Dear Mr. President
Monday, February 16, 2009 at 11:41PM From
Sundar Narayanan
Just another dude
To
The Honorable Barak Obama
President
United States of America
Subject : Simple requests to do things that meet green standards, improve quality of life and make Americans happy
Dearest Sir,
Congratulations on your new position. Looks like you are slowly getting the handle of Washington. My expectations from your presidency are high. With that said, I request you to do some minor things that would make life easy for techno folks. Stuff that may not be as big or as important as the bailouts of various folks, but things that might get people to say "Bless that man!" and people who are blessed by one and all get to do greater things for the greater many. You know it already!
So here is my list:
1. Could you kindly mandate that all cell phone, electronic handheld devices adopt a single charger. It would greatly benefit the nation and its people if said charger were to just plug into a USB type interface. You have a PDA! You have a cell phone. Why do you keep lugging two different chargers? I am sure your bluetooth gizmo has a charger of its own! Please get all this in the same format. While the cell phone lobbyists will vehemently protest this by saying "We give the damn phones for free because we make money by selling spare batteries, spare chargers, car chargers, cables etc. How are we to make money?" I am sure you will find a way to justify that the environmental impact of all the chargers a single "dude" throws in the garbage every year justifies the cost of a single charger for which said "dude" will gladly pay! You can quote me if you want. Go ahead. This alone will save the USA tons of money, just in garbage disposal!
2. Please subsidize the development of a cheap bio-degradable diaper. I know shit and shit related things are usually the last on any President's list, but you could be different! I know you are. Think of stacking up all the diapers that you changed (okay okay, Michelle and her mom changed) for Sasha and Malia. I am sure that would fill a few rooms in the white house. Imagine if you could have just burried those diapers in your backyard and planted some saplings on top! Free fertilizer the way nature intended! I know you could always tell me to use cloth diapers. We will get there. People have already been hooked to the commercial machinery of Huggies and Pampers. You have to do this one step at a time. You might encounter a lot of resistance from the diaper lobby in DC. Again, this "dude" is counting on you to come up with a way to justify this to those guys.
3. You could be the next Eisenhower. He came up with the highways to link every city to three other cities and that changed the USA forever. You could top that with a public transportation system which is something of a MRTS (mass rapid transport system). You could talk to the dudes who did this in what was Bombay in the late seventies (please do not talk to the dudes who run this today). That might free us all from oil dependence. If I had a bus that would take me from Cupertino to Alviso in 25 minutes flat, the van will be long forgotten! This "dude" alone will save 300 dollars a month in gas bills and pollute the atmosphere a lot less!
4. Please make healthy food a priority. Everywhere we see corn, potatoes, peanuts, sugary syrups from cheap corn are more prominent than more healthy stuff. Please reverse this trend. If you can make tomatoes, green veggies and onions sexier than corn and potato, we will owe our health to you. Again, this "dude" knows that you will come under intense pressure from the potato growers lobby, not to mention the corn-ethanol lobbyists, the automakers who get perks for putting a sticker on their cars which say "runs on ethanol based fuels also" knowing that it is all hype and bovine excrement. Again, Mr. President, we trust you to come up with the right words to say to these people.
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There are actually a lot more requests where the first 4 came from. Kindly contact said "dude" at sundar72@gmail.com, if you care to hear some of these requests. I am sure they are all on your list already, but here is to hope that they will get higher up on the list.
Thanks in advance,
Yours truly,
Dude who one day hopes to eat healthy food grown courtesy of manure made from biodegradable diapers, on a public bus travelling to work while listening to music playing on his PDA that is charging from his laptop on a universal power adapter that is nicely plugged into the USB port!
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