers bind themselves to products or services as a result of a deep-seated commitment.
To exemplify this point, they rendered a distinction between repeat purchases and actual brand loyalty. In their published research, they assert that a repeat purchase behavior "is the actual re-buying of a brand” whereas loyalty includes "antecedents” or a reason/fact occurring before the behavior. Bloemer and Kasper further delineate brand loyalty into "spurious” and "true” loyalty. Spurious loyalty exhibits the following attributes:

Biased ; Behavioral response; Expressed over time; By some decision-making unit, with respect to one or more alternate brands; A function of inertia .

True brand loyalty includes the above, but replaces inertia with a psychological process resulting in brand commitment (Ref: Journal of Economic Psychology, Volume 16, Issue 2, July 1995).

So are you loyal to your company/country?

Wakeup Call

Is Anything gone wrong?
We are deaf with indifference, and the Mumbai blasts should be loud enough to wake us up.
Wake us up to understand : what has become of us - us as a nation!
Will you pay donation to get your child educated at that elite school?
Or will you compromise on her education?
Will you pay bribe to get that seat in the railway compartment?
or Will you suffer the discomfort of standing and travelling?
Will you pay the 100/- to traffic inspector and save time and money?
or Will you instead park on the side, settle the fine, waste time and money?
Will you watch that nice movie available on the net?
Or wait like a fool for three months before the DVD is officially released?
Will you be street smart or a dumb person? Which one will you be?

So what can I do?
We ask what the politicians are doing, what is police doing, what has happened to this world?
We never ask - what has become of us? What has happened? Why has our core competency of being adjusting in nature has become our core rigidity of "chalta hai". Everything goes - we take everything in our stride!
Corruption has set in every small thing - it has become part of us - we don't even feel now that somethings are bad!
Imagine, from where will the policemen, armymen, the workforce will be drawn from?
From us - they are us - they inherit our core rigidity of "chalta hai" from us.
How can we expect them to be suddenly holy and saintly?

Still, what can I do?
So,what can I do - can I be foolish - as the world overtakes me - acts street smart?
Am I a weakling? What is in it for me NOT to be corrupt? No one catches me - and its all in so small things - no one minds?
Why shall I do anything about corruption? I cannot be a martyr - you see - I have my company to run, my family to take care, my responsibilities to fulfill.

But if I still don't wake up - what else do I need?
What if my family was in Taj that fateful day?
Isn't this a grim enough reminder, that forget conscience, forget duty, forget responsibility, just for my own sake - it is high time that I stop being corrupt.
The fight has come to my home - I need to stop this corruption - and I have the power to do it.
If each one of stop being corrupt in small things - there could still be a difference made.
Let the feeling of guiltcome back into corruption. Let that ticket checker, that traffic inspector feel ashamed in asking for a bribe.
Stop corruption, be awake - please now before its too late

Core Rigidities

A definition:
Flip side of core competencies, and caused by overreliance on any advantage(s) for too long. While a successful firm's management relaxes its improvement efforts, others keep on getting better and obsolete its competitive advantage.

Are we by nature also like this?
We stop challenging ourselves - and relax our individual improvement efforts - and what used to be a core competency for me when I was 30 yr, becomes a core rigidity by the time I'm 35??
If its true for me - in past few years - imagine the rigidities I have developed over last 32 yrs of my life!!
And now think of a culture that goes beyond decades - and is measured in Centuries!!

Came across this concept of "Capitalization Problem" by Malcom Gladwell. It talks of what stops us from reaching our full potential!
He gives an example:
He refers to James Flynn, an academic who got really interested in why Chinese immigrants to the US vastly outperform white Americans. Within one generation, they’re achieving at an extraordinary rate. The difference is not usefully described by differences in IQ. The cap rates for people who are smart enough to be a professional who end up being a professional is vastly different in different communities: 78% in Chinese American community rather than 60% in the white community? How are they able to capitalize on this? Flynn suggests it’s because they work harder, and Gladwell agrees. But why?
If you take a group of Chinese schoolkids and a group of American 10-year-olds and give them a complex maths task and time them at it, you’ll find the American kids give up after 2 minutes; the Chinese kids will still be working after 15 minutes. It’s about persistence: it’s the consequence of ingrained cultural notions of how hard you should work.
This is a cultural problem.

Core Rigidities and competencies of Indian Population?
So how do we go about unlocking the great potential we have within our nation?
Do we have core competencies and core rigidities that need to be unlocked? How do we go about identifying them and then leveraging them?
In my quest of contributing to alleviating poverty - to go beyond mental masturbation - and really act - I feel the key is in:
identifying these rigidities - against which I will have to fight, and
identifying the competencies - they will have to be leveraged

Let me start with identifying the core competencies of the "Rural Indian Market" - thats where the 70% of people reside - people who do not participate in the great debates in popular media - people who still die of hunger, malnutrition and preventable diseases...
I'm sure they don't want to die - and I don't have any data, but I'm sure their IQ and zest for life is not below their Urban bretherens..

So why do they die? Why are they poor? What core competencies can we leverage upon and get them going?
I need your support in identifying the core competencies first.
Please do post comments about your ideas - what could be the core competencies of the "Indian Rural Population"

Where the mind is without fear

and head is held high:

CRPF open fires in Srinagar 21 injured
India in the elite club of PSLV owners
India a trillion dollar economy

Where knowledge is free;
The data released by the ministry to the press information bureau is a bit outdated as it relates to figures from 2002 to 2005. Nonetheless, the trends are an eyeopener:
Compared to the national average of 60.92 per cent, Bihar dropouts from classes I to X were over 83 per cent in 2004-2005 followed by Meghalaya and West Bengal. Is even a drop put rate of 60.92 something to be happy about?
IISC, IITs, IIMs, XLRIs provide India with the young leaders of tomorrow. The institutes are world class! Indian diaspora is shining in silicon valley, the financial hubs and the centres of power. This is something to be proud of :-)

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow
domestic walls:
Cauvery water dispute, Telanagan agitation, Separatist movements are the walls dividing the nation into fragments.
SKS Microfinance, Amul, Aravind eye care on the other hand are few initiatives trying to span across the domestic walls and make an impact.

Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Bribe money allegations Rock Lok Sabha!
Medha Patekar goes on a 20 day fast to protest against the Narmada Dam!
Dr. Binayak Sen spends a year in Jail.

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Bangalore has a flyover with a traffic light on it - perhaps the worlds first flyover??
ISRO announces Chabrayan, India's frist mission to moon - wow we have come a long way.

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the
dreary desert sand of dead habit:
India gave "Zero" to the world - perhaps the single most important gift to mankind.
Witches are still burnt alive in the remote villages!

Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought
and action--
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake

This poem from Rabrindranath Tagore is a prayer that we have partially answered. We have all the means to achieve it. We are perfectly poised to take the next big leap - only thing we need is to be awake!!