Running the Marathon..

It all started with Alice mail to participate in Marathon, he literally forced me to register for this. I had the option of 10K run and 5.7K run, and always as ambitious as I am, I chose 10K run.

Later some people told us that you could raise money for some NGO running for the marathon and then started this mad rush to run for NGO post. It was good hectic last week, to get NGOpost registered, to set up payment gateway and then to get the Tshirts designed and printed. It reminded of the time we used to do nightouts in college preparing for those cultural festivals.

Finally came the Sunday, I was able to run 10 kms in about 1 hour and 13 minutes, it was not bad. Though later in the evening legs had become very soar. I have never run so much before, but cheering and people running around you can made a lot of difference. There were so many people, army people, old ladies, some families standing outside their apartments cheering and urging you to go. It is funny that for something as physical dumb as running should be controlled by your mind and how the surroundings can make you feel.

So it was good fun and the event was wonderfully organized, but the only thing that bothered me was the picture on the right. There was loads of plastic litter'ed everywhere. Though it is true that they cleared most of roads of this, because I did not find any traces of them when I was driving later in the day. But I still wonder if all this can be recycled. Why use plastic when we can avoid it.

I also contributed three bottles to this, could not help it, it was so hot. But next time I think I am going to carry my own bottle.

(Picture: courtesy Murali)

Being Environment concious..

These days I have become majorly environment conscious. Whenever I see little bit of plastic, I keep asking myself, "Is there anyway i can avoid using this".

The other day, I had gone to Cisco. As soon as you enter Cisco and go around, you see various posters pasted which keep stating how eco-friendly Cisco is. It is good to see a big company as Cisco being environment conscious. But what saddens me everytime I go Cisco is the way they use bottled water. Unlike most other companies which have normal water bottle for each employee, which keeps getting refilled from water dispenser, Cisco has loads of half liter packaged water bottles. So most of the employees who keep coming to cafetaria pick up 1-2 of these bottles. Imagine about 1000 employees and the number of water bottles getting used per day. And how much waste that will be generated. Maybe they recycle it, but still why do all that when you avoid the situation all together. And what amazes me is that this is same campus which is filled with all posters of environment friendly quotes.

Then I go to meet a friend of mine in oracle the other day and I went in to their meeting room and they had this normal water bottles which had to be refilled from water dispenser. This made me really happy "Your company is truly environment conscious", I told my friend.

And we were generally discussing this, and then there was this friend from a top MBA school and he was saying that these days, lot of students before considering a company for placement also try to figure out how environment friendly the company is and how much does it score on its CSR. Maybe this is still a far fetched thought, and personally till now I never thought of such things before taking a job. But it does seem a good idea, and I shall keep this in mind next time I think of hopping job, and then Cisco probably has lost some points already.