What a stupid idea, sirji!!

By Kanchi Kohli
26 Feb 2010

As mobile service provider companies twist environment activism into commercial opportunity, earnestness is getting replaced by absurdity.

I am a click happy person these days and doing my bit for the environment too! You see mobile phone companies, their service providers and advertisers have helped me become a responsible citizen of this country. It's a great idea, Sirji! The more one uses one's mobile phone for talking to people, sending them short and long messages, the less we use paper, right? The source of paper is trees located in forests or maybe plantations, and it is my fetish now to contribute to saving trees on this planet.

What more! I am joined in this cause by several celebrities. Along with promoting their films and products, many of them are flying across the country to tell people in towns and cities on how the use of mobile phones can make the old fashioned letter writing redundant. All those papers used for pages and pages of expression, can be replaced through short, fast and quick messaging, they say. Send as many messages, it does not cost you the earth.

Don't tell me you haven't seen all those brilliant advertisements and propaganda for the last four months. Go quick and get a glimpse. And if you're one like me, convinced by eco friendly mobile stories around, welcome aboard the hogwash bandwagon!

Mobile phone technology works on batteries, charged by electricity, right? Secondary school text books tell us that electricity is generated through sources like coal, hydro or nuclear related technologies. Coal lying underneath India's richest forest tracts has to be extracted through mining if thermal power is to be produced. Each year several hectares of forests are wiped off officially to produce the power we need for our electronic gadgetry. Hydro power is no innocent ally, with river basins in the Himalayas and other ecologically fragile region under tremendous stress due to construction. So the more cell phone, the more electricity to charge, the more batteries to discard and the less forest for us to breath.

And what does mobile phone comprise of? Creating a cell phone requires a desired combination of plastic, chemicals and metal depending on the range and type of equipment our fingers may desire. It is not rocket science to know that most of these are non-biodegradable materials. So when I think I am being eco friendly purchasing my qwerty key pad phone, I am only succumbing to a gadget which is adding to the pollution load around me. No benevolent act this, sirji!

Now in this big bad world, what is better, you'd ask? Consumerism or reverse consumerism, where companies allow us to be less ecologically destructive through creating blogs, recycling, watching eco-friendly advertisements and so much more. The latter I guess, as it allows me to keep my heart and phone in the right place by believing that all the trees I save through my SMS clicks are standing intact. There are also options to feel less guilty and send one's old cell phone into a recycle bin provided by leading phone companies. They have to be reliable so I don't need to verify where they might dump my junk, as I continue to succumb to my techie desires. After all, it is all supposed to be...in the well.

So, as I drive to watch a film on global warming being screened in a shopping mall built on a wetland I tell myself that if the world's not getting green, the colour of money surely is!