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Your letters: Ice bucket challenge!
The words âwaterâ and âlifeâ can be used as synonyms
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T
he words 'water' and 'life' can be used as synonyms. Last Saturday, reading The Jakarta Post with my morning tea, I came across a cartoon on the Opinion page, depicting the ice bucket challenge.
Then it struck me, we live in such a contradictory world where in one part of the globe we find a woman walking 6 kilometers on a regular basis just to get a pot of portable drinking water, while the rest of the world is busy nominating one another for the ice bucket challenge.
Developing countries like Indonesia and India continue to struggle to make portable drinking water accessible to their masses, while on the flip side, we see developed nations wasting millions of liters of clean water every day. The burgeoning ice bucket challenge is one living and naked example.
The ice bucket challenge was initiated with the aim of raising money to combat the neurological disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). It ended up attracting the participation of a
number of celebrities, including Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrey, since when it has gone viral on social media and is treated as just a bit of fun.
The focus has shifted from charity and has gone haywire. Even if the Earth is a blue planet, with three-quarters of its surface area being water, only 3 percent of it is drinkable.
And on top of that, when things such as the ice bucket challenge gain ground and become some sort of status factor, it shows us to be educated fools.
'We give advice by the bucket, but take it by the grain,' said WR Alger. His words hold very true in this situation. Inspired by the global charity chain to spread awareness about the disease ALS, Hyderabad-based Manju Latha Kalanidhi has come up with an ingenious way to help those in need with its 'rice bucket challenge'.
In this challenge, all one needs to do is to buy or cook a bucket of rice and feed someone who needs it. It's that simple.
Therefore, amid a water crisis like this, where economists say the next World War will be fought over water, how can the ice bucket challenge be justified?
Aritro Mukhopadhyay
GMIS student
Jakarta
