Bovinity is not for me

February 2nd 2025

The other day, Seenappa and I, on examining the lime plants at Random Rubble, the farm, carefully concluded that they had been attacked by stem borers.  Now, as you know, I keep myself abreast of the latest developments in scientific thinking, so I immediately thought of cow urine.  

The head of IIT Madras, in a deeply emotional moment of bovine divinity (which phrase shall henceforth be termed bovinity and is my unique contribution to the language),  has endorsed cow urine as a panacea for a variety of diseases (including dullness between the ears because of a pre-existing vacuum).  Since he has not specifically mentioned stem borer, I asked ChatGPT for help and, accordingly, Seenappa prepared a solution of cow urine + garlic + chilli with a teaspoon of asafoetida, a pinch of which will otherwise repel a blue whale.

I have some advice for you if you have never experienced a solution of cow urine + garlic + chilli + asafoetida.  

Don’t.

We applied this to each plant with a brush (the IIT Director, in keeping with his astute scientific temper and bovinity, would have emphatically disagreed and asked us to apply this with a cow’s tail, but Seenappa’s cows were deeply and violently reluctant to lend their tails and one needs inter-departmental cooperation in these matters).  Besides, you could end up dead, and, as they say in the Wild Wild West, dead men tell no tails.  

About three minutes and twenty two seconds into the application, Seenappa, who was holding up the bucket - had he been in Citibank, he would have been Executive Vice President (Liquidity Management) - began to smell strongly of cow urine + garlic + chilli+asafoetida and I was forced, abandoning table manners and societal decorum, to ask him what he had had for dinner.  

Now, if you have read my earlier posts about this stellar representative of Sapiens ruralicus, you know that when his IQ is compared to that of Winnie the Pooh, Winnie turns out to be an intellectual giant on the same infrared wavelength as Carl Jung.  He stared at me blankly (Seenappa, not Winnie the Pooh) and remarked enquiringly that I was smelling of 

1. Garlic

2. Cow urine

3. asafoetida

4. Chilli

and appeared surprised by the coincidence except for the order of odour (which is such a cool phrase and hence to be bookmarked for future use), all of which, of course, got me raving mad, but there was nothing to be done.  

As we progressed, the lime fruits on the plants, which are world famous in Bangalore for their citrusy fragrance, began to smell of bloody cow urine + garlic + chilli + asafoetida, birds abandoned their chicks, the yellow-billed babblers announced their opposition with screechy alarm calls and fled and I saw a mongoose shoot past with a clearly disgusted look in our direction.  

When we were done, I hung up my gloves after rinsing them and dropped my clothes in white vinegar, had two baths with lux and Dove, lit seven incense sticks in a never-before seen display of devotion and left a bottle of eucalyptus oil open.  

The next morning, I woke up to a beautiful day smelling of

1. Cow urine

2. Garlic

3. Chilli

4. Asafoetida

William Anders – A tribute, a story and a pledge to think about

 William who?
 
Anders was an astronaut who was assigned to Apollo 8, a particularly dangerous lunar orbit mission in end December 1968, as humans had never been outside earth’s orbit before and he didn’t expect to make the return trip.  Yet, he and two others went off into space and he was hardly excited when they reached the moon itself, for it was a stark, grey, barren and bleak moonscape of depressing monochrome.  ‘Ugly’ he often said when recalling the sight.
 
But they had to do their task of finding the proper landing sites for the missions to follow and photographing these sites, so they got down to work. All of them were equipped with cameras, and Anders was photographing the grey and forbidding moonscape in monochrome when – unexpectedly – he saw something unusual in rich colour from the corner of his weary eye, ‘a shining blue marble that was rising above the moon, wreathed in cloud’, a gorgeous, fetching sight and he realised, with surprise and feverish excitement, that this was the Earth.
 

It was so beautiful and enthralling to see - that little, shining blue marble - that he was emotionally overwhelmed. “Oh my God!  Look at that picture over there!  There’s the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty!” he told the others and scrambled to load the camera with colour film.  He had no light meter, so he took a number of photos, changing the F-stops and the aperture with every click, hoping that a few would come out well. 
 
Once that was done, all Anders wanted to do was to look out of the window at the Earth.  It was Christmas Eve and that little blue marble looked like a fragile, delicate, gorgeously ornate ornament on a Christmas tree.  Anders thought of the tumultuous events that were underway in that marble beyond the moon: a catastrophic Cold War underway in Vietnam, a young generation across the developed world in rage and protest with riots in Europe and campuses in the US in flames, the ravaging of soil, water and mountain and burning forests leaving depredation in its wake….all in that delicate blue marble that needed people to work with each other, not at each other, that needed collaboration, not conflict, hearts not guns, forests not giant dams and gouged-out ravaged land.
 
Years later, Edgar Mitchell, an astronaut on Apollo 14 and the sixth man to walk on the moon, memorably put it like this: “You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a ---.’”
 
Three of Anders’ photographs developed well and one of them became known as Earth Rise.  It was printed on the covers of magazines, on stamps and on posters that decorated countless walls in campuses. It was the catalyst that, alongside Rachel Carson’s book, ‘Silent Spring”, birthed the environmental movement in the developed world, for a photograph is worth a thousand words and stirs a million emotions.  One of the world’s greatest wilderness photographers, Galen Rowell, described it as “the most influential environmental photograph ever taken.”  
Those photos did more that capture our earth, they captured our imagination. 
 
And he was repeatedly reminded of the wonder he had seen and of what he had said on his return: “We went all the way to the moon to discover the Earth.” And William Anders always wondered if he had actually said it.