Human touches in personal relationships are taking a back-seat in today’s world. With email, you don’t write letters to your old aunt anymore. With cellphones, you don’t write love letters anymore. But is this shift towards the digital media a welcome trend? Join the debate. Also, find out what you can do to keep planet Earth green.

Staying in touch has always been a choice. Either you said yes to that and connected with your old pals regularly, or you said no and moved on to make new friends. But there is always that thought in your mind that makes you wait for the college reunion to happen each year. It’s like you subscribed to these invites when you walked out of those college corridors. College friends have a strange presence in your life, though you may not see them or talk to them for years. A chance sight of a balding man on the road suddenly brings about the recollection that this is the guy who paid for your food when you ran short of dough in your sophomore year.

There is another side to this. With increased tools at your disposal to keep in touch, the pull of college reunions are no longer what they used to be. Take for example, my colleague Donna. She says, “Why do I need to go to college to meet old pals? I can do that through Facebook!” Now I think she’s got a point there. With social networks, you can keep in touch with your old friends throughout the year. You can know the crests and troughs of their lives, you can see pictures of how they evolved from gawky twenty-somethings to mature parents. It’s all there for you to explore.

So the question is, should you take up that invitation from the college and be there? Or are you content keeping in touch with your friends via networking tools? It’s true that we are constantly running short of time, so that college trip might well be a little heavy on your work schedule. But, at the same time, a trip to the campus which stood witness to the making of the person you are now, is time well invested. What would you rather do, be there at college reunions or stay in touch via Facebook?

Administrative Professionals Day® is all about thanking the administrative professionals in your office. Yes,they charted your schedules, they helped you stay ahead of your time and made sure you turned up at the right time at the right place. Kate has taken up work as an administrative professional recently. She told me that her boss doesn’t say “Thank you” as often as he should. Now that’s something of a problem when you are busy. Thanking your immediate juniors at work for their cooperation is essential to build up that team which sticks together and fights the odds away.

So if you unfortunately identify yourself with Kate’s boss, it’s time for you to make up to the ever dependable administrative professional in your office. There are a number of ways you can do it. For a start, get her flowers and a token gift to show your appreciation on Administrative Professionals Day®. The token gift could be anything that your administrative professional would need in office. Maybe a pencil holder or a nice notebook. But there could be many more options as well. What gifts would you like to receive if you are an administrative professional? What gifts would you suggest as a boss? Your ideas could just save the boss who’s desperately looking for Administrative Professionals Day® gift ideas!

Planet Earth needs you like never before. I was reading an article which said that the ice caps and frozen areas around the poles are showing the signs of melting. Large chunks of ice capped areas are changing patterns and altering maps of our frozen assets around the poles. Recent pictures show how Wilkins Ice Shelf of the Antarctic peninsula have cracked up and are about to collapse. Just a sheet of ice holds it attached to the parent ice body.

There are seminars and conferences on global warming. There is an information overload on the internet on topics related to global warming. But when it comes to doing our bit to tackle this problem, hardly any of us make an effort. To many, the enormity of the problem seems to suggest that there is nothing we can do at the micro level. But the fact is that we can. How? By saving energy. Switch off the television when you walk out of the room. Turn off the tap when you are brushing your teeth.

Yes, that is how simple saving planet Earth is. When I told this to Adrian, he was open mouthed! “Really Bob! Are you serious?” he was really excited at having got ways to do his part for planet Earth. He’s more careful with the use of electricity and water. The issue has come up so close to his heart that he’s now spreading the word as well! Would you like to encourage others like him by suggesting ways by which they can do so much more for this problem plaguing our dear Earth? Folks, we all need to make a collective effort if we want to keep our heads above the water.

Visit here to post your comments on how strongly you feel about Going Green at this very juncture. Tell us your stories, your feelings; let’s make a sincere effort in making Planet Earth a cleaner, healthier home for all of us and for our future generations.

There are some friendships that stand the test of time, and some which get locked away in the fond corners of our memories. There may be times when you quarrel with your friends, walk different ways, go around the bend and meet again! My friends, Adrian and Rick, are more this way than any of us. They are both very strong in their opinions and know how to hold their own. So when they clash, it’s highly unlikely that it will get resolved any time soon. But, they always get along together again. And that’s the surprising part about friendship. It always makes you get back to your friend.

Such friends really motivate you to keep going. I’m very proud of my friends. Meeting them has been a turning point in my life. They made life for me in this city easy and enjoyable, stood by me through thick and thin, and now they make up my family away from home. A wonderful set of friends is all you need to spice up your life. If you have a friend circle that boasts of diverse individuals like I have, you can live the life of a misadventurist, as I do. And believe me, it’s great fun! Can you say the same about your group of friends? Do they make up the world for you?

We do not choose our family members, neither can we say for sure that we would have wanted to choose them. We love our family the way they are and more often than not, we complain about them. There are some family members who are quirky, to put in the mildest possible way. Like an aunt I have. She is a stern woman who never approved mine or my sister Liz’s pranks. She had a special frosty stare that she used to glare at us if we dropped her expensive cutlery. There are many other instances and images that come to my mind when I think of those good ol’ days I spent with my family.

Family makes up a very important aspect of our life, right from childhood. Those family dinners that you looked forward to, those short trips to lush green fields during the weekends, all of these evoke memories in you which still haunt you on empty evenings. You may be a busy professional, but you are not spared from these surges of nostalgia. My friend Megan is specially susceptible to these memories about her family. She’s a sous chef, as you guys know, and she tells me, “You know Bob, however perfect the recipe may be, I just cannot replicate the taste of the pancakes baked by my mom!”

I know what she means. You may be living in the most luxurious of places, but you can never forget the charm of that small room you shared with your brother as a child. Memories related to family make a very strange aspect. It makes you smile when you think of the days you cried and it makes you cry when you think of the days you smiled. Why don’t you share a fond memory about your family? We’d really like to know about your family.

The Zen quote this week could be about families, and this is an all-time favorite with me. It’s the opening line of Leo Tolstoy’s book Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” It couldn’t have been put in a simpler way, isn’t it?