Cloth diapers for the baby

Before the baby was born, we started thinking about cloth diapers. At AID, many volunteers had already tried them and posted their experiences at AID forums. There is also a wealth of information on-line.

The reasons for going for cloth diaper:

1. They save the landfill from the hazardous waste. We used some disposable diapers during the first 1 week and had to throw a bucketful of used diapers in the landfill each day. It was a pitiful sight.


2. Unlike what they seem, the disposable diapers are not made of cotton, but polyester and other petroleum extracts. Then they are filled with Sodium Polyacrylate, the magical super-absorbent chemical. Sodium Polyacrylate is rumored to be cancer causing. FDA as usual has stayed quiet.


3. Cloth diapers are cheaper even after including the cost of laundry costing about a 1/3 to 1/2 of disposable diapers. A baby uses on average about 5000 diapers.

Unfortunately, the age old cloth diaper is now available mostly on-line and not in the local stores. We narrowed down to two brands of pocket diapers: bumgenius and haute pockets. We got them at cottonbabies.com They are out-standing (absorbent, easy to wash, sturdy adjustable size and leak proof). For the wipes, my mother-in-law (Atha) stitched a bunch of four layered cloth wipes which were softer and more absorbent than the synthetic wipes. We haven't looked at disposable diapers or wipes since.

During the baby's first three weeks, we used small dual layered cloth diapers that Atha brought from India. They were not as easy as the fleece lined pocket diapers. They did not keep the baby's butt dry and had to be changed in less than an hour. The weather being cold at that time also made them uncomfortable for the baby. Although Atha was persistently changing the dual layered diapers every hour (sometimes 3 in an hour) and washing them, we decided to move to pocket diapers as soon as the baby's butt fit in them.

Vinegar and baking soda help in cleaning. Soiled diapers are washed in water and placed in diaper pail (a huge bucket). The diaper pail is filled with few tumblers of water mixed with baking soda. Baking soda removes odors and neutralizes the acid in urine. During the first rinse cycle, couple of table spoons of vinegar is added to neutralize the alkaline baking soda and also helps remove the stains and lint.

Adopting cloth diapers was made easy with a lot of support from my mother-in-law who makes sure that the right quantity of baking soda and vinegar is used. She also makes sure that diapers are washed, dried and ready for the baby every morning.

So, far this experiment seems successful, although it is too soon to judge.

Here is a very good article by Aravinda on cloth diapering.

Avoiding the elevator

For the past month and half, we have tried to avoid the elevator and take the stairs. Most elevators in high rise buildings have a counter weight and efficient electric design. So, a lot of energy is burnt as they go up compared to when they come down. The hydraulic elevators in most apartments are very inefficient power hogs. At the end of the day, a lot of energy could be saved and exercise gained by avoiding the elevator.

It was easy at home as it was only two flights of stairs from the apartment to garage. At work, it is a different story. Mayuri was able to manage well as her office is mostly on the 1st floor. My office is on 9th floor. For about 3 weeks, I avoided the elevator. That meant up and down 9 floors twice a day as I go home for lunch. It was great initially. I was feeling more energetic with all the work out I was getting.

After 3 weeks, my knees decided to give up. I think it was mostly the climbing down that hurt the knees. So, I started taking the elevator again at work. The plan is to take the stairs up and elevator down once the knees get back to normal in a couple of weeks. At the apartment, it is still the stairs.

After the knees returned back to normal, I started taking the stairs on the way up and elevator on the way down.

This experiment was mixed success.

Baby is almost two months now

Our baby started smiling, laughing, whining, cooing, responding to humans, eating more, sleeping almost 7 hours at night, playing in her gym and above all occasionally demanding us to carry her around. All this is normal development. But for first time parent, each development is new and exciting.

A few interesting things to report after observing our little one:

• It is very delightful to be a parent. It gets interesting after the 1st week when the baby has mostly adjusted to the outside world.


• Babies grow so fast. She put on over a pound every month.


• After the first few days, unable to bear seeing a bucketful of hazardous waste going to landfill each day, we switched to cloth diapers. More on that in another post.


• Mother's milk seems to provide lot of resistance in addition to the nourishment and satisfaction.


• Our baby loves being carried around in sling. She seems to fall sleep quickly in it. It maks it easy for us to carry her around when we go outside.


• Babies become all the more fun when they are about 5 weeks old. That is when they start responding, smiling and soon start cooing. Best of all, they are easy to handle(less delicate) after a month. Haven't started tossing her around yet.


• The Vivaldi "Four Seasons" music that we are using to soothe the baby has not caught up yet. She seems more calm when we make the humming sound. Vivaldi notes are probably not simple enough to soothe her compared to humming white noise.


• We are slacking on responding to phone calls and emails. I am occasionally slacking on AID tasks, sometimes causing frustrations to other volunteers.

Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh

I recently read the book on Ladakh "Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh" by Helena Norberg-Hodge. She illustrates the changes taking place in Ladakh over the past 30 years.

Some of the interesting observations from the book that I wanted to share:

Ladakh was once a completely self contained, sustainable and happy society in a harshest environment. But it is rapidly adopting an unsustainable model that is destroying their community and identity.

Industrial development, the western way:
"Most westerners have come to believe that ignorance, disease and constant drudgery were part of the pre-industrial societies and developing countries need to industrialize to get around them. The fact is, however that many, if not most of the problems of 3rd world are to a great extent the consequences of colonialism and misguided development.

We treat technological change as more natural than the changing weather, and seem locked in the belief that where ever scientific inventiveness goes, we must follow. But Ladakh has shown that this process exacerbates greed, competition and aggression while vastly increasing the potential for destruction. Development (western) causes artificial scarcity, which inevitably leads to greater competition, and puts pressure on people to conform to a standard western model that they simply cannot emulate. The resulting dissatisfaction and inferiority complex leads to more problems."

Buddhism as a way of life in Ladakh:
There is nothing that has independent existence. Everything is interdependent. We need to accept that and respect it.

As long as there is ignorance, there is a need for ritual. It is a ladder that may be discarded once we have attained a certain level of spiritual development.

Attitude to life and death seems to be based on an intuitive understanding of impermanence and a consequent lack of attachment. Rather than clinging to the idea of how things should be, they seem blessed with an ability to actively welcome things as they are. Even death is more readily accepted.

Future Sustainability:
Neglect of rural and agricultural economy has created destitution on a massive and unprecedented scale.

Economists and technological optimists assume that we will be able to invent our way out of any resource shortage, that science will somehow stretch the earth's bounty ad infinitum.

Human race would probably survive no matter what, but the question is how many will perish in the process and how many more will have to endure the suffering before perishing.

Quote: Why there is so much evil

Heard this interesting quote on NPR:
"We have so much trouble and suffering in this world, NOT because there are so many evil people, but because so many good people choose to ignore them instead of confronting them"

Nature as the Capitalist

I was reading about PointReturn, an experiment of D V Sridharan from GoodNewsIndia. There is an interesting observation about how capitalism has prevailed. Well worth sharing.

"In capitalism, there is an owner of capital -the capitalist- to whom the user of capital is in some way accountable. Either the capitalist gets a good return on his investment or he switches to another user of his capital. If there is willful default, he invokes powers in the system to punish the defaulter.

The capitalist arranges to provide our food, water, roads, heating or cooling, education, fitness and entertainment. We shall receive employment and wages with which we shall pay the capitalist for our needs. We shall be occupied, pre-occupied, entertained, retired, cared for and cremated.

When it comes to natural resources however, modern man has failed to develop an enforceable system."

We treat nature as an infinite resource. It isn't a surprise that per capita land for each person in India is only 1/3 acre. That makes nature all the more precious. The new idea being tried is: make the nature capitalist. Resources like water, energy and the means to grow food and materials. What we consume, we repay with interest, treating nature as the capitalist.

This idea is not new since several societies (Ladakhis in most recent times) have followed such a path till the modern civilization kicked them out of it. What makes it interesting is the modern context in which it is being implemented. It will be 2012 by the time D V Sridharan's experiment is done and that will show the world yet another way of sustainable living with almost no external inputs. Effective water harvesting, bio-fuel, food grains, solar power will lead to surplus of water, energy and food.

Timbaktu Collective is one such success story.

The Special Economic Zone or Death Zone

Several countries have tax free Special Economic Zone(SEZ) where goods are produced for direct export. India seems to have jumped on that idea and started implementing it without proper guidelines and regulations.

SEZs in India are flawed for several reasons. First, they involve forcible procurement of good agricultural land under the colonial Land Acquisition Act of 1894. The small landholders are discriminated. Second, it helps the rich businesses through undeserved tax breaks and other concessions at the expense of the public.

Third, they create fewer jobs than the people they displace. What about all the agricultural workers who have no land. Are they expected to end up in the city slums? Finally what about the neighbouring villages where land becomes unproductive due to water being sucked out by industries and the effluents being discharged into their environment?

There has been wide spread protest and lot of bloodshed due to police violence at the proposed SEZ sites, prominently Kalinganagar, Nandigram, Singur and Reliance SEZ in Raigad. Some of these SEZs don't even make sense: 960 acres in Singur to build a Tata car plant is ridiculous when Toyota is doing the same in 200 acres.

After so much bloodshed, the government decided to scrap the SEZs at Kalinganagar and Nandigram. What about the suffering that people displaced at other SEZs are enduring?

A clear policy is needed on the rehabilitation of displaced people before land is acquired. There should be proper review, which includes the affected people before approving a SEZ instead of a random shot at the idea.

Music to soothe the baby

Pavlov is known for experimenting with the involuntary reflex reactions. He would ring the bell while the dog was having food. Later, even when there was no food, the dog started salivating at the ring of the bell.

It would be interesting to see if a similar reflex works on our baby. Our little baby seems to be content and happy when she is feeding than at any other time. Her Mom enjoyed Vivaldi's Four Seasons when she was pregnant. We started playing the same music when she is feeding. It has been only a couple of weeks since the experiment was started and it could take a couple of months to train. The hope is that at a later time, when her Mom is away, the same music would soothe and comfort the baby, at least for a little time.

I don't mean to be insensitive in comparing a dog based experiment with a baby's experiment. It is the scientific theory behind it that is important. Most of us do these sort of things involuntarily any way.

(1 year later)
We noticed that the child was more receptive to the lullaby music made by the crib toys. From time to time, she really loved that music. We used that music to put her to sleep. The classical music experiment failed, but the lullaby music worked. She is too young for complicated notes.

Charity makes mathematical sense

A young friend who is at school asked "How could Warren Buffet give away $37 billion to charity?". His older sister said "You will know when you grow up". I started thinking what would be an appropriate answer. One of the answers seems to be in pure math.

In rural India, it costs about $12/yr to save a child from malnourishment. So, if we give up eating breakfast out for a day and eat cereal at home, we could save a child. What if our life style changed and we always have healthy breakfast at home?

Extending that a little bit, if we were to support 300 kids for a year($3600), that would have almost no impact on the short term life style and possibly about 5% reduced living expenses during our retirement. Compared to 5% reduction in long term life style, the 100% difference it could make in the lives of 300 kids makes for a winning argument.

Now, one could argue why not take a 10% reduction in long term life style and support 600 kids. Sure, why not. If one could give up 10%, that is even better.

Next comes the question of trust. If I am giving up something to help some one, is it really reaching that some one? For that you need an organization that you can trust and that has minimum operational expenses. Fortunately we have AID India (and Vibha, Asha as well), local organizations run by volunteers we know.

Warren Buffet already made his mark. To lead the same life till the end, Warren Buffet would probably need no more than $1 billion, so it makes mathematical sense to give away the rest. Who else would he give it to but the foundation run by his buddy: Bill Gates.

For a more detailed analysis look at this article or Peter Singer's NY times article.

It is not surprising that when we started reducing our carbon and resource foot print (read: reduction in life style), the health and savings seem to improve.

A modern shopper

This definition of a modern shopper (some folks call it "civilized shopper") sounded interesting:
"A person who spends money he doesn't have, to buy things he doesn't need, to impress people he doesn't like."

An addition to our family

March is the month that we will mark as the second transition in our married life. The first being the marriage itself.

Our little bundle of joy arrived after 14 hours of labor. We were glad to see her healthy. Mom recovered over the next 10 days and started having a good time with daughter. It was a exciting, happy, sleepless, anxious transition. Needless to say that I am also having a good time with the baby.

It took us over an year to decide if we ever want an addition to our family. After long discussions, we finally decided that it would be a great experiment worth trying.

It is too soon to draw conclusions on such a big experiment, but so far we rate it as a success as we are happy.

Life without TV

About a year ago, our TV was busted. The vertical scanner chip failed. All we could see was a bright horizontal line. Experimenting with repair was going to be futile as it was already about 7 years old and the chips would be obsolete by now. So, we experimented with life without a TV.

It was odd for a couple of days without the familiar TV babble. Then as we got the books from the library to fill our time, we completely forgot about it. Someone asked us how we would get the news or watch a movie. The solution is simple: laptop and the Internet. With TV, our choices were limited and it was like force feeding (CNN repeats the same biased news every half hour). Now we get to see, hear and read what we want and when we want. Internet is a huge resource of independent journalists and movie makers. The local library has vast collection of books, DVDs and documentaries to fill all our time and brain. I tune to NPR occasionally. I guess the only thing I miss is seeing/knowing about a snow storm that occurred 2000 mile away from my home.

It has been over a year and we don't miss the TV. We might get one when our parents visit us for extended period of time and they demand for one.

This experiment is a success.

(2 years later)
In retrospect, it still seems good not to have the TV. Reading about research on child development, avoiding TV during the first 3 years of the child's life seems to help reduce the incidence of addition deficit disorders.

Boycott Coke and Pepsi

What if a terrorist organization struck and killed 1000 people? Everyone would call for banning that organization and bringing the perpetrators to justice.
What if my favorite drink is tarnished with blood? I would immediately throw it away.

The above two things provide a clear answer whether one should boycott Coke, Pepsi and Dow Chemicals (and some more like the DeBeer diamonds, Tata Steel., etc)

Coke tried to curb formation of workers union by killing the union workers in Columbia. In India, Coke and Pepsi are wreaking havoc in rural areas by drawing massive amounts of ground water with out permission and dumping toxic waste without treating. The end product: drink itself does not meet the European standards on pesticide content. Yet they get away with kick backs. It is for the people to lead when the leaders fail.

Similarly Dow Chemicals (acquirer of Union Carbide) seems to elude the responsibility of killing over 15,000 people and maiming over 120,000 in the worst industrial disaster in Bhopal: an avoidable disaster caused due to removal of safety equipment to save money. The toxic waste from the plant was never cleaned and it continues to contaminate the city. Can't they be branded greedy terrorists? If so, why would the government want to do business with them?

The experiment of boycotting Coke and Pepsi was successful. We don't consume them and will not buy it for any of our guests.

But boycotting Dow Chemicals was not that successful as their products reach many of us through indirect channels. The best solution here is to ask the state to ban Dow from doing business here.

Local and Organic Foods

Farmers all over the world are in trouble. The government seems to provide subsidies on one hand and cause much grief with depressed prices, a result of bad policy. Added to that, there are huge subsidies to industrial farms that operate on a massive scale. These industrial farms don't have much concern for envrironment and damage the land and neighbouring small farms in the long run.

Farmers' situation in India is really worse because the governement, after making sure that farmers are addicted to fertilizers and pesticides removed the subsidies. Then it removed the credit support. Then it went on to destroy the trading structures (cooperatives) and then removed the excise duty on imports. The result is increasing production costs with reducing prices. This drove millions of farmers to bankruptcy and many of them committed suicide. Even today, the problem is not properly addressed.

Farmers market is touted as a solution to bring the urban community to the small farmers. Agreed, some of the folks at the farmers market are not really farmers, but middle men. But a great majority are farmers. Buying local also helps reduce pollution/carbon consumption because food travels less distance from source to the plate. Besides fresh food tastes better. In US, on average food travels over 1200 miles from source to the plate.

Organic food helps farmers, land, environment and you. I have been reading about the increase in incidence of cancer in rural areas due to increasing pesticide exposure. Organic farmer can avoid that. It helps you by reducing your intake of pesticides and chemical fertilizers which are mostly derived from Petroleum.

With those goals, we started off on buying organic/pesticide free fruits and vegetables as much as possible at the local farmers market. It has been over a year now and we keep going there every weekend.

This experiment is a success

Optimal Use of Resources

Is there an optimal use of resources?

I read about Al Gore who is going around the world spreading the message of global warming, is himself a carbon hog by consuming lot of power for his mansion. The argument in favor was that his mansion was very efficient, uses solar power and he buys carbon credits.

The bottom line for an average city dweller is: no matter how much you reduce the usage of resources, you still are a resource hog. The best one could do is to progressively reduce the resources consumed without comparing with others. The resources could be water, power, all materials. At AID, there was a huge discussion on ways to reduce some of which are:

1. Replace filament bulbs with energy efficient CFL(Compact Fluorescent Lamp)
2. Open windows to let the natural light warm the home.
3. Reduce the number of bulbs in bathrooms that have Victorian style: 6-10 bulbs.
4. Placing a gallon plastic container in flush to reduce water usage.
5. Using a bucket for bathing instead of shower
6. Stopping newspaper and going to the Internet for news. Reusing paper
7. Carrying a shopping bag instead of the plastic covers when one goes shopping
8. Driving at less than 55mph to improve vehicle driving efficiency
9. Buying local and organic produce
10. Turning down energy hogging electronics when now in use.
11. Going for cloth diapering for babies instead of disposable diapers.
12. Not buying things that are not so necessary (a subjective one)

and some more

We have tried many of the above. Some are tough initially, like carrying a shopping bag each time I go to get groceries. Sometimes we get strange looks from shopkeepers. But eventually we got used to it. Reducing paper was easy as I have a bunch of hand kerchiefs. The speed thing was a bit tricky. But most of my friends now know that I drive slowly. So they start early when they ask me for a ride. We stopped buying new clothes till we use up all the existing ones. Some of this may appear frugal. If so, so be it.

We are still consuming lot of resources because of travel and stuff at home. There is more work to be done. Some more to try are reducing packaged food/goods, eating out and avoiding elevator, paper and plastic.

For some one who is really living a 0 impact life style, check noimpactman.com. For more about folk who try to reduce carbon food print by reducing and reusing read about compacters.

This experiment is reasonably successful, but there is some room for improvement.

Experiments and Thoughts

The journey of life is full of experiments. Each experiment provides insights and answers. This blog is a collection of those experiments that I would like to share.

There are also many thougths that come up, some good and some bad. As memory begins to fade, it might be worth recording the thoughts for sharing and also to remind myself later.