The Real Bagheera of Bagli

 

Jowan Singh Alava is a real hero.  

Hanumanth and I are in a tiny, non-descript village, along with PS Vijayshankar from Samaj Pragati Sahayog, on a learning journey.  We discuss agriculture with the denizens and then I ask, "Has anyone had any encounters with wildlife?"
The answer is unanimous: I should, they all say, speak to Jowan Singh.  
We walk a bit to reach his modest home and he comes out to greet us with a big smile (as you can see).
And then, with no pretensions whatsoever, he tells us the story.

Twenty odd years ago, on a warm summer night, the family was asleep outside their hut, in  a little village about three hours from Indore.  
Jowan Singh awoke to a rather odd sound- a stifled, yet terrified cry - and looking around, he saw a leopard taking his five-year old daughter away.  The animal had moved silently among the sleeping family, picked up the little one with its mouth and was now dragging her over the hard wheat field.

With a yell, he began to chase the animal.  He then did the unthinkable: he caught up with the leopard and held on to its tail, shouting all the while.  (As he described this, my heart began thumping away and I got the goosebumps big time).
The leopard tried to pull away with a growl, but Jowan Singh would not let go.  The animal dropped the girl and that was when Jowan Singh let go as well, half expecting the leopard to attack him but the now-frightened animal bounded off.
Jowan Singh then took his daughter - who was bleeding badly from the skull where the leopard had its grip - on a bullock cart to the nearest hospital (a Government one) four hours away in the middle of the night.  The doctor on night duty examined the wounds and, with a shrug of indifference, said that they would have to wait for the day doctors to show up to do the needful.  

And that was when Jowan Singh Alava, this man of incredible tenacity and courage, finally lost it.  "I told him that, if my daughter did not survive, he wouldn't too. I had blood all over me and a frenzied look (like a paagal), so the doctor got really scared and treated her." he said, with a cheerful laugh.  

She survived and is now in her twenties, though she carries the scars on her temple and face.  What Jowan Singh carried on his face, when we met him, was a charming smile and a modest acceptance of our encomiums.

Yes, Jowan Singh Alava is a real hero 

When the Pahadi spoke

He spoke animatedly, his face aglow
Of elegant, dignified, Pahadi stock.
He spoke of ageing, loneliness and health
And the impact of the migration shock.
Of hardship and attachment as seasons go by
Of the regular, crunching uphill walk.
 
As I listened, noted and marvelled within
At the Pahadi’s resolute grit and smile
My eyes took in with utter fascination
His charmingly easy fetching smile.
The teeth; they were perfect, white with shine
Some secret mountain herb or chamomile?
 
After the conv, I popped the Big Q
‘Just how do your teeth fit the perfect Bill?
I spend on toothpaste, on dentist and brush
And yet my set are over the hill.”
He smiled again, that sparkle of white
And removed his dentures from behind the grill

My Farmily and Other Animals

I reach the farm around 9 this morning, the morning after a night of gentle, persistent rain.  The air is heavy with moisture and the tall grass greets me with a fragrance, while its bushy heads brush against my skin.  I pick my way carefully on the soft, wet earth, for the-morning-after is time for the Kingdom of Animalia.  This is mid-day already for the birds – white-headed babblers (damn their new name), bushchats, bulbuls, tailor birds, sunbirds, white-eyes, mynas and the odd bushlark me thinks, though I am missing the chatter of the white-browed bulbul family that’s usually around the young mango.  As I open the house door and deposit the bag, a wasp from the in-house nest greets me with a buzz, a menacing keep-away whirr.  Two of her female ancestors had given me a nasty sting some years ago, so I get this message well (males are the benign, retiring type who’d rather curl up with a book than pick a fight, and that’s why we’ll get along well if we e’er meet).  Over the years, I have removed the wasp nest often (after saying my prayers), but they always return and the last time Anand, my extraordinary brains trust, was asked his opinion, he lit a quick small fire and finished them off, which destroyed not just the wasps but my heart as well.  So, I have decided to let live (and not provoke the females, after all this #MeToo stuff).   

Anand and I walk to the back of the farm, a patch of horse gram (huruli) that is as nutritious as it is unfussy to grow.  The lush sight is a delight to see, the little saplings waving excitedly in the breeze.  He shows me the impressions of the hoof of wild boar as it traversed through the patch to the ragi across, being grown, thankfully, by my neighbour (who is not averse to occasional flavouring of rice-and-curry with some bacon).  Even as we stand there, a small flock of baya weaver birds descend on the guava tree by the small pond and their excitement suggests that it’s nesting time – indeed, monsoons is when they work their magic.  The path is dotted with gorgeous lemon-yellow butterflies – the Common Grass Yellow – flitting about with purpose, in which pursuit, of course, they differ vastly from me. 

Did I just hear a Crested Serpeant Eagle?  It isn’t to be seen, which is odd, but the call – that deceivingly plaintive cry – is, as an Ornithologist would say in his tongue, diagnostic. “Do not enter the Tuvare (toor dal) patch, Sir,” Anand says, “there is a bee hive there.”  Which, of course, is great news for pollination.  I would not have entered the Tuvare anyways, for it has grown taller than I am and is densely packed – a walk through this would have had the heart doing a lively gig.   

We begin the walk to the front of the farm – the Western side, so to speak -  and, a few steps ahead, a grey francolin (a big name for a partridge) takes off just ahead, giving me quite a start and Anand a hearty laugh.  A month ago, I had seen their dainty little nest with eggs under a clump of grass.  They are generally heard more than seen, yet they are lovely birds, tubby and compact, in the line of evolutionary thought that includes quails and pheasants.  Thankfully, in our area, they aren’t caught for the table (well, at least to my knowledge). 

We are now past the little patch of greens that I am looking forward to eating next month (if not beaten to it), and Anand stops all of a sudden and points to a solitary scat on the path.  “Jungle cat,” he says with assuredness, and I feel a thrill, for this is a first.  “It seems to have gone this way last night.”  As we walk further, he points, with disappointment, to the now-sparse patch of jowar by the water-channel.  “The monkeys came a couple of days ago and destroyed this,” he says in irritation, and I share the emotion, not being particularly fond of bonnet macaques.   

Even as we stand there, staring at the soil, he bends down and examines a paw print in the soft earth.  Hares, two of them, went by last night too, their prints and droppings pointing the way.  At one point they seemed to have both stopped to deposit an entire load of droppings and I can, in my mind’s eye, see them now:  the male standing up and sniffing nervously, looking around all the time, with his black-tipped ears twitching like vibrant antennae.  I love to see hares bound across a field in a sprint that can leave you breathless and awed.  They are, in a phrase, Nature’s great dashers.  When in my teens, I read an eerie story called “The Rabbit’s Paw” (read it at your peril), but it only enhanced my fondness for rabbits (and, by extension, their Indian cousins).   

At my foot is a tiny LadyBird beetle.  Can Nature be more resplendent than this?  “We call it Guruganji vola (insect),” Anand says in reponse to my question and, on reflection, this is a brilliant name.  Guruganji is the local name for Abrus Precatorius (or the Crab’s Eye), which is Kunnikuru in Malayalam.  The LadyBird looks just like the Crab’s Eye, so what could be better than naming an insect after a seed that it resembles?  Damn the science, admire the simplicity.   

After Anand leaves for lunch, I stroll on my own – there’s a treepie up there, and his cousins, the crows, come around when I have lunch.  They know that I will give them a piece or two, not just of food, but of my mind as well.  My Great-Grandmother, a woman of incredible fortitude with a toothless grin and a yawning earlobe, used to keep one ball of rice for the crows on the low roof at the back, for these were, she insisted, her ancestors reborn, who would keep an eye out for her.  I share no such sentiment (or perhaps I do).  She, my Great-Grandma, lived to the age of 98, so the crows have a trick we don't quite know about.

I am in the porch and, taking a step forward, I see a movement on the stone patch a few feet to my left.  A striped keelback – a beautiful, harmless snake – is moving rapidly away from me, for the last thing it wants is to be near humans.  The moment it enters the grass I know that I have lost it for good. 

I must be honest, I miss Colonel Haathi.  It’s been a while since he visited, but I know that when the ragi is ready to be taken, you can’t keep a good elephant away. 

A Rhetorical Question To a Common Sense Economist

Allow me to ask you a question, well, a rhetorical one, after I present some essential macroeconomic data, basic stuff at that: 

Your Government has a historical record of budget deficits, more recently at around 4% of the Gross Domestic Product, but at earlier highs of 6-6.5% of GDP.  In the current Financial Year (2018-19), the Government will borrow around Rs 6 lakh crores to fund a deficit of 3.3-3.5% of the GDP.   

Now, here’s the question: what is your opinion of the following plan that your Government might present?

The Government says – let’s suppose – that it wishes to run a long-term project over the next twenty years which has the following characteristics:

- It will cost a minimum of about Rs 1 lakh crores a year (that’s Rs 1,00,000,00,00,000).  Once begun, this investment cannot be stopped without delaying the project and increasing its cost.  This alone will, at current price levels, increase the budget deficit by about 0.5% of GDP every year and contribute to inflation.

- The overall cost therefore would be about Rs 20 lakh crores.

- All of this money will be raised by borrowing, within India and abroad.

- The project has never been done earlier in any part of the World, never tried out at anything close to the scale that the Government is proposing.

- The benefits from this project are entirely in the realm of speculation and subject to a number of assumptions – including one on weather patterns.  None of these assumptions have been put up for scientific review and educated scrutiny.

- There is no peer-reviewed independent project report by a ‘non-interested’ stakeholder that has detailed the net benefits of the project after a cost-benefit study.  

- The employment benefits from the project are, relatively speaking (ie, in comparison to alternatives that could be done with that kind of money), marginal to the point of being irrelevant.  The agricultural unemployment resulting from the displacement as a result of the project is likely to be – there are no reliable estimates here – greater than the employment generated, resulting in significantly higher migration to the cities by both landless and landed (but now ‘de-landed’ agriculture workers)

- It is likely – indeed, probable – that some parts of this giant project will be stalled due to land acquisition issues, local stakeholder protest and intervention by the Judiciary (though such intervention may be years in the future, making the project even riskier)

- Which brings us to the issue of risk management; the project has no public risk management profile or document, nothing that alerts us to possible show-stoppers, unintended consequences or accidents.

This utterly insane white elephant is the loosely termed ‘river-linking project’, which was budgeted in the year 2002 to cost about Rs 5.2 lakh crores.  The project targets thirty rivers in India and seeks to inter-connect them in the hope that floods will be prevented by such connection as waters seek their own level.  

It is an idea that is as foolish as it is quixotic, as unequivocally disastrous as it is costly and as useless as it is destructive.  Everything about this project has ideology sans reality written all over it and yet, over the last two decades, the project has received undue impetus.  

Beyond all of the above – each of which should by itself be enough to halt the progress of the project – is the issue of planetary geoengineering that is being attempted, possibly beyond the scale of the Three Gorges Dam.  Could such effort have unintended – and unpleasant – consequences?   

Indeed, yes.  Take dams, for instance.  Over the last sixty years, the construction of dams in India alone has displaced four million people, arguably the biggest cause for refugees – ecological refugees – after partition.  Despite all attempts at water distribution from these dams, desertification and land degradation is growing as never before, with such geoengineering resulting in other unintended consequences including the decimation of fish habitat and concomitant loss of fishing livelihoods.  

A second example.  In an excellent article titled ‘The Risk of Planetary Geoengineering’, Rahul Matthan writes of a crazy attempt in the 1950s to seed clouds in the US and control the weather called Project Cirrus.  Read this:

“ In their first attempt, they took on a hurricane heading to Jacksonville.  A Project Cirrus plane dropped dry ice along the edge of the squall line and almost instantly, the clouds shed rain over the sea.  This was the result they were anticipating and they hoped that this would cause the storm to change its direction.  

While the storm initially turned away as they hoped, it soon made a dog-leg turn over the Atlantic and headed back to the mainland with renewed vigour.  The resulting Frankenstein’s monster of a storm was more vicious than before, its winds gusting at a hundred miles an hour by the time it made landfall over the Savannah.  It smashed windows, flattened sugarcane fields and caused upwards of $23 million of damage.” 

The consequence of river linking are too frightening to contemplate – and these are the intended ones.  The ecological cost of the project includes the destruction of swathes of forest and vastly increased human activity in protected areas, while the benefit of flood mitigation is, at best, a hope – just how can one predict if this will work? 

The Government of India should be doing quite the opposite of what it proposes – it makes excellent economic sense to protect the river courses as they are, remove encroachments, spend a fraction of the funds that would go into linking rivers to clean them up instead and protect the riparian forests that then mitigate flood impact.  Watershed management and river conservation must be given the most important place in Government policy, for our human capital’s productivity depends on it, more than on anything else.  Is common sense too much to expect?

Duck-in-mud

It's approaching dusk on a cloudy, overcast day.
I am by the open, harvested, muddy and puddled paddy field, squelching a way through the mud to look at my favourite sight: busy ducks.
There’s something about ducks that has always fascinated me: the way they waddle around and squawk at each other, dipping their beaks in the tiny pools and eating away with the rapidity of mindless chatter. There’s something about the way they all seem to move together, without even looking up and seeking directions or leadership. There’s something marvellously enticing about the egalitarian-ness of this whole troop (the collective noun for a group of ducks is a flock, of course, but that’s when they are flying. A group of ducks can also be called a brace, raft, team or paddling when on water. That’s your education for the day). And there’s something in their busy-ness - call it living in the moment - that is fulfilling.

So, here I am, standing next to Satyan and his young boss, Murali (whose mobile number I have stored as Tarav Murali, the prefix meaning duck in Malayalam). Here, off the lovely village of Somnathpur, with its historic never-prayed-at temple and an equally historic but abandoned shrine, I meet these two men from the border of Kerala and Tamil Nadu, simple men of leisure, watching over a thousand ducks with benign care. The vast majority are females (ducks), with about a tenth of them being males (drakes). When I mention that the ratio is a happy one for the drakes and should be an education to us all, Satyen’s lined, weary face breaks out into a grin, showing teeth that could do with repair, a crooked, chipped set that has held its share of beedis over the years and his voice – a scratchy, gravelly smoker’s voice – attests to the habit. He communicates with the whole flock using clucks and the odd grunt and they seem to know just what to do then. Fascinating, utterly engrossing.

There are questions of course, from me, and none, it seemed, from them, for I must surely fit a prototype. Why are the ducks here? Why now? What’s in it for you? How do you protect them? What’s your life like?.....and the questions flow on at a high pitch, above the chatter and din of the team of ducks hard at work on the paddy.
The answers return in monosyllables and it’s a struggle to connect the dots. They have come a long way, of course, but the rest of Murali’s large family, all of whom breed ducks – over a hundred thousand of them – are spread out over the southern states. The crop here has just been harvested and the land is fallow, prior to the next crop being sown in perhaps a month.
The ducks waddle in rows over the paddy, picking tiny pieces of grain from the muddy puddles with their beaks working like whirring motors. And, not just grain, but pests too. Along the way, they enrich the soil with their droppings and churn the mud, all practices that we could classify as Deep Ecology. But that’s for the farmers. What’s in it for Murali? Do they sell the ducks for meat?
Eggs, he says. His current flock of a thousand would give him about four hundred eggs a day and each egg fetches – at the moment – eight rupees, a handsome return, FOB (free on board – because a truck comes in the morning to pick them up). I tell them – jocularly, of course - that my life, in immediate retrospect, seems wasted and I’d love to give it all up and join them. Four thousand tax-free and the company of a thousand ducks; is there a better Heaven?
Satyen laughs again- he’s clearly certified me as a stand-up comic and now laughs at anything I say or ask – while Murali hastens to add that it’s not that rosy. “There’s transportation in a truck that’s expensive and other costs too,” the voice trails away, leaving me unconvinced, and he continues, “and ducks don’t lay eggs around the year.”
Ducks lay eggs apparently for about three quarters of the year, and for two years.
What about after that?
Murali’s face changes colour a shade. ‘We sell them away,’ he says.
‘For meat?’
He nods in assent.
‘Do you get attached to these ducks?’ I ask. It’s not a nice question, you will agree, provocative in its tone, and seeking a response that he is clearly unhappy to provide.
‘Yes, I do. But what to do?’
‘Do you get really attached to any one or two ducks out of these?’
‘Yes, then I leave them at home and allow them to lead their lives.’
“Do you keep any eggs for incubation?”
“No. Eggs are incubated artifically nowadays. We buy little chicks.”
“And, where do you take all these ducks to, at night?”
“We corral them. No sleep, Sir, because there are dogs and jackals waiting for a meal.” Satyen chips in, “And elephants in some places!” “Yes, elephants, back in our home range.”
So, these are not men of leisure, I can see. Over the past quarter of an hour, an empathy – perhaps even a bond – has developed between us, who inhabit different worlds as removed as possibly could be. With his family dispersed, Murali’s mobile phone – a basic button-phone – is his lifeline for communicating with them, the truck driver, customers and farmers.
It is a world that has changed slowly. Thankfully.
There’s just the one question that I don’t get an answer to, and perhaps it should remain this way. Why don’t these ducks fly away? Ducks are amongst the longest flyers in the world and these – Mallards, clearly – are known to migrate over continents. They never leave us, Murali assures me, and I wonder why? What is going on in that little brain at the apex of an incredibly dexterous neck? Is it loyalty to the flock (brace/raft/team/paddle – to reiterate the education)? As there is no leader (or so it seems), is this a collective decision to opt for a sort of free-slavedom, a curious twist in the machination of Nature?
By now, the ducks have changed direction, unanimously it seems, and are heading the opposite way, much like a disjointed march of a rag-tag army. I marvel at the ease with which their beautiful webbed feet step lightly on the mud, and the discerning eye with which they pick their way. This is visual, noisy, asynchronous poetry, these thousand ducks on their daily rounds. We stand in silence watching and listening to the chatter of a thousand waddlers. And then it’s time to turn around and go home, a long way away. The ducks don’t miss us though.

Immoral Signs

It was when I saw a dugong – a sea cow – in Singapore zoo that I thought of Father Dennis Coelho, who taught me in high school. 

Dennis was a rather sleepy looking fellow, with a generous waist and three chins, a genial air and a loopy smile, all of which seemed genetically linked to Suspect Number 1, the aforementioned mammal.  We called all the priests ‘Fa’ (ridiculous, as it sounds), but amongst us he was known as Babyface.  For much of his life, he taught English, in which subject his competence was commendable and hence of no interest to a biographer.  Of much greater interest to us was the School’s decision to ask him to teach Moral Science.  

He must have committed some unforgivable sin to be given this task.  When anyone takes Moral Science classes for fifty ninth standard boys, their only real knowledge from the class is a clear identification of which moral they had carefully abandoned yesterday.   

The Moral Science class, I remember well, succeeded the noon break, after we had played cricket, sweated it out in the sun and then had lunch.  We returned to the class for a well needed rest under a fan that had been last serviced around the Sepoy Mutiny.  This meant, of course, sleeping or lounging around, both of which apparently are not Moral Science.  Alternately, we’d use our compass to inscribe names on the desk in front, a task that was incredibly creative, for over the last few decades, every available space on it had been taken and one had to have a careful strategy.  Playing Battleship or Book Cricket – both games requiring compulsory brain-deadness - were options too. 

But Dennis did not get the idea of win-win at all.  He could done his thing, allowed us to do our thing, and a peaceful, shared, mutually respectful co-existence would have ensued.   

Instead, he would trundle langourously in, with heavy steps, heavier eyelids and the heaviest foreboding and take his chair.  Then would begin the most boring - lemme emphasise that for effect - THE most boring, incredibly dull, profoundly inane, utterly pointless, predictably tedious, uncompromisingly dreary, scathingly lifeless, monotonous litany.  You get the picture.  He would attempt, with some pompousness and mild assiduity, to get us to see morals in stories in a book that was written for the limited readership of Certified Angels, when the kind of stories all the Ninth Standard boys wanted to hear cannot (unfortunately) be revealed in public.   

So I slept.  There were times when I made a valiant effort to stay awake, but lost the battle, only to wake up when I was shaken and stirred by my neighbour, who had just been woken up when his neighbour poured the leftover water in the waterbottle down his back.  Once, I tried to sleep by holding my book up, but the afternoon peace was broken by the dull thud of my head banging against the desk after I had nodded off, causing much merriment for the citizenry.  It was hopeless.  And, without fail, Dennis would pick me out as one who was the principal sleep-catalyst of the class, a villian and a wastrel and a blot on the Moral Science landscape.  

I was once sent to the Vice Principal’s room – whom we called Small Cop, but was a gentle, smiling soul, unlike The Cop who was a gorilla in disguise.  Well, Small Cop asked me gently why I was sleeping.  Is this a question?  I mean, he should have asked Dennis why he wasn’t allowing all to sleep?   

As the year ended, Dennis – a normally mild-mannered fellow who, when awake, wouldn’t harm an anopheles mosquito – cursed me to hell. I had slept again and, dreaming that I was playing for India and facing Andy Roberts, had woken up with a sweat and a start, apparently exclaiming ‘Shit’ aloud (in justification, anyone facing Roberts would say much worse things).  “You will never succeed in life,” he said with feeling, his face turning a shade pink and the third chin swaying in the breeze in excited anger. 

About twenty years later, while having lunch with our team in CDC, I remembered Dennis and spoke about him to an attentive group.  I imitated his walk and his langourous style and recited a story or two to much local approval.  A little later, Annette, my boss’ secretary gently informed me that he was her uncle.  

I should have paid attention in that class, me thinks.

Health Is Wealth. Insurance is neither

If you are part of the 80% + of India’s population that does not have health insurance (and are therefore a blot on the GDP landscape), here is what it is:
1. You pay
2. You fall ill
3. You claim
4. They reject
5. You plead
6. They reject
7. You beg
8. They reimburse cost of toothpaste used, up to 60 days before and 90 days after hospitalisation
9. You renew
10. You fall ill….and so on.

If you don’t claim anything, they give you thank-you-for-not-pestering-us-so-we-can-watch-the-world-cup bonus.
 In April, I applied, after considerable research on options, to Cigna TTK.  My sophisticated reasoning was that a company that makes pressure cookers headed by an Iyengar who did not follow Ramanuja to Melkote must be the best at health insurance.  

In a moment of utter asininity – induced by a neighbour who was smoking pot and talking to the moon – I applied online.  Once you are done, you will get about 43 calls, between which you are allowed daily duties. 

The calls begin as follows:
“Are you so-and-so?”
“No, I am his labrador retriever.” Actually I did not say that (not quick-witted enough), but strongly recommend that you do. 
“For the sake of verification, can you provide your date of birth?”

This is ridiculous.  They call me and ask me to identify myself, when telephone etiquette since Alexander Graham Bell has been the reverse.  When I said this, they asked me how I was related to AG Bell, which of course warrants not an answer, but an education.  

Next they need everything, and by that I mean anything.  Actually everything that is anything (or the other way around).  If there was a pimple on the dimple of your baby bottom, that is vital information.  And they always end with, “You have been speaking to Rajesh Khanna,” as if the said R Khanna is a neurosurgeon in disguise, adding to his income by toiling in a call centre.  

I fetched up for tests at a diagnostic clinic in Koramangala where the only technology in evidence, other than the syringe, was an ECG machine (honest, I mean this.  Ok, I also saw a desktop).  The ECG machine, judging by the stains, had been used in its free time to remove bits of intestines and to lay roads in Defence Colony (this is a joke by the way.  There are no roads in Defence Colony, only wide jungle trails.)

The young doc who examined me had both his eyes on the pretty nurse and his fingers on my pulse (the other way around would have caused him trouble on social media: “Doctor assaults nurse in presence of legendary writer”).  He asked me if I had something called a hernia and I smiled and said, No, I have always been a Honda buff and have a City.  He then stared at me, which was the only time he took his eyes away from the nurse, and shook his head questioningly and I shook mine in response; no doubt he was checking if the ball bearings around the skull base were well oiled.  
And when he told me that the heart was pumping along satisfactorily, I told him that his wasn’t at the moment.
(No, actually, I didn’t.  I am lying again).

And then he said that I was done.

I agreed with him on this.  

As I really was done, I cancelled the policy.  

If you are Japanese, then this is a bathroom

 As I have not trained to be a commercial pilot, I find it hard to use the bathrooms in new hotels.

Bathrooms here seem to be full of buttons, switches, knobs, taps, rods, handles, levers and joy sticks, some of which seem to be there because there was a buy-one-take-one free offer.  The only thing missing is a geographical positioning system.

And even as I find my way around this instrument panel, the thing that drives me nuts is that the bathroom wall that separates it from the main room is made of glass.  You can therefore come to  one of three clear conclusions:

Conclusion 1: Hotel architects can’t see through glass

Conclusion 2: Hotel architects are dim on the uptake (unlike the lights in the bathroom)

Conclusion 3: Hotel architects are dim on the uptake and can’t see through glass and think that others are as blind as a bat (without Nipah. I don’t know if a bat with Nipah is as blind as a bat without it, but it’s a piece of research I am not enthusiastic about.)

So if you happen to have guests and are taking a shower and press the wrong button, the blinds lift; and you are presented in birthday suit, armed to the teeth with soap, shower gel, conditioner, body lotion, loofah and shampoo, to the mass of visitors (most of whom are on their third drink and hence ready to laugh at anything, pickled morons).  The towel rack is helpfully about thirty feet away, which only strengthens Conclusion 2 above, unless hotel architects dry themselves by whistling loudly and think others do too (in which case refer to Conclusion 2 above). 

Sometime ago, the hotel I stayed in had a secret shower on the ceiling.  Now, in my considered opinion, there should then be a knob in the wall which says, ‘Secret Shower – ice cold water refrigerated in liquid carbon dioxide.  Please look up’ so that there is the excitement of a treasure hunt and you look up and leap out of the way.  But I turned one perfectly normal looking knob, got soaked in water that had just been shipped in from the polar ice cap, and then spent the next ten minutes trying to stop my teeth from involuntary chattering.  This Marriott had, trust me, three showers, one on the ceiling, one flexible contraption that went up and down a rod (which was a wonderful past time once you figured it out and got the right temperature, all of which takes about 24 minutes) and a final shower at knee level.  At knee level?  Are they trying to give you an enema?  (No, I know there is another shower thingy at knee level in the toilet, but I wasn’t referring to that).  I saw later that all three showers had icons showing their location in a nano print that needed an electron microscope, which should compulsorily be provided in each bathroom.  

And the switches in these new bathrooms are embedded in the wall and look like art in the Louvre, but most of them don’t work on two times of the day – before 6 pm and after.  I pressed one of these, thinking (foolishly) that switches mean lights on or off.  But a panel by the side turned to reveal an unkempt beast staring unblinkingly. Quite a shock to see, I tell you, till I realized that it was me staring into a concave shaving mirror.  

So, I am applying for a commercial pilot’s licence.

Aap ka Manpasand

I miss the 1980s.  

It was in the Bangalore of yore that I delighted in being the third person on a phone line, when I picked up the receiver and found a cross connection. These were utterly fascinating: I would listen in for a bit and then ask, “Excuse me, which one of you has loose motion?  This is Doctor Sharma speaking’ and wait for the response.  Sadly, not once did this ruse work, despite a heroic attempt to mimic a doctor.  
And then the BSNL phone service got boringly efficient, much to my dismay.  The private operators too don’t give you a cross connection even if you are willing to pay for it.  But recently, a new invention has brought charm back to existence again.  I am referring, of course, to the tethering of the phone to the sound system in the newer cars.  

Last week, a chap parked in front of my house and made a call on his phone-cum-sound-system.  The ringtone sounded like distant thunder.  The moment the other fellow came on line, they began to quarrel and I craned my neck to receive better audio.  

Evidently, the fellow at the other end was a stock broker who had, sometime ago, recommended Manpasand Beverages – a juice maker – and the guy in the car had punted on it.  Apparently, the problem is that it isn’t just the stuff inside the Manpasand tetra packs that is fluid, it’s the stuff in the balance sheet too.  
So, these two chaps went at each other, the broker defending himself, and it was most enrapturing to hear, so I listened intently, making mental notes and silently cheering when points were scored.  

The fellow in the car had a clean shaven, fine North Indian face.  From the voice and the Hindi, it was clear that he had spent three quarters of his life in Delhi and, judging from the volume,  the remaining quarter in a maternity ward for frogs.  
Once he had hung up after twenty minutes of mutual recrimination, I opened my gate, walked over and tapped on his car window.  
‘I agree with you,’ I said, ‘The broker was wrong to suggest this.’
He seemed surprised, almost agitated and said that I should not have overheard their conversation.

What stupid logic.  It’s like announcing in front of a child that the ice-cream tricycle is coming and then getting worked up that she heard it.  ‘I did not interrupt you or defend the decision, both of which the broker did.  Also, remember I am agreeing with you.’  As you can see, I was justifiably indignant.  
But, I must say, he wasn’t impressed and said something about regretting having used the sound system.
‘Please don’t say that,’ I pleaded, ‘I found the conversation most interesting and you’d ruin an afternoon if you turn it off.  Do use the parking area in front of my house anytime to call your broker.’

Besides, I wanted to ask him about a couple of invectives he had used that I had not heard earlier, one of which seemed a very musical word to summarise the stock broker’s father’s ancestry, but before I could enrich the vocabulary, he drove away.

The problem nowadays is that it’s hard to find someone who is not a spoilt sport.

Today's buffett special: cheese from Mohenjadaro

One of the undoubted joys of my occasional corporate work is that I get to have the buffet lunch in a large hotel. Every time I see the plethora of colourful dishes, with their marvellous French-sounding names and Urdu superlatives (‘paneer lajawab-e-pasandila-Mumtazi-dilruba’ sort of thing), two ‘Which’ questions die to be answered, both of which are intellectually deeply engrossing:
1.Which original dish was this before its leftover was made into another dish, the leftover of which is in front of me in another form? and
2.Which financial year was the original dish prepared in?

Hot chocolate pudding is a great example.  When you see one in front of you, be reminded that it is an archeological marvel, originally baked around Aurangzeb’s time, then soaked in sugar and stored in deep freeze, removed and cooked to pulp, marinated in chocolate syrup (and, maybe, some leftover fish sauce) and now on the hot plate.  If the sign says ‘Walnut chocolate pudding’, remember that they take their singular sign seriously: the pudding will have one walnut piece that a South Korean ahead of you has lifted.

Yesterday, I picked up a piece of fruit cake and pointed out to the unsmiling steward that it was so old that it had wrinkles on it and a walking stick on top.  The fruit tray itself had, by weight, the cheapest fruits going – pineapples, watermelon and musk melon, the last mentioned being cheaper than cow dung (ton for ton – I am not joking because I checked online and showed the steward the data).  I asked if, being in season, I could have mango instead.  The steward looked surprised, possibly at the existence of such a fruit and even more at the sheer impertinence of a diner to ask for it, and scurried away.  He came back to say that there was no mango, sorry, but could I have mango ice cream instead?  Well, mango ice cream is flavoured, coloured, preserved and murdered, so I said no, give me a South Indian dessert, so he brought semiya kheer that had been boiled on the stove till the lactose asked for forgiveness and promised never to misbehave again.

But you know how I exaggerate the negatives.  I must admit that the white rice was very authentic and clearly white in colour, so they didn’t mess around there.

From Narayanan to None

When I first read of the controversy at ICICI Bank – the Chief Executive accused, on social media, with more than anecdotal evidence, of a conflict of interest, her husband having been a direct beneficiary – I could only think of the giant of a man who had occupied her post for much of the late 1980s and 1990s.  His name is Narayanan Vaghul and this is an unashamedly flattering tribute to a legend.  In contrast to his stature and ethical standards, the current incumbent (and the flamboyant, cowboy before her) is a pale, almost lame shadow. 

I did not work at ICICI (as it was then known), but then, neither did I not work in it.  That sounds funny, so let me explain.  For about five and a half years, I worked at a subsidiary – TDICI - that later became ICICI Ventures: Vaghul was the Chairman of our little enterprise.  Indeed, it was his baby and I got the marvellous opportunity, as a fresh grad out of business school, to learn from every interaction that he chaired. 

At IIM, the best and brightest of my classmates were vying to get into ICICI, and, when the final list was released, it was clear that the interviewers had chosen well: Hawa, Bhushan, Dahiya, Kannan, KG, Vinod - these were the crème de la crème, who joined a quasi-Government enterprise offering an average salary, in the rather quotidian business of granting loans.  The reasons were clear: the freedom the enterprise provided young grads, the level of engagement with finance, the opportunity to meet senior leadership in corporate India.….and the quality of ethics and leadership that Mr. Vaghul set.  The cultural transformation of ICICI was led by him, for, in the senior leadership team, he seemed to tower over everyone else.  Among India’s financial institutions, ICICI stood out, not just for its team capability, but also for its style of working and values; IFCI and IDBI were considered to be ethically dodgy and bureaucratic, while the Indian banks were, simply, incapable and could not offer adequate project finance. 

I did not even make it to the shortlist on campus, but a few months later joined TDICI, its subsidiary, which had a similar culture, possibly even more daring under KSN, the President of the company.  Meetings led by Vaghul were, if you were only an attendee and not a presenter, most enriching and fun.  A big-made man, with heavy spectacles, a predilection for curd-rice  and a visible dislike for exercise (he had had a couple of bypasses in his 50s), he would walk in to a meeting and take things over effortlessly, his razor-sharp mind cutting to the root of an issue or the core of the discussion.  There were liberal doses of humour (he would laugh in a open, engaging way, engendering a little twitter around the room), occasional references to the Bhagavad Gita and the Thirukkural, loads of stories about Indian businessmen – some very spicy ones –  whom he had met in the course of his work, bits from conversations with the glitterati amongst US Univ academics, particularly the Indian-American ones with whom he hobnobbed quite a bit  (the CK Prahlad types) and from their books, and little gems of wisdom (of which one example shall be provided later). 

His vision encompassed ICICI and its subsidiaries, yet, in operations, there was loads of freedom.  He had strong opinions on issues and on people (which were backed by experiences and an uncanny gut), but he would listen to contrarian views and debate them firmly at times, letting go on occasion.  Above all, there was a consistent focus on the ethical aspect of decision making.  This had two aspects: firstly, ensuring that the organisation’s team stayed ‘clean’ and above board and, secondly, that their decisions were not influenced by power influencers.  An example of the second: early in my career at TDICI, we got a proposal to invest in a large, commercial mango plantation, many hundreds of acres of it, in partnership with local farmers.  I did not think this was good investment material, wrote a note and rejected it.  The promoters of the venture knew an irascible, mercurial, hugely influential character whom I shall call R.  He headed the newly-formed SEBI and had apparently earned the epithet Mad Dog R, for being rather vicious.  He sent a letter – a terse one – to Vaghul, asking why this highly noteworthy venture had been rejected and seeking a re-opening of the issue.  Learning of it, a senior colleague of mine asked me to expect Trouble, for Mad Dog R was known for it, and got me most nervous indeed.   

But my colleague didn’t quite know his super-boss.  I was not asked to re-open the issue or indeed justify this to the Chairman.  The only thing I was asked to do was to prepare a reply that he could sign off; he trusted my decision and wanted to stick with it.  This, I will emphasise, was not just a signature – the key message was that he backed his team - and got him loyalty amongst his juniors (despite the usual cribs about salary, in-company politics and so on). 

On another memorable occasion, I learnt one piece of wisdom I have never forgotten: we often speak of the ‘first-mover-advantage’, the poster-example of this, often quoted, being Microsoft.  Vaghul believed this to be a myth and the more you examine the successful businesses of today, you more you agree with his assessment, for starting later enables you to learn from the pioneers’ mistakes.  You didn’t need to be First, he argued, but you needed to the Best (adding the word Big to this later).

Yet, Vaghul had his biases and flaws - one investment decision was made by him after meeting someone in a lift and he liked Gum India’s Narayanan much more than necessary - but who doesn’t?  He could be acutely manipulative (the old Amar Chitra Katha comics speak of ‘the wily Brahmin’, a phrase that fits the description to a V), possibly as a result of the experience of negotiating Government bureaucracy, and was touchy about certain topics.  A colleague once made a case for a hike in salary for all of us and what followed for the next few minutes was trademark theatre: the Chairman was appalled and offended that we, people he regarded as his own, worked for money and benchmarked our pay against other less-notable companies.  He did not expect this from us and hoped we would correct our myopia as soon as possible….and so on.  If we wanted to leave, he thundered with emotion, we were free to do so.  And then he left the room, with about a dozen of us shaken (and stirred).  But the big leadership flaw he had was an intolerance to ideas on organisational growth and direction not consistent with his own.  He preferred Yes-Men (and notably Yes-Women) to take up key positions.  I saw one such example at a meeting in 1995: he was convinced that our organisation needed to be Big and that we needed to do it quickly and when the President did not show entire agreement (the disagreement was only a short, quick, laugh actually), he was replaced by someone who agreed, but, clearly, was otherwise a poor replacement.  It’s a flaw the best of leaders possess, and Vaghul was no exception. 

His successor was a hard-nosed, deal-making sort of fellow who, while he was superbly knowledgeable on Finance,  did not attend Moral Science class in school, a rather yawning gap in an otherwise impeccable education.  He was initially a Yes-Man of sorts too (till he got the top job), but without the same ethical leaning that the Grand Old Man had, willing to tread grey zones in gum boots and with an end-justifies-the-means approach.    

..and that seems to have begun the slide.  In the last two decades, when ICICI Bank has been in the news, much of it has been unsavoury: the quality of loans provided (asset quality, as it is termed), the deals done by a branch abroad, the utterly shoddy treatment of retail customers and depositors,  the dressing up (and ever-greening with abandon) of non-performing assets to mislead investors and the Reserve Bank, and even a short run-on-the-bank that occurred some years ago.  At its root – the root cause, as it were – isn’t misplaced yields-to-maturity or poor financial acumen: those, rather, are the symptoms.  The root cause is the insane urge to grow at the cost of everything else, excluding in that vision a system of values that should have necessarily been enshrined as non-negotiable but which were forgotten, as were the other lessons the Charismatic Chairman had taught. 

Aunts Aren't Gentlemen

If you have been a Wodehouse fan and know of Aunt Agatha – the one who eats broken glass for dinner and has been known to maim people for life with an unspoken word – it will gladden your heart to hear that I had an aunt made in that mould (which word, as you know, could mean fungus as well.  English is a funny language, but any such resemblance would be utterly coincidental).  

Her name, as I shall now amend and christen, was Aunt Susheela.  

Aunt Susheela was (for she is no more) a legend in her lifetime.  A dumpy, rotund lady, with thick spectacles, she spoke in short, rapid bursts – the analogy to gunfire is entirely appropriate – in a tone that varied from the blunt to the censuring and, on suitable occasion, to the hysterical.  The impact on humanity in the city in which she lived was most devastating: street vendors otherwise known for their aggression would cower and plead, maids would walk faster once they reached the floor on which she stayed, lest they were made an offer of a job they couldn’t refuse, taxi drivers –  of those days, in the black-and-yellow ambassadors -  would be hushed into a petrified silence and so on.  You get the picture.  

Yet, none of this language equalled, or even came close to, what must have been the most frightening stare of all, an unspoken, unblinking, malevolent glare that was the first catalyst for climate change, for it was known to melt glaciers.   

There she’d sit, by the large window in her living room, shaking her knees in a rhythmic way and fixing you in the spotlight as parts of your body seem to disengage and shiver independently.  Her husband tried hard to work late, run errands and keep himself busy outside the home.  Being a gentle, warm sort – the classic Lord Elmsworth of Wodehouse – he was accommodative and understanding, yet that empathy seemed to have little effect on Aunt Susheela.  Indeed, his spirit of accommodation in larger family matters only seemed to have pulled the trigger on occasions, engendering volleys, barbs, sarcasm, innuendo and rancour that would unsettle a Donald Trump.  

The only person who seemed entirely inured to her stare and verbal assault was a faithful manservant who did all the cooking and about everything else (for Aunt Susheela did, in a nutshell, nothing).  He must have been secretly deaf or dense between the ears to be this immune to what can most politely be called feedback, and, under the circumstances, it was an asset to the family to have him. 

We met the family typically once a year when I was in my young, formative years (I am now in older, formative years), and I learnt to spend the day in their home giving the Rock Star a wide berth.  When I did make a public appearance, it would be by clinging to my mother’s sari.  In those years, Aunt Susheela seemed to have some fondness for me, if a rapid volley of statements and instructions followed by a smile could be termed fondness, but I had once seen her go after her son with a kitchen knife, so it was best to wear a helmet at all times and go for the bunker.  I understand from family lore – we need more of it – that my father, who was considered to be the senior statesman, had a sobering effect on the aunt,  for when he was around, she seemed to be a trifle constrained, held back on a cloth leash, if you see what I mean but such setbacks were temporary and piffling in nature for what I have termed, post facto, a cask of trinitrotoluene talent.

Among her unusual traits was a certain parsimony: she'd ask my mother exactly how much each of us would eat for lunch or dinner – and exactly so much would be made.  Now, this is hugely appreciative, for wasting food isn’t high on anyone’s agenda.  Yet, this also meant that if, like Oliver Twist, you asked for more, you would receive a stare that would instantly fill your belly; you’d then find yourself lowering the head and pleading silent forgiveness.  The family trunk we carried always had emergency rations - biscuits - to tide over this unforgivable lapse in assessment of need. 

In later years, she took an active dislike to me for reasons that I shan't labour on, and,  recognising that I was now in august company of about a million people, I chose to keep it that way.  Thankfully, all interaction – the stare and the short, rapid burst, followed by serve and volleys – ended.  Yet, meeting other family members, all of whom were most amused, if not somewhat concerned by this path of avoidance that I took, kept me fully informed of Aunt Susheela’s current state of tongue motility - lashes per second for the uninitiated. 

Much later in years, I had a nightmare in which I visited their dwelling.  In this horrific experience, I was in Aunt Susheela’s house, seated uncomfortably on the edge of the sofa with another relative, while she stared unblinkingly at me with malevolence, her pursed lips holding back vitriol and the fingers clenched around an imaginary throat.  About ten minutes later when I awoke with a fright, it was unsurprising to know that the knees were rather liquid inside and the heart was doing a lively gig.  For such was the legacy of the legend.  

And, that was when, in a flash of inspiration, I developed the now world-famous (and patented) Stare Index, which measures intensity of stare, the unit of measurement being – as you have no doubt rightly guessed – the Richter Scale.  

My friend, Jams, has a poster in his office room, right behind his chair, so that all who sit in front of him see it.  It says, “Everybody brings joy to this room.  Some when they enter and others when they leave.”  When I learnt of Aunt Susheela’s demise, a silent obit that formed itself in my head took its inspiration from that risible piece of literature.

Palm Off

The other day, I met someone who’s been a consultant to the biscuit industry for the last couple of decades.  Over the course of a conversation, I mentioned (initially lightheartedly and later with seriousness) that our family had pretty much stopped eating biscuits (and a whole lot of processed snacks), because they all used palm oil, which was the single biggest cause of deforestation and climate change.   His response was, “Don’t believe what you read, it’s all written by vested interests.” What worries me, I responded, is that palm is now being planted in North-East India as well, and those priceless forests mirror those of Indonesia and Malaysia, which have been devastated by palm.  “There are 7 biscuit factories in the North East,” he responded, now with increasing belligerence “and palm oil provides livelihoods there.  Also, isn’t a palm plantation also providing green cover to deforested areas? One has to be open minded.”

I was astonished, not just at his ignorance, but his spirited defence of the indefensible. Equally, I was worried, for even as wildlife NGOs in India are fighting micro battles, the commercial foods industry, led by business consultants like this guy and others, are pitching the case for large-scale oil palm cultivation in India, particularly in the North East, with gusto.  To me, this is one of the biggest threats India’s  wildlife and forests will face in the near future and the sooner the scientific community, forestry specialists and non-profit organisations take cognisance and action, the better. 

But first the macro-economics of edible oil:  In 2015-16, India’s edible oil demand stood at 24 million tonnes, out of which only about 9 million tonnes was met from domestic production and 15 million tonnes were imported. Over 60% of the edible oil imported was palm oil: illustratively, in December 2017 alone, India imported 7.22 lakh tonnes (source:Economic Times).  

The proponents of oil palm have the following arguments, all of which are supported by economic data:

1.        India’s oil imports in 2015-16 was around Rs. 65,000 crore, constituting around 2.5% of India’s total import bill for that year. 

2.       Oil palm promotes livelihoods/employment and can be part of the overall make-in-India program.  Indeed, oil palm is the most productive commercially grown vegetable-oil crop in the world

3.       Palm oil is used extensively in haircare and beauty products and in the production of soap, not just in food. 

4.       The clear trajectory for per capita consumption of edible oil in India is up, with a current consumption of about 19 kg of oil per person per year (source: ICAR-Indian Institute of Oilseeds Research).

5.       Palm oil is cheap.  Substituting it with other oils fuels consumer inflation.  

Indeed, these arguments have made considerable headway in the offices of policy makers: the government is currently running ‘National Mission on Oilseeds and Oil Palm (NMOOP)’ to improve agro-techniques in oilseed crops, including palm.  In parts of the Western Ghats and in the North East, palm oil plantations are beginning to appear, not just in areas that were earlier planted up with other crops, but in newly chopped forests as the gestation period, prior to productivity, is, as earlier mentioned, about 6-7 years.  So, many planters who have taken to palm, keep their existing lands under another crop and chop up forests, in a case of having the cake and eating it too. 

….and this is the real problem.  Oil palm is doing to the planet what tea, cocoa and rubber have done earlier.   

The ecological costs of substituting imports of palm oil with its domestically produced version are too horrific to bear.  Photographs of rain forest devastation in South East Asia, taken by GreenPeace and others, significantly due to oil palm cultivation can break your heart; large stretches of felled forests up in smoke, beside virgin rain forests that would soon suffer the same fate.  In 2006, the World Resources Institute released satellite images of Borneo in Indonesia that effectively showed a 50% reduction in forest cover over half a century, driven primarily by oil palm cultivation.  Between 2000 and 2005, when oil plantations in Indonesia grew rapidly, the country lost 1.8 million hectares of forest per year or 51 square kilometres every single day (source: Ashish Fernandes, Sanctuary Asia, December 2009).   Now, this loss was not just due to oil palm but for timber and paper as well, but the number itself is mind-boggling.   

 Source: WRI, taken from treehugger.com 

Alongside this widespread destruction of priceless habitat and the burning of forests – which gave Indonesia a dubious emerging-nation status, that of entering the list of the World’s largest emitters of green house gases (about 2 billion tonnes) – has been the killing of orangutans in their thousands, often in the most horrific ways; they have been clubbed to death, buried alive, burnt, shot and speared.  Over 140 mammals identified as Threatened and 15 that are Critically Endangered originally inhabited these landscapes (source: IUCN), and their fate now seems sealed as the destruction goes on: these include the Sumatran tiger and the Sumatran rhino, which is the most endangered of all rhino species due to its rapid rate of decline. Numbers of the Sumatran rhino have decreased more than 70% over the last 20 years, with the only viable population now in Indonesia. The species was declared extinct in the wild in Malaysia in 2015. (source: rhino.org).  By encroaching on rhino habitat, oil palm plantations had, make no mistake, a role to play in that extinction.

Yet, moving that production to India is a horrible solution, for the North East and the Western Ghats are as vulnerable as Indonesia was (and is).  Both these biodiversity hotspots have their orangutan and rhino mammalian equivalents, in addition to a quarter of the World’s bird species diversity.   

The North East has a history of poor local governance, inept or absent institutions and a large population seeking employment opportunities and, finally (and dismally), much of the region has a legacy of hunting.  As the latest forest map of India reveals, the region has lost an enormous amount of green cover in the two years 2015 to 2017, about 1500 square kilometres in all (source: India State of Forest Report 2017).  The entire zone is prone to landslides and earthquakes and floods, and the destruction of forest cover is catalysing a crisis that, ironically, is as unreported as it is serious: rapid loss of biodiversity, increased incidence of natural disasters, leading directly to crises faced by local communities living there.  

Oil palm plantations could take such deforestation off the charts and fuel a wildlife and human-rights crisis, as local vested interests lobby for land acquisition for palm (as has been the case in South East Asia). 

The urgency for action is because India’s taxation policy on palm oil has moved towards import substitution: in late 2017, the import tax on crude palm oil was raised to 30 percent from 15 percent, while the duty for refined palm oil was raised to 40 percent from 25 percent.  

So, if domestic cultivation of oil palm is to be discouraged and our import bill curtailed,  while inflation is kept under control and livelihoods are encouraged, what needs to be done?

There isn’t any one substitute that will sort all of this out, of course, but the primacy of India’s forests must be treated as sacrosanct, not a negotiable factor.  The options that clearly emerge for the Government’s policy makers then are:

      1.        Stop doing the wrong thing.  Ban the cultivation of palm oil in India.

2.       Improve the productivity of existing acreages of other oilseeds.  This process has already begun, but a clear Government impetus is needed.

3.       Encourage the use of non-edible oil in the production of soaps and beauty products: oils such as those of mahua and pongamia, which are used in small quantities today,  are not just far better for the skin, but their usage could improve rural livelihoods in different parts of India and actually protect tree biodiversity. 

4.       Promote the use of healthier oils – palm oil is unhealthy and its derivative, palmolein is particularly heavy on transfats – by increasing taxes further on palm oil and promoting the usage of traditional oils in India.  

The goal that the Government needs to particularly emphasise on is the reduction of palm oil usage in India, whether sourced domestically or imported.  For such actions – as detailed above – to be taken, there must be informed pressure on the Government to act; pressure from scientists, non-profit organisations and citizens, for the demands of industry are the ones being heard as they are the loudest.  Those demands centre around cheap and abundant edible oil.  Yet catering to these demands entail a cost that the country ecology cannot afford to bear.

On March 3^rd – World Wildlife Day – we must rethink our policy on palm.  It’s the least we can do for our planet.