Nope, it’s not the dancing twins. (Though that is a pretty awesome viral video too.)
Over the weekend one of my colleagues at IBM sent me a link to a video from “The Ugly Indian” and immediately I thought “Oh brother, here’s someone who wants to comment negatively about my company’s presence internationally.” But I was pleasantly surprised.
It turns out that the Ugly Indian is an organization that encourages Indian citizens to take responsibility for how their country looks (locally) and their environmental impact (globally.) They organize “spot fixes” by partnering with various corporations to mob a particularly dirty area in the streets of India and clean it up, repaint it, plant new plants etc.
I am traveling a few weeks to speak at AdTech in Bangalore…and I plan to visit the site of this clean up as part of my trip!
So here’s the video and, below it, a bit of background information sent to me by my colleague, Deepa Kedoor, in India when I asked for more detail.
“This started off with a ” Say No to Plastic” oath and to to determine if there is something we could do, that would really impact from a grass root level. i.e reduce the use of plastic just by doing an activity. instead of going on a sermon mode.
This is where we thought of partnering with “The Ugly Indian.” This group works with Corporates to clean office spaces and educate vendors around the area, on reduced use of plastic, and promote a plastic free environment. The group has done some incredible work with Dell, ING Vysya and many other such corporates and have a great following on social Media. The thought behind this was that if we were to create a really clean space outside our main offices in Bangalore, then employees would …keep it clean and not litter it with plastic and cigarette butts etc..
We approached them to do the activity with us at Subramanya Arcade, This has stemmed from employees who have posted comments on our ‘ Say No to plastic’ article on W3 <IBM’s intranet> stating that they would like to clean up their campuses, and get rid of the plastic in the office spaces. This is being run with the support of On Demand Community volunteers by the Corporate Citizenship & Corporate Affairs Team.
On this day about 60 volunteers came out to help run this effort.
This event was kicked off by our COO Amit Sharma…. and we plan to have this drive at other locations as well”..
Ethan McCarty 