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India Today
2 days ago
- Lifestyle
- India Today
World Nature Conservation Day: Simple lifestyle changes that protect our planet
Every year, July 28 is observed as World Nature Conservation Day, a global reminder of the need to protect and preserve the environment. In 2025, the message is clear: even one lifestyle change like reducing single-use plastic or switching to public transport can have a huge impact on the health of our AND SIGNIFICANCEWorld Nature Conservation Day is not linked to any international body like the UN, but is widely celebrated across the world, especially in countries like India. The day aims to raise awareness about the importance of a healthy environment and the urgent need to preserve natural resources for future was started to encourage governments, organisations, and individuals to take responsible actions that ensure the planet's well-being. In recent years, climate change, deforestation, and pollution have brought environmental issues to the forefront, making this day more relevant than Mahatma Gandhi once said, 'The world has enough for everyone's needs, but not for everyone's greed.' This quote perfectly captures the spirit of conservation and the need to adopt mindful POWER OF ONE HABITadvertisementIn 2025, experts say even one good habit like carrying a reusable shopping bag, avoiding fast fashion, using a refillable water bottle, or switching off lights when not in use can start a ripple effect. The focus is on sustainable living, which means making daily choices that reduce harm to the instance, if one family stops using plastic water bottles, they can prevent hundreds of plastic items from ending up in landfills or oceans each year. Similarly, using public transport for just two days a week can cut down significant carbon emissions over time.A WAKE-UP CALL FOR ALL Nature is under threat like never before. Reports show that we are losing biodiversity at an alarming rate, with over 1 million species at risk of extinction. Forests are shrinking, water sources are drying, and global temperatures continue to YOU CAN DO TODAYStart small. Here are a few things you can do on World Nature Conservation Day:Plant a tree or care for a plastic and carry your reusable bags and or cycle for short recycle, and reduce waste at to your children about respecting Nature Conservation Day 2025 reminds us that the Earth is not just a resource—it's our home. Saving it doesn't require big actions from a few people, but small actions from all of us. Whether you're a student, parent, or working professional, one simple habit today can make the planet greener let's take the pledge this year: 'I will be kind to nature, one choice at a time.'- Ends
News18
2 days ago
- General
- News18
World Nature Conservation Day 2025: This One Lifestyle Habit Could Help You Save The Earth
Last Updated: World Nature Conservation Day 2025 on July 28 urges global efforts for nature preservation. Discover India's green initiatives, powerful quotes, and how to get involved. World Nature Conservation Day 2025: The World Nature Conservation Day is observed annually on July 28, highlighting the need to preserve the planet, its natural resources and biodiversity. The day is celebrated to raise awareness about environmental issues and promote efforts to safeguard nature and its precious offerings with sustainable practices. As the threat to the environment increases amidst rising climate change, deforestation and pollution levels, World Nature Conservation Day underlines why protecting nature is essential for human beings' survival. World Nature Conservation Day 2025: History While the exact origin of the day is not clear, it is understood that World Nature Conservation Day gained prominence in the early 1970s with the rise of global environmental awareness practices and many nature conservation efforts. It has been celebrated across the world for several years, promoting awareness and efforts to protect nature from an increasing set of threats, including weather fluctuations, climate upheaval, natural disasters, deforestation, pollution and loss of biodiversity. Campaigns, workshops and various green activities are conducted across the globe to mark the celebrations for the World Nature Conservation Day, inspiring everyone to take time out from their busy lifestyles for nature conservation and save the resources provided by Mother Earth. In India, the Indian government has carried out key initiatives for environmental protection, including the National Mission for Green India (GIM), which focuses on safeguarding and sustaining India's dense forests that feature a host of species that deserve our care and attention. It also helps revive degraded forests in the country. Namami Gange Mission is another valuable government initiative for nature conservation, helping clean and rejuvenate the great Ganga River. It is an effort to address the rise of pollution levels inside it and protect the wetlands along the river. Under LiFE, people are encouraged to inculcate good habits to preserve nature and its ecosystem in their regular lifestyles, including no single-use plastic usage, saving water, reducing electricity consumption and recycling waste. One Lifestyle Change India Wants Everyone to Make Lifestyle for Environment (LiFE) is part of the Indian government's broader push towards environmental protection and biodiversity. It's a concept introduced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at COP26 in Glasgow on 1st November 2021. World Nature Conservation Day 2025: Quotes 'Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's needs, but not every man's greed" – Mahatma Gandhi 'Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better" – Albert Einstein 'When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world" – John Muir 'Forests are the lungs of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people" – Franklin D. Roosevelt. view comments First Published: Disclaimer: Comments reflect users' views, not News18's. Please keep discussions respectful and constructive. Abusive, defamatory, or illegal comments will be removed. News18 may disable any comment at its discretion. By posting, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
The Print
4 days ago
- Politics
- The Print
Socialism doesn't deliver prosperity or produce equality. Does it give freedom? Of course not
Now, Gandhi taught us two things, basically. One was that ends and means are interlinked, that you cannot produce a better society by methods that are not clean and decent, that the end does not justify the means. By the time your means, which are dubious, are practised, your end gets vitiated. In other words, to cite the Soviet Union, by liquidations and butchery, by distortion and lying, you cannot produce a more fraternal society. Our great leader, Mahatma Gandhi, used to say that consistency in political affairs is 'the virtue of an ass.' He was himself a very inconsistent person, who moved from position to position as he developed and the world developed. The point I am making is that it would be very stupid for anyone to hold on to a point of view or a dogma, disregarding what is happening around him. There is an idea afoot that liberalism came before socialism and therefore must fade out before socialism. I would like to examine that assumption and, looking fifty or a hundred years ahead, to consider which is more likely to survive, and which is getting outdated today. The other thing Gandhiji taught us was that the State in the 20th century is no longer a great friend of freedom and progress, that perhaps the biggest threat to human freedom comes from the State. This Gandhi repeated a hundred times in different ways, by saying that there is no violence as evil as the violence of the Government. All other violence can be forgiven, understood or controlled, but when the Government becomes violent and dominates and oppresses the people, that is the most foul kind of violence. Socialism does not deliver prosperity. It does not produce equality. Does it give freedom? Of course not. The loss of liberty is the most obvious thing in the socialist countries. Lenin was a great man. He was an idealist gone wrong. He imagined that, after a short period of dictatorship, liberty would be restored by the benign Communist Party to the people. The State would 'wither away.' Now, some of us have been waiting patiently for this process to start. There are no signs of it yet, either in the Soviet Union or in any other communist country. The State keeps its monopoly of power very securely in its hands. Now, all this had been foreseen by a very wise Italian philosopher, Benedetto Croce, who said that in any country where there were no 'autonomous social forces,' liberty was bound to disappear. By 'autonomous social force' he meant people who own their factories, people who own their shops, people who own their land, people who practise independent professions like lawyers, doctors, engineers and accountants. In other words, when everyone is an employee of the Government, you cannot have freedom or democracy because there is no one to oppose or criticize the Government. It is only when a peasant can say: 'This land is mine,' that he can stand up to the official. But when you have no peasant proprietors, no businessmen, no free professional people, it becomes a slave State. Also read: Socialism hinders India's industrial growth. We need free enterprise first Now, let us consider what has been happening in a semi socialist society like India. We have been practising, or trying to practise, socialist methods for the last 15 years. Is there more prosperity? Are we better off than we were in 1947? The answer is 'No.' Living standards have been stagnant since the British left in 1947. Some classes have benefited, some are worse off. The Government admits that the real income of the agricultural labourer, the landless labourer in the village, has gone down in the last fifteen years. He does not take home as much as he could in the old days under the British. The real income of the industrial labourer is more or less stagnant, thanks to dearness allowances. Anyone who knows anything about the middle class knows that its standards have gone down shockingly in the last fifteen years. In fact, the middle class is being ground out of existence today in India. The biggest victim of socialism is the lower middle class, the educated man with a small income, the clerk, the schoolmaster, the shopkeeper. Then, who has benefited? If the middle class, the working class and the landless labourer are all worse off, who has benefited? The answer is a small number of people have benefited. Because we have a mixed economy, we have a mixed 'New Class.' They are not all commissars. Some of them are commissars and some are businessmen. What they do is that by means of a controlled so-called socialist economy, where more or less sheltered conditions are created, they share the profit. If I am in power and I give a licence to somebody to produce something with a protected market, he gives me back 10 per cent or 20 per cent of what he makes. So political patronage, operated by dishonest politicians, officials and businessmen, creates a new ring of exploiters which replaces the old system. Equality? Even the advocates of socialism themselves complain that every time a Five Year Plan is put across, it creates more inequalities, for the reason I have just explained. Now I come to the alternative, the Liberal path. If socialism does not serve the purposes for which it was intended, that is, moving towards a freer and more equal society, is liberalism the alternative? What is liberalism? Liberalism, according to Hobhouse, the great British liberal, in his book on Liberalism, which is a classic, is 'a belief that society can safely be founded on the self-directing power of personality, that it is only on this foundation that the true community can be built. Liberty then becomes not so much a right of the individual, as a necessity of society.' Professor Parkinson said in an article recently published in England: 'The word Liberal means generous or open-handed. Be generous with what? With freedom and political responsibility.' Now, these are two quite good definitions of liberalism. How do we apply them to the problems of social welfare or social justice with which we are concerned? Their application to the economy means a free economy. What is a free economy? There are many variations of the free economy in different parts of the world, but one thing is common to all of them—the Government plays a limited and restricted part. Liberal economics are the economics of limited government. Social controls and regulations are necessary, but must be restricted to the minimum. That is one aspect. The other aspect of a free economy is that 'the consumer must be king.' What does this mean? Who is the consumer? All of us are consumers. We all buy something or other. Therefore, the whole country is made up of consumers. What does it mean that the consumer must be king? This means that what is produced in a country should be what the people want, should be something for which the people are prepared to pay a price in the market. The pattern of production must be dictated, not by Government, not by a Planning Commission, not by the dictates of anyone, but by the collective will of the people, as expressed in the market place. This has been well described as 'the ballot of the market place.' The ballot of the market place is superior to the ballot of the political election. You can shift your choice from hour to hour and day to day. You can buy one brand of soap one day, change over to another brand the next day, if you do not find it good. You can change your perfume, your shoes, your clothes—everything. How does this choice of the small man—it does not matter whether he has ten rupees in his pocket or a thousand rupees—affect the pattern of production? It affects it through the profit motive, through what is called the law of the market, which is the only sane economic law—the law of supply and demand. The industrialist or the businessman does not produce for fun or for love. He produces for a profit. He produces what will get him a profit in the market. A profit is made when the demand exceeds the supply because when the demand exceeds the supply, then prices go up. But where the supply exceeds the demand, prices drop. The biggest capitalist has thus to consider what the smallest man in the market wants. This is how the consumer is king and this is what is called a free market economy. This is the liberal economy, as opposed to the socialist. What are the results? One is prosperity. The buying power of the man in these countries is out of all proportion to what it is in the socialist countries. Even the Indian worker, under so-called capitalism is better off than Russia under socialism, since he does not have to work as long as a Russian worker, to get a pair of shoes or some cloth. Liberal methods, which are economic freedom or economic democracy, lead to social justice, equality, prosperity and freedom much quicker than the methods of State Capitalism or State-ism, which in France is called Etatisme. That is a much more accurate name than socialism, which may mean anything or nothing. It is interesting that most of the world is beginning to see this. The world trend is away from communism and socialism and towards liberal democracy. This is not surprising because, after all, human intelligence wins in the end. This essay is part of a series from the Indian Liberals archive, a project of the Centre for Civil Society. It is excerpted from Minoo Masani's essay in the book Congress Misrule and the Swatantra Alternative, published in November 1966. The original version can be accessed here.
Hindustan Times
4 days ago
- Politics
- Hindustan Times
Cricket diplomacy can serve India in the neighbourhood
Broadly, soft power is utilisation of a country's cultural strengths as opposed to being coercive to influence and prevail over other nations. More commonly, the arts, entertainment, language and institutions have been components of cultural diplomacy. But sports, too, plays a role, from the extravaganza of the Olympic Games and football World Cups to the Wimbledon championships. In the early 1970s, ping-pong diplomacy broke the ice between the US and China. Cricket diplomacy has occasionally been employed by India and Pakistan as confidence-building measures. Today, the game has bestowed India with a valuable soft power ingredient. In 1928, India, despite being under British rule, stunned the world by lifting the gold medal in hockey in the Amsterdam Olympiad. Other than Mahatma Gandhi's non-violent freedom struggle, no facet of India in that period made an impact on the international community as Jaipal Singh's team's triumph did. Thereafter, India completing a hat-trick of golds in the 1936 Berlin Olympics rather jolted the German dictator, Adolf Hitler, whose world view was of white Aryans constituting a superior race. To his dismay, India thrashed Germany 8-1 in the final. In short, independent India inherited hockey as an instrument of soft power. People worldwide would yearn to witness the Indians' dribbling skills. Fast forward to Mexico 1968: India earned neither a gold nor a silver in hockey for the first time in 40 years. In contrast, three years later, India caught the imagination of the cricketing world by notching back-to-back Test series victories in the West Indies and England. Then, India's unexpected triumph in the 1983 World Cup pitchforked cricket as its new soft power implement. The win instigated the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) to reach out to the Pakistan Cricket Board to jointly stage the next such event in 1987 — after England had monopolised hosting rights for the first three competitions. The Indo-Pak collaboration conjured a financial package neither England nor Australia could match. India's friendship with other stakeholder countries ensured decisive support for the bid. As cricket burgeoned in popularity in India and the footprint of television simultaneously expanded, Indian corporates started bankrolling broadcasts. This, in turn, created an opening for the BCCI to demand licence fees undreamt of before from broadcasters. Progressively, India became cricket's financial powerhouse. Today, BCCI's monetary stranglehold over cricket is such that not merely other cricket boards, but also the International Cricket Council (ICC), are at its mercy as in no other sporting discipline. India, contrary to Brazil in soccer, have never been undisputed champions of the game, indeed are yet to win the most prestigious World Test Championship; but BCCI unequivocally controls the sport. India as a team are the darling of BCCI's counterparts, because they fill their coffers with bountiful revenue from digital and TV networks, advertisers and sponsors. But they are not always popular with host cricket lovers, as they perceive BCCI to be a bully and as having inequitably captured the ICC. BCCI was party to ICC's decision to award this year's Champions Trophy tournament to Pakistan. Therefore, India's refusal to play in that country was not only a breach of its commitment, but an infringement of the ICC rules applied in the 1996 and 2003 World Cups, namely forfeiture of points for abstentions, which Australia and England suffered. India also derived unfair benefit from playing at a solitary venue and by summoning spinner Varun Chakravarthy as a replacement in their squad to suit the consistent conditions. ICC allowed the special dispensation. A majority of the participating sides permitted this for pecuniary gains; but it did not please the non-Indian public — thereby impairing India's potential goodwill. It is also opportunistic to meet Pakistan in over-limit World Cups, but not in the World Test Championship. The powers-that-be in India are understandably displeased with Pakistan. So, the principled approach would be to have no links with them at all. In 1974, India preferred to default against South Africa instead of playing against them in the Davis Cup final because of its apartheid regime. The BCCI's muscle is best channelled towards magnanimity, consequently in winning hearts and minds; not arm-twisting and seeking undue conveniences in the field. India can capitalise diplomatically on the robust following the Indian Premier League enjoys in England, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, the West Indies and South Asia, many of whose cricketers figure in the tourney. In 1987, with the anti-India General Zia-ul-Haq holding the reins in Pakistan, India's ties with it were unsatisfactory. But BCCI seeking PCB's cooperation helped to temporarily soften Pakistani people's wariness towards India. Therefore, South Block could consider lifting its long-standing ban on Pakistani cricketers partaking in the IPL. This year, Bangladeshi cricketers were also de facto debarred. Lifting the barrier would encourage people-to-people friendliness. The Indian government's anger with its neighbouring counterparts to its west and east and their proxies need not spill over into punishing individual cricketers. Pakistani and Bangladeshi cricketers crossing swords with the world's best in franchise Twenty20 would likely delight and suitably melt cricket fans in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Ashis Ray is a journalist and author of The Trial That Shook Britain. The views expressed are personal.
The Hindu
5 days ago
- Business
- The Hindu
Review of Marketing Mixology by Ambi Parameswaran
'A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him,' said Mahatma Gandhi. Advertising and marketing veteran Ambi Parameswaran's book, Marketing Mixology, captures the essence of understanding consumers and three other skills—brand building, selling and negotiation, and communication—as being crucial to successful marketing. Parameswaran, founder of and who has worked with popular brands/companies like Tata Motors, Wipro, ITC, Amul and Pepsico, draws on his professional and teaching experience to share a masterclass in marketing, which acts as a guide for both seasoned professionals and aspiring marketers, amid changing marketing dynamics. Reading the weather Pointing out that consumer analysis is probably the most important step in the brand building exercise, he says with the country around us changing, an analysis of macro socio-economic factors may throw up interesting trends. A company, for instance, spotted an opportunity when it noticed girls keen on having a good education and pursuing a career. The company began setting up creches in housing societies and IT parks. He urges companies to think what other opportunities will open up because of increasing incomes and working couples. 'There will be an explosion in the demand for gadgets that save time and effort,' he points out. Successful marketing hinges on understanding consumers and from the smallest of organisations to the biggest, good marketing mixology cannot happen without a deep knowledge of consumers, says Parameswaran. He dismisses myths that brand building is very expensive and only big companies can do it. Parameswaran also debunks the theory that brand building is very complicated in India because of factors like large population, multiple States etc., and discusses various elements of brand building. 'One of the myths is that you need a person with an MBA degree from an IIM to do your branding for you. Not true at all. Some of the most successful Indian brands have been built by our own entrepreneurs,' he writes, citing examples like Ramraj Cotton, Moov Balm, MTR Masalas, Nirma, among others. The chapter on negotiation begins with a quote of John F. Kennedy's: 'Let us never negotiate out of fear; but let us never fear to negotiate.' Parameswaran elucidates various tools and techniques for negotiation and drives home the point that core principles, like don't react out of anger, always put yourself in the other person's shoes, attack the problem not the person, and make it easy for the other side to say yes, are still relevant. Communication is key The last chapter deals with communication and its various aspects, including one-on-one oral communication, one-to-many oral communication, written communication. More importantly, it touches on the concept of integrated marketing communications, which is using various marketing communication platforms aligning with the overall brand message. Parameswaran notes that one of the big pitfalls affecting brands is to see India as a single market. 'In reality, India is a federation of many markets. Several brands have been able to achieve success by not going all-India, but into regional market after market,' he adds. Marketing Mixology Ambi Parameswaran Westland Books ₹350 sanjay.v@
