A tribute to someone I never knew

Being an agricultural scientist is infra dig, of course. Yet, for Norman Borlaug - who died yesterday at the age of 95 - his work was his mission. If there was one man who helped the World beat the gloomy prophecy of Malthus - a prediction that population would outrun food supply for it - it was Borlaug. I owe my existence, my full stomach, my absence of anxiety about my next meal to him. So do you.

If there is a flip side to this, it is in the excesses of the Green Revolution that we see today - the salinity of fertile land, the leaching of pesticides and fertiliser into ground water, the poisoning of animal populations (including our own species), yet none of this is due to Borlaug's work. It is the greed of those who took his work away from its foundation of values and into a world of production, distribution and profitability who have caused these excesses to occur.

We are now entering an age, hopefully, of a return to organic agriculture, based on a combination of science and tradition. We need Borlaug again (version 2.0) to help feed the future population of 8 billion.
An excellent note on this extraordinary human being, written by Justin Gillis for The New York Times News Service, was published in The Hindu today

In 1989, twenty years ago, Vikram Seth wrote, with deep anguish, on the Tiananmen massacre. A few days ago, I came across the cutting that I had made of that poem, a remarkable verse, for its depth of feeling.

No miracle will ever clean
The memory, brutal and obscene,
Of those who, having fouled their trust,
Grew warped with dread and powerlust -
And order fire on the Square,
On unarmed people everywhere,
Brave people seeking to be free,
Of rottenness, of tyranny.

George Santayana once said: Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it. This piece of history – belonging to our generation – must never be forgotten.

The Great Divide

I spent a couple of days at Kabini last weekend, facilitating a workshop for a team. We stayed at a resort that could only be classified as seven star and, at the edge of India's finest national park, it stuck out like a sore thumb with its lap pools, jacuzzi and multi-cuisine breakfast. I have always been uncomfortable in luxury, perhaps because it is my nature to be contrarian, and this was certainly no exception. There was far greater beauty outside the resort than in it and Ravi, a friend, and I spent a few idle moments in capturing this beauty. This hut, for instance, represents the maxim of eco-consciousness, even as its inhabitants are unaware of the label. They were displaced, unceremoniously I might add, from the forest when the Kabini reservoir was created in 1974 in the interests of 'the greater common good', just another family, amongst those in 117 villages who were informed that they were in the way of progress. Thirty five years and two generations later, they seethe with bitterness at the raw deal they received in compensation. A family that has moved from the status of the landed to seeking Government dole and possibly a job for a family member in the resort that I stayed in.

A few hundred yards before the reservoir is a lovely old temple, alongside which is a bilpatre tree, the fruit of which had the peculiar fermented smell that had me asking for more...... This combination, temple and tree, belongs to another era, an era in which religion and conservation worked hand-in-hand, a symphony of synergy.



...and by the tree, we met Puttuswamy, an old man who farms groundnuts with the same passion that he reserves for a commentary on the breathtaking banyan tree in his field, bigger than the biggest I have ever seen. Did some other banyan giants sink in the reservoir in 1974? What did we lose then for the gain?
What we do know is that hundreds of hectares of priceless forest were drowned in the cacophony of development. In many parts of the Kabini, the branches of trees stand out in the water, mute testimony to an outage of reason.
As I spoke to the local people, the image of a paradise lost is unmistakeable. The Kabini reservoir is now a tourist attraction for those who carry a whistle-stop checklist and need to tick this one off. Yet, the locals, the ones who have stayed and borne the brunt of brutal change ask the question: Which thought-deprived, senseless, asinine system designed this blunder that robbed them off a livelihood and future security ?
The tourists in the resort will never understand these questions. They need just the right water pressure in their jacuzzi.......

Hemant - the candle in the wind

I heard today that Hemant was gone. A candle, in the brightest moment of its life, extinguished by an unexplained calamity that modern medicine had no answer to. Hemant was not my best friend; indeed, I knew him only to a marginal extent, for he kept to himself. He was an outdoor support instructor for my training programs at Wonder Valley and I oftened marvelled at his ability to stay silent for hours on end, as participants played games and made predictable asses of themselves in pursuit of mythical team goals. In his quiet way, Hemant was a special guy, gentle to a fault, a contrast to his boisterous colleagues and I reflected this evening on the many days I spent at Wonder Valley, under the stars, making idle banter in his company.

Why? Why did he have to go, when others who are bad and nasty live to a ripe old age, leaving unhappiness in their wake? Hemant deserved to live more than most people I know and his smile - with its inherent simplicity that is the hallmark of the Pahadi - will be with me for a long long time.
What does someone's death do to us? You fret a bit, ponder as you potter around during the day, think of the times together, lament for one now gone and then ? Life goes on. As the World becomes busier by the day, there is little time for idyllic or sorrowful reflection or indeed expression. In the olden days, much time was spent in mourning, an activity so despised that professional mourners were often employed to do the job. Today, there is instead the escape that activity provides us, the sheer force of which compels us to look at the here and now, rather than to reflect.
Is there a larger purpose that we don't know about ?

We, the Peepal

There is something magical about the rustling of the leaves of the peepal. Many years ago, when we moved in to Reach for the Sky, where our apartment is on the first floor, I noticed a small peepal sapling growing in a corner in the plot behind us. This plot had a small house, long since abandoned, and plenty of land around it The peepal is a hardy tree – it can even grow out of a crack in sheer concrete, because it gets its moisture, and nourishment, from the air. I knew that, in the course of time, it would dominate the landscape and provide beauty, shade and fruit, in addition, naturally, to the hypnotic sound of its leaves rustling in the wind. It was a rustle that The Buddha must have had inspiration from, as he meditated under it at Bodh Gaya.

The sound of the leaves on a dark night can be eerie. If you aren’t conscious of the Peepal nearby, if you are dreaming, as I often do, of nothing in particular or of everything in general, the sound can jerk you back to awareness, indeed heightened awareness, as you look around you in apprehension. Is it an animal ? you ask in that instant before the realisation.

By mid 2002, about a year after I had first seen the peepal from my backyard, the tree had grown well and a year later, it had reached the height, where its branches were at about eye level from my first floor perch. But it was in 2004 and the succeeding year, that the tree displayed its potential, as a possible transit point for the many mynas, tailor birds and crows that populate the area. On a lovely evening, we all watched a spotted owlet, its distinct call resonating in the stillness of a summer night, and it stared back at us with a touch of insolence. I hesitantly switched a torch on and it flew away, to be back the next day, and the next, with its equally vociferous mate. Now in its fifth year, the tree was tall, attired well and confident. I couldn’t have asked for a more distinguished neighbour.

I arrived from work one day to see it being chopped down. The old house itself was to be demolished, to be substituted with a much larger, modern city dwelling. The peepal was the first to go. I stood by the grill, upset and angry in equal measure, yet this was about as much as I could do. Architects are the ones who can truly prevent such idiocy, for their standing with their client gives them the credibility to propose options. Yet, architects are taught to build, never to preserve and those who do protect ecology, do so from the goodness of their heart, not from the practice of their curriculum; in a ‘professional’ course, trees are, well, unprofessional, if they don’t add to some standard measure of aesthetic appeal. …but that’s enough of discourse.

The owlets went away as well; the chopping of the peepal wasn’t the reason, for I heard them for some months after. When the new house was complete – a concrete castle, with not an inch of space for Nature – its new owners did a puja invoking blessings, no doubt, for selfish prosperity. It probably never crossed their conditioned minds that, had the peepal remained, their joy would have been infinite, beyond any measure that prosperity can define.
Last year, on our small farm at Javalagiri, we planted five peepals, and followed up with a couple of saplings in mid July this year. Maybe its the only way I know of getting back at the ignoramuses who own the house behind mine. Or perhaps, I yearn to hear the spotted owlet call out to us, from amidst the leaves of the peepal.......

The Truly Great

My father, who passed away a quarter century ago, was a study in contrasts. He had the method of an accountant (which he was by profession), yet the heart and soul of a romantic. Rummaging through his papers and clippings, I came across Keynes and Keats and his own collection of thoughts often. I seem to have got his proclivity for method for much of his own writing and clippings have been carefully preserved.
Last month, as I opened an old diary of his - which now is a hiding place for my daughter's pocket money - a little piece of paper fell out, yellowed with age. I picked it up carefully; it had the smell and the feel of another age, and the neat trimming of the paper could only have been from my Dad's sure hand. The paper had a short poem printed on it, written, alas, by an unknown author, whose style is most unusual, yet brilliantly maverick. The poem reads:
This I have learned at last
That gentleness
Is bred within the strong of heart
Those who possess
It wholly are not weak, but brave
Seeing life clear
They understand that arrogance
Is hidden fear.

My years have shown me that
Compassion mends
Wounds graven deep upon the soul
And comprehends
That valour is an empty thing
When born of hate;
And only those with tenderness
Are truly great.

I have read this many times since and it has helped me understand my father a little more. A quarter century after him, I can only label this better late than never.

Just how people choose their email ids is fascinating to observe. A number of them begin with their age or year of birth in the mail id – such as something like i-promise-i-am-not-a-moron_37@yahoo.com or shutterbug1985@bigshitnochief.com . Soon, this makes people self conscious. Every time they send a mail they worry if the truth will hurt them. “Will it get around that I am 37?” They then send out a mail to all those who have still kept in touch with them, despite their advancing years. The mail reads like this: “Please direct all communication (irrelevant spam, gossip, corny jokes, puzzles that add upto purple and the rest) to moron_halifax_texas@yahoo.com, a courageous attempt to get others to believe that the place they live in is a pleasing qualification to have on a CV. Sometime later, of course, when the downturn hits, they move to Hyderabad or Bangalore, necessitating yet another mail notifying change of identity. Why, you ask? Well, they do not wish to appear to be false, of course. When you live in Harohalli, you cannot have a Halifax mail id. The problem is that you cannot have a Harohalli, after the underscore, in your mail id as well. Its just not cool and the Yanks might think that you ain’t a comeback kid no more. This apparently complex problem is now solved: people simply appropriate the Harohalli onto their surname. So a Vinayak Harihar Rao in school (‘yuck’ to all the boys who knew him well, ‘Vinayak’ to his parents, ‘Rao’ to the PT Master, ‘Nose-digger’ to the girl sitting on the first bench), would morph into a US-returned Hari Harohalli, with an email id such as hari.harohalli@i-still-promise-i-am-not-a-moron.com . The full stop in mail ids is very powerful, much better than the underscore, more definitive than a dash. You will be amazed at just how many of India’s villages have thus entered mail ids. The defensive e-mailer always argues, with a weak smile, that the 'harohalli' is the result of the US Immigration Surname law - an argument that is now as old as the hills and rather strained.

This evolution of the email sapien carries considerable baggage. I have had, for a while now, a spreadsheet that I do not update every week, often sending mails to the original mail id. Now, I also know that these fellows checks their original mail ids at least once a week, so no doubt their year of birth or past age is still a matter of public knowledge. Perhaps, some academic type should write a paper on this matter.