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An online invitation to grow offline

On Saturday morning, 120 Mumbaikars, most of them internet junkies, gave the city a green Christmas gift. They had been invited online by techies Satish Vijaykumar and Ranjeet Walunj to adopt an Ashoka or Neem sapling. The saplings were given free of cost with a condition: They should have an online profile with updates, photos and videos for the next two years.

Participants were encouraged to use the #sapling tag on networking sites like Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, del.icio.us and Technorati. An award awaits the participant whose sapling grows the tallest at the fastest rate. The group plans to plant 10,000 saplings to the city by 2010.

The citizens’ initiative has been called The Sapling Project (www.thesaplingproject.com) and was started because the organizers felt that most tree plantation drives were carried out at the National Park or Aarey Milk colony, while colonies and buildings that actually need more trees were being ignored. ”Living is a different thing, we’re just about managing to stay alive,’’ says Vijaykumar, a Borivali-resident, avid tweeter and blogger at bombaylives.com.

Weeks before the drive, online invitations to visit Shivaji Park and adopt a sapling were sent out using Twitter, Facebook and blogs. His friend Walunj wants to tie up with the BMC. “A lot of places in the city can be designated sapling zones where trees are needed. So people who do not find place can come here and plant them’’.

Online networking with tweeters in Chennai, Bangalore and Delhi has enthused locals to carry out similar plantation drives as part of the project. The next drive in Mumbai will take place in January and the organizers will visit areas like Dadar, Bandra, Andheri and Borivali with saplings in a van for distribution.

In the past, several sapling-planting initiatives have been launched in the city. In a move to restore the degraded periphery areas of the Sanjay Gandhi National Park, GAIA Conservation Foundation is working with the Bombay Natural History Society to get citizens to plant saplings.

Over 10,000 saplings of indigenous trees like Red Silk Cotton, teak, Shivaji’s Sword, Khair, Shivan, Ziziphus and Flame of Forest have been planted by hundreds of people at the Goregaon site. NGO I Love Mumbai has been carrying out planting distribution drives in the city too.

But environmentalist Rishi Aggarwal says drives like these need support from experts who understand the ecology of each tree. ”You can’t plant a tree that will grow to have a 30-foot canopy on a narrow road. Plantation has to be an informed exercise,’’ says Aggarwal who wants the tree authority to have a separate website giving details of where saplings can be planted in the city using GPS coordinate. ”Location is the key criteria and the BMC seems to have failed in facilitating the good intentions of citizens in this area’’.

Unemployed and underground

Saddled with debt and the tag of being unemployed, a group of 20 trained commercial pilots met last week at Kalina. They prefer staying anonymous and say there are around 3,000 others like them. They’re people who spent Rs 30- 40 lakh to train and obtain a commercial pilot license, and are now just about barely managing to pay EMI. Some are 21-year-olds, who joined flying schools, after not scoring well enough to make it to medical or engineering school. For them it was the best alternative, but little did they know that three years down the line, the slowdown-hit sector would have no vacancies.

For 22-year-old Divyesh Trivedi the captain prefix before his name is only of ornamental value. Today, after completing 200 hours of flying, the Dadar-resident works with a BPO. “How else do I pay an EMI of Rs 45,000?’’ he asks. Trivedi says it was the air traffic boom, three years ago that attracted a large number of young students to the sector. But that gap was filled by over 900 expat pilots and those who had retired after the government increased the flying age from 60 to 65. “It hurts when airlines continue to employ foreigners when there are so many qualified Indians waiting for a job,’’ he says.

Recruited on a contractual basis, expat pilots are paid 30-70 % more than their Indian counterparts with a bonus of free accommodation. “Their contracts are being renewed and other expats are still being hired. Why the unfair treatment?’’ he asks. “We want a rollback in the retirement age back to 60,’’ say pilots like Trivedi who have come together and formed the Unemployed Pilots Welfare Association of India this year. “For all government jobs the retirement age is 60, then why is it still 65 for pilots? Isn’t it a security risk since the rarefied atmosphere, fatigue and jetlag can make it tougher for retired pilots to fly?’’ they ask emphasizing the need for all pilots to have quick reflexes. Members network using the Internet and hold meetings like the one at Kalina to make sure they make the right noises, at the right decibels. But when they warn out-of-school freshers against attractive aviation school adverts, they are snapped at with, “You are pulling us down,’’ in return.

So severe is the job drought that even small time airlines are taking advantage of the large number of unemployed who are eager to fly. When Air India advertised for 30 trainee pilot posts, it received more than 1,350 responses and no one was selected because of reported irregularities. Spirit Air in Ranchi, a private air-taxi provider invited applications but charged a fee of Rs 6,000 from every applicant. Other private operators charge heavy deposits for every application, making huge profits in the process and do not even tell the applicant the results. “Recruiters are taking advantage of the jobless and milking us as much as they can,’’ says Dhruv Sen who was asked to show 3,000 hours of flying experience by one recruiter. “It takes almost a year to finish 1000 hours, with each hour costing Rs 7000. It is next to impossible for a newbie who generally completes 200-280 flying hours to have that kind of experience.’’

Tags: mumbai, pilots, UPWA

Carry on doctor

At 65, Dr K Chaudhry, a retired medical practitioner spends 17 hours in front of his computer screen. Over 1400 videos old, 2.2 million views famous and a fan base of hundreds of subscribers from Pakistan, USA, Canada and the UK within 18 months, this bespectacled grandfather of four is India’s YouTube singing sensation. In August, this year, he was missed after he pulled a Houdini and deleted his account, but he’s back, Karaoke system in place and mike in hand singing Justin Timberlake, Cliff Richards and Madonna for his fans. His repertoire is as wide as a violin’s pitch and even consists of Hindi versions of songs, most popular being Michael Jackson’s Beat It sung as Peeto Peeto.

Peeto Peeto by Dr K Chaudhry

It all started a few years ago, when the male nightingale from Paschim Vihar started uploading his videos in cyber space as a “humming non-singer’’.  The response was extraordinary. On one hand obscene abuses cluttered his inbox and would have sufficed to break the spirit of any novice singer. On the contrary Chaudhry felt elated that people had made time to post comments because real-time responses from around the world proved to him that he was a singer, good or bad and people were not ignoring him. Some said he sounded like a braying donkey while others said he deserved a music ratna from the government. “Praises please me, abuses amuse me. I feel indebted to every one of you for time spent by you in assessing me as good or bad,’’ he writes in order to allay his fans, some of whom have gone to the extent of forming fan clubs and theme evenings in honour of him and his special talent. They call themselves devotees of the man and currently there are seven fan clubs spread across the world including two in the US with medical doctors for members and an all-pilot group from Singapore. Imitating the video legend, his fans pay tribute at dinner parties and sing James Blunt’s ‘You’re beautiful’ Chaudhry style. He describes his relationship with his USA fan club with 310-strong members as, “This is a carry forward relationship from some past lives. I remained away from you for 63 years. Now we shall remain together until we live together,’’ he writes in response to a video.

But closest to his heart are his fans from Pakistan who first admired his talent. “We Pakistanis are in shock. We used to pride ourselves that we had Ghulam Ali Mehdi Hassan, Noor Jehan, Reshman, and Nusrat Fateh Ali but now we are dumb and speechless,’’ reads a comment on Youtube from across the border. “With the advent of Dr Chaudhry, you Indians have left? us, far behind. We will never catch up, we stand defeated.” But offers to appear for live concerts in Lahore have been dismissed. “I cannot perform without lyrics and a computer screen,’’ he says.

At first glance, one would think, that here is another bathroom singer nodding away but his eyes are wide open behind spectacles that reflect the bright computer screen as he swivels in his chair. An almost ethereal experience grips the viewer as he elegantly pulls off a spoof of Avril Lavigne’s Skater Boy, his personal chartbuster. “I prefer singing songs by female artists,’’ says the Bryan Adams and Mohammed Rafi fan. His grandchildren perch themselves on their silver-haired prodigy, singing along blissfully unaware of the world watching them. They just enjoy the moment.

Fate can do strange things when people’s actions are not governed by financial constraints. An epitome of self-proclaimed “genius’’, this dotard continues to zoom higher up the popularity snorkel. Today, his Internet biodata boasts not only of 30 years of medical practice but also credits him with the creation of a horoscope software, laboratory equipment, a billion webpages and the title of a work addict. Carry on doctor.