Summary: The Water Crusader | Buzzword Workbook Class 7: Solutions, Notes & Worksheets PDF Download

Summary

Imagine waking up every morning to the sound of a bell and a friendly, 83-year-old man at your doorstep, offering to fix any leaking taps in your home for free. That's Aabid Surti, a person with many talents - an author, painter, cartoonist, journalist, playwright, and screenwriter. But what makes him truly special is his mission to save water.

Aabid grew up in a place called a chawl, where people with lower incomes live in small, separate housing units. In his childhood, he saw people arguing and waiting in long lines just to get one bucket of water. This experience stayed with him even as he grew older.

One day, Aabid read an article that said every drop of water wasted every second adds up to a thousand liters of water wasted every month. This was a wake-up call for him. In 2007-2008, he started an organization called the Drop Dead Foundation. His mission was simple - to provide free plumbing solutions to save water.

During the first year, Aabid and his team visited nearly a thousand and six hundred houses in Mumbai. They fixed almost five hundred taps and faucets, saving a significant amount of water. Now, after eleven years, his organization has saved more than twenty million liters of water!

Aabid didn't stop there. He put up posters encouraging people to save water, and to his surprise, it worked! The Drop Dead Foundation gained popularity, and people began praising his efforts. Despite all the attention, Aabid remains focused on his mission. He refuses to turn his one-man NGO into a business. The tagline for his NGO is powerful: "save every drop, or drop dead." Aabid wants everyone to realize how precious water is and that each person can make a difference.

Difficult Words and Meanings

• Crusader: a person who actively campaigns for a positive, social cause.
• Chawl: a type of residential building divided into small, separate housing units.
• Wake-up call: something that makes people realize they need to change the way they do things to avoid problems in the future.
• Menace: a threat or danger.
• Tagline: a memorable phrase that represents the purpose or mission of a person or organization.
• Laud: to praise or applaud enthusiastically.
• Plumbing: the work of installing and maintaining systems used for water supply and drainage.
• Initiative: an organized effort to accomplish a task or goal.
• Belief: a strong conviction or acceptance that something is true or exists.
• Conservation: the protection and careful use of valuable resources, such as water.