Friday, July 20, 2012

Project 5 Speech at Toastmasters - Your Body Speaks

My morning was greeted with a a Breaking News and surprisingly it was not my wife (pause). It was an idiot box, predicting the unthinkable, a submerged London, and a largely inundated Mumbai by 2100. My wife was overly concerned, but I was as cool as a cucumber. I glanced through Bangalore Mirror and noticed a full page advertisement about some people dressed as super heroes and heroines, claiming to be Earth Warriors. I had heard enough about warriors in Indian mythology and history, even Star Warriors, but Planet Warriors ?? They seem to belong to species, worried about anything and everything around. worried about the air, worried about the water, worried about the soil, worried about insecticide, pesticide, food additives, green-house gases, saving endangered species.

Good afternoon fellow toastmasters and guests, Let me tell you about endangered species. Saving endangered species is just one more arrogant attempt by humans to control nature. Over 90%, way over 90%, of all the species that have ever lived on this planet are gone..Whoosh..They are extinct. We didn't kill them all ?? (pause) This list includes monsters like Dynasours and small/tiny creatures like Dodo. They just vanished !! That's what nature does. Even today as we speak, they are disappearing at the rate of 25 every day. So regardless of our behavior, 25 species that are existing today, will be gone tomorrow. Let them go gracefully ?? Leave nature alone. Why interfere in nature's affairs ??

How about global warming ?? It will surprise you that in 70's and 80's, people were worried about global cooling. Now it is turn of global warming !! And just in case somebody questions their claims, they renamed it back to Climate Change !! If you look at earth's temperature over the past 1000 years, it has remained more or less constant. There has been an increase of about one degree Fahrenheit (half of one degree Celsius), I will not be surprised if this deviation is because of insufficient data, wrong assumptions and could very well turns out to be a human error :-) Remember your college day Eletrical Engineering Experiments where you had equipments showing their efficiency more than 100% :-) The earth has natural cycles of warming and cooling that have more to do with sunspots, solar wind cycles, and volcanic/tectonic activity. And we think the car that we drive (pause) the autos we ride (pause) the refrigerator we use (pause) the tissue papers that we use and throw are causing all this!!
 
Everybody around is busy saving something.
  Save the water, Save the paper
  Save the trees, Save the bees
  Save the whales, Save those snails
and the greatest arrogance of all, Save the Planet. What save the planet ?? Are these people kidding me ?? We don't know how to take care of ourselves, but we make an overly pompous claim of saving this planet !!

I am tired of these so-called environmentalists talking about saving the planet all the time. I am tired of hearing about Earth Day, tired of these Go-Green activists. The only thing, I am not tired of, is all those good-looking models, going nude to increasing awareness; about what ?? environment conservation !! Going nude for planet, (pause) I am sure there are better ways to save the planet !!

And besides there is nothing wrong with the planet, absolutely nothing wrong with the planet. Compared to ourselves, Planet is going great. Planet has been here for 4 and 1/2 billion years, and we humans have been here for what 100 thousand(pause) may be 200 thousand years. And we have been engaged in heavy industries for only about 200 years. Do your maths, folks; 200 years versus 4 and half billion ?? And we still concede that somehow we are a threat, somehow we are putting into jeopardy this beautiful little blue green ball that is just floating around the sun, as if to suggest that humans are the worst thing to have happened to this planet.

Planet has been through a lot worse that this. It has been through earth quakes, volcanos, sun spots, magnetic storms, hundreds and thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids, world wide floods, fire, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice-ages.
And we think some plastic bags ;(pause) Some aluminium cans ?; (Pause) Some extra trees are goiing to make a difference ??

Planet is not going anywhere, We are !! We are going away. Pack your bags, folks, because the planet will be here for a long, long time, even after we are gone. It will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, because that is what is does. It's a self-correcting system. The air and water will recover, the earth will be renewed, and if we think, plastic is not degradable, it will find a way to recycle it. After all, Plastic came out of the earth, could possibly the ONLY reason why nature allowed HUMANS. It wanted Plastic for itself, didn't know how to make it, so invented humans :-). But when we humans do go, for the planet, this will be just another failed mutation, just another closed and biological mistake, just another step in evolution.

Now let me give you somethings about state of humans
  One out of 4 kids worldwide is malnourished, by 2025, this number is going to increase upto 450 million.
  Nearly half of Indian population don't have access to toilets
  Millions of people go to bed with an empty stomach every day, not knowing what they will have during next day lunch either
  1,00,000 kids are being forces to fight a war each year
Are these stats serious enough to warrant our attention ?? They surely are. In fact, to be honest they are frightening and should scare the hell out of us. I am not saying we should stop bothering about our Planet, but I am sure there better things to be done, there are bigger fishes to fry. Let's try to save ourselves first, the human beings. Planet knows how to save itself !! It is the humans who are at threat more than the planet !!

Over to you Toastmaster.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

thanks just gave me an idea for my toastmaster speech