Anil Dash blogged about an unignorable infograph that CNN did about the how USA is getting fatter by the year !

I think this is something that the whole world ought to consider seriously at this point. On a side note, I wonder what the world’s obesity demograph would look like. A Couple of things :

- Hotter parts of the country in the south, are somehow ending up as the most affected parts consistently. I am from South India and I could venture to guess why this could be.

Traditionally, tropical climates are used to greater amounts of spice and plenty of play time in the Sun for kids growing up, not to even mention a whole summer vacation of just running around until we catch a thick, dark tan and get chided/stopped by parents. That culture is now being replaced quickly with Cheese, flat TVs, online social networks and indoor games (God bless the ‘fair is for beautiful’ frenzy).

I heard of a few friends of mine that live within the same block texting each other in India to make plans for the evening. I grew up just outside a small town where telephone access was a privilege. People (my parents’ age) would just walk to each others’ homes to greet and meet in the evening. Not to mention, they all worked in the same office ! May be, it was a little too much but it certainly did help my parents stay on the healthy side of BMI for a good amount of time.

- With Countries like Brazil, India and China celebrating new-found wealth, fansy luxuries are the talk of the town at this moment. I guess it is only human to be a luxury lover but if that is cutting into what we burn and adding to what we eat on a daily basis, it might be time to trade off our broad IT minds with our narrow waists before one can realize

- Fast food was fun. It still is once in a while to satisfy our cravings for that warm Donut or that guilt-free, carb rich lunch. It still could be, daily, if I can burn what I eat. But how much do I work out ? ummm……I guess I should go back to that diet chart that I made a few years ago

KGB, the cold war era, Stalin through Gorbachev sounds familiar. But, did you know that the KGB had predecessors going all the way back to the first world war and the days of ‘Cheka’ ? That’s right.

KGB was, no doubt, the most successful and durable of all its predecessors but was no more operationally agressive than the previous ones. KGB’s expanded form in russian stood for “the committee of State security” and, like all things of the Soviet era, had a very formal name to a series of ultra-smart covert operations of intelligence gathering, counter-intelligence, protection for heads of the soviet and their military secrets, border security protection and “duty enforcements” (you probably heard the Stalin era) and even maintaining a list of people

Chocolate is something which we take for granted. It is something we can practically get whenever and wherever we want. But does anybody truly know where it comes from?

Recently I have written a case study on this issue. While discussing this case in the class, I was surprised to know that out of 40 students only 2 knew about chocolate slavery ( before reading the case i mean)

Here is a fact: Over 40 percent of the world’s conventional chocolate (i.e. non-organic and non-Fair Trade) comes from Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast), where the International Labor Organization (ILO) and US State Department have reported widespread instances of child slavery. Exploitation of cocoa farmers and farm workers is the global norm in the chocolate industry, rather than the exception. The largest chocolate manufacturers like Hershey Food Corp., Mars, Inc., Nestle USA, Kraft Foods admitted to the media that they were aware of these conditions.