Of the usefulness of campaigns

Save the tiger campaign has drawn flak from some quarters because while it makes people talk about it (with comments like 'oh the cub is chooo sweet/cute'), it does not tell people what they can do to help (monetary contribution to the cause or other kinds of contribution). And I would tend to agree with the conclusion that by simply talking about it and joining the 16-odd facebook groups, how am I really contributing to save the tiger? How many people in those awareness groups have done anything concrete to save at least one tiger?

Saying that talking and voicing concerns will help (even if indirectly help the cause by raising awareness) is like asserting that people who play farmville on facebook are contributing to India's agrarian economy. This is not like an AIDs campaign where creating awareness will lead people to take precautionary measures (like using condoms or using disposable needles). Why doesn't the Save the Tiger ad suggest some concrete measures about what urban masses can do to really save the Tiger? And let those suggestions be practical - not something like - stop using tiger products (I do not know any one in urban areas who uses Tiger skin or eats Tiger meat or uses any part of the Tiger for curing any ailment).

The breast cancer awareness campaign 1 month ago was also on similar lines. Apparently, women had to put the colour of the bra they were wearing on that day on their gtalk/yahoo chat/other chat/facebook status board, to 'raise awareness about breast cancer'.

I felth such a measure was the most useless method (indeed of the highest order). Firstly, how can someone's status message on the bra colour raise awareness about breast cancer? Secondly, it was not an awareness campaign so to say - no handouts or accompanying e-mails which would tell you how you can prevent/reduce the incidence of breast cancer.

When the Internet and e-mail was new to India, there used to be these peculiar chain mails sent for 'helping' a certain cause (justice/appeal for someone) - something similar to a signature campaign, 'please send this to 10 people and add your name to the below list which will be sent to President of India'. And people would (irritatingly) forward those lists. Till date, I do not know of any such spam mail eventually solving the cause for which it was forwarded by scores of people.

I really wish people would stop focusing on such useless methods of raising awareness about an issue and come down to implementing some thing that is practical and aligned to the cause instead.

Wedding gift question

Recently, husband and I were invited to the wedding. As usual, we were haunted by the key question, what gift should we be giving to the couple?

In our own wedding, we received tons of glass vases. Initially, we thought that maybe this is what people liked, so even we gifted other people glasses and glass vases for weddings. But after several months of storing vases in our own house (which after nearly 3 years are still collecting dust), we realized they were of no practical use to us and neither would they be to any one else. So we stopped giving gifts altogether when we went for weddings.

Early this year however, we again had a spate of weddings to attend to in February - some included NRIs. Giving any gift in kind to an NRI is useless since they are anyway unlikely to carry it with them. So we gifted them money. Since we were gifting our NRI friends money, we decided to gift the Indian ones money too. Since there were at least 15 weddings we attended in a row, we did not place any great significance on the amounts we were gifting - which were different for different couples for no reason.

This time during the wedding season however, we were confronted with another question, how much is good enough to gift? Should it be based on your earning capacity, or should it be based on the cost per plate of food that we eat in the wedding? Or should it be based on how close we were to the couple getting married? Is INR 500 too little and INR 1500 just touching the mark then? We had no clear answers. Eventually, we decided, it is neither costs nor how much you earn, nor how close you are that should determine what you give. You should give what you feel like giving from your heart to that couple.