World Water Day

With world water day just around the corner, I thought it apt to begin my blogging with some thoughts on water issues. Growing up in a water -constrained, rapidly expanding metro back in India, water scarcity has been in my face during my tween/teen years. I remember the long hours of “pumping” that my friends and I would do, or carrying buckets of water from our community well to our home. My dad was not an activist or conservationist by any means. In fact he was just an average man with a lot of common sense and the right values. He would ration our water by buckets and when we protested he managed to convince us that you really don’t need more than 3/4th of a bucket to wash yourself clean. It was OK to lose money, but losing the “catch” water from the washing machine was a "punishable offence:)" in our household . These experiences have stayed with me over the years and therefore made me more sensitive to water issues. I can’t help thinking that my child growing up in South Western United States might have to deal with acute water shortages in her life time, and the lessons I learned from my father in a different corner of the world are valuable enough to be passed on to her.