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Jun 4, 2010

"Think small and act small, and we'll get bigger. Think big and act big, and we'll get smaller." --Herb Kelleher

It Starts with a Seed

The seed of the idea, Satish Vijaykumar recalls, started as something tiny and simple: "One day I was just sitting and thinking about how the average Indian is always worrying about something, but we don't do anything." One thing that sounded doable to the young man of Mumbai, India was to pool together rupees with friends, buy a few saplings, and plant them. "It's the least I could do," he thought. Now called "The Sapling Project," Vijaykumar and his friends' tree-planting movement has delivered over 1,200 trees and involved roughly 700 people people, with plans to plant 10,000 trees in Mumbai, preferably before the monsoons. In a city that loses 3,000-4,000 trees a month due to development, Vijaykumar's "little act" has rather large ripples. They've even been asked to share their experience with people in Kenya and Zimbabwe!