Paths are made for walking

The warm spring season in Feb-March is my favourite time of year.
As you walk by the different species of trees that line the roads, most of them in flower, the mild, yet intoxicating, fragrances emanating from them make you breathe more, deeper and fuller. The honge is in a class of its own, its mauve & white tiny flowers forming a carpet that attracts the apis indica in their hundreds and releasing the scents of a million blossoms in spring that power the imagination. No less is the large leaf Mahogany (about which I have written in the earlier post), the now-scantily flowering Cork tree (Millingtonia Hortensis to those who know of Millington, the great botanist in pre-Independence India) and the Champaka in white and blood red.
Stop to look around you and up into the foliage and you are greeted with a riot of colours, with the Tabebuias leading from the front. Colours from the delicate to the resplendent, from the ridiculous to the sublime – only Nature could prepare this Planter's Punch, in a moment of heady mirth. Walk longer, a lot longer, to reach Lalbagh and a lot more is in store – the Flame of the Forest (Butea), now alas a rarity in the city, the Coral Tree, the Silk Cottons in two colours that would shock and awe, the giant Mahua, the flowers of which would make a heady brew and, as April dawns and the season of Vishu begins (the Malayalam new year), the most beautiful, the most delicate, the most inexplicably charming necklace of petals, the Laburnum (Cassia Fistula, Vishu Kanni in God's own language).

As you can see, this is clearly my pick; I can spend a happy hour by a laburnum, watching the necklaces of yellow sway in the mild breeze, drop some flowers or draw a dizzy bee into their midst. When our ancestors first set store by this tree, profiling it as sacred, setting its flowers aside for worship and giving an otherwise ordinary tree a place of pride, it was because they had had their moments of exultant de bonheur, an unbrindled happiness at the sight of the Laburnum. We have a lot to learn from the history of beauty.

Mahogany Magic

In the post-winter month of Feb - occasionally extending into early March - something astonishing comes alive in Bangalore, a process that, because it is commonplace, is taken for granted by all of us. 

Many years ago, as a part of the social forestry program, large-leaved mahogany (Swietenia macrophylla) was planted all over the city. This is not the expensive-wood mahogany that is considered better dead than alive. Rather, it is but a poor cousin, poor enough to be planted by the road and left to grow unhindered. And grow it does to a large size, flush with large green leaves and capsule-like fruits, covered with minute knobbly projections, containing many winged seeds that are, as I write this note, scattered on our pavements and roads. 

In early Feb, as if on cue, every tree of this species begins to shed its leaves. The beginnings are modest and I often stand for a few minutes under the benign shade, tracking the lazy swirl of a leaf as it breeze-dances its way to the ground. A couple of days later, the process acquires a momentum, a shot of inspiration, a fillip and the occasional leaf is now joined by many many more, turning shedding into a veritable shower. Park a car under the tree for a day and you could well miss the steel-and-rubber under the pile up. Imagine, for a moment, just what imperative the tree is responding to, to have to issue pink slips with such rapidity, to shake off its clothing, much as wet dog shakes off water with some annoyance. 

The imperative, of course, is the heat which results in transpiration loss. In the tropics, our deciduous trees shed their leaves in the summer, unlike the temperates where autumn is the season for the shed-fest, yet the magic of the mahogany is the sheer velocity of the process, measured in hours, not days, in the briefest moments of a mild breeze, not in gradual phase of weather change. 

And one day, the tree is bare, a shadow of its former self - indeed it is quite an appropriate turn of phrase, for a bare tree's shadow is but sparse, a gigantic fibrous root system it would seem, upside down. 

Miss this spectacle for a day or two though and you have missed it for a year. For very soon, the tree begins to grow its leaves again, bright dark-green leaflets, that soften the summer sunshine and fan the weary pedestrian. A week later, the tree is back to its former glory, bathed in a shiny green, a new look for the year ahead. For some years now, I have watched this with fascination. I have far more questions than answers each year; questions such as 'What determines the speed of renewal?' and 'Why does it not wait for some indicator of rain before sprouting its leaves back?' When a spectacle forces a question, we know that Nature is at work. Here, it's the magic of the Mahogany.

Just Why I am a Genius

One of my abiding questions has been: just why am I a genius? Indeed, I read somewhere that only geniuses ask this question.

Well, the latest issue of The Economist (page 78) has part of the answer. Research presented in the American Association for the Advancement of Science on Feb 19th proves that a post-prandial snooze sets the brain up for learning. Those who remain awake throughout the day become worse at learning. Those who nap, by contrast, actually improve their capacity to learn, doing better in the evening that they had at noon. These findings suggest that sleep is clearing the brain’s short term memory and making way for new information.

If you have additional insight on just why I am a genius let me know.

China is the wrong goalpost

Just prior to the Budget this year, a newspaper headlined "Finance minister says India will beat China by 2014." This is about as boring and predictable as one can get. The media and India's corporate sector has succeeded effectively in placing China on an aspirational economic pedestal, compelling politicians to pander to their views.
China is the wrong goal. In the pursuit of economic growth, it is destroying its environment, depleting its soil, air and water and producing third rate goods, often made or coated with toxic material. Fast growth comes at its own cost - its a very heavy burden for current and future generations to bear.

Just why can't we take the best examples in comprehensive economic growth? These are not economic Page 3s, so to speak, not spoken about in hushed tones or with awe. But they are solid examples: Bhutan, Netherlands, Costa Rica and Norway, all have a great deal to teach us. In an earlier blog, I briefly commented on the essence of Costa Rica's philosophy. Bhutan measures not GDP, but Gross Domestic Happiness. In a couple of later posts, I will cover the other two economic models, if only to make the point that human happiness, green cover and economic growth are intensely correlated and have never been contradictory.

One reason why the aforesaid 4 are not on any economic map is their size, particularly vis-a-vis India. China fits the bill here, of course, yet the fallacy is in the belief that 'thinking big' is thinking right. Nothing could be further away from the truth than this rather fallacious assumption.
China is the wrong goalpost. Happiness - through whatever economic model we choose - is the right one. More later.

Vedanta - a man is known by the company he keeps

The more I learn of the Indian mining major, Vedanta, the more I am convinced that it is a company whose designs and values are suspect. There are many such companies in India, of course, but the Vedanta group has set, by itself, a rather dubious standard of 'rape and run'. The group companies include Sterlite, Madras Aluminium, Bharat Aluminium and Vedanta Alumina.

Over the last few months I have been exposed to a fair amount of data, videos and photographs put together by a number of civil rights groups, committed non-profits and intrepid individuals and am convinced of the abuse of this management's power and money in its operations in Orissa and elsewhere in India. I have seen and read extensively of collosal, shocking air pollution with fly ash, of thousands of people affected by multiple skin diseases, of the use of State police to force poor people to vacate large areas of lands that the group wants acquired for mining, expansion or new development and of mass destruction of tree cover. This is the classic example of the company that Micheal Moore termed the alter ego, in some sense, of the psychopath - single minded pursuit of profits to the detriment of all else.
The final nail in the coffin was the decision of the Orissa Government to 'sell' a sacred hill for mining bauxite, to this company, a decision that regrettably was endorsed by the Supreme Court, which has often taken the side of environment and traditional heritage in its history. This hill - the Niyamgiri hill - is sacred to the Kondh people and they have fought a courageous battle that, in many ways, is only beginning.

Very interestingly, this is one environmental battle that is being fought in the financial services sector: a number of investors - mutual funds, charitable trusts, pension funds - are either dumping their Vedanta stock after learning of the company's activity or refusing to buy. These include Norway's Government Pension Fund (also called the oil fund), the Church of England, Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust and the Martin Currie Investment Trust.
Hence, here's a request: please read to learn about Vedanta. If you don't like what you see, and you manage a fund, do the right thing. Write to the Mutual Fund Managers you know or those who manage some of your money about this company, requesting them to avoid buying or holding onto the stock of a criminally negligent company.

The Cost of Driving Your Car

If you are contemplating buying your second car, for the home, the better half or possibly a grown up child, read this carefully. When an airconditioned taxi cab (with a chaffeur) is offered to you @ Rs. 15 per kilometre (Meru or Easy Cabs, for instance), you shudder. This is expensive, if used regularly. Much better to buy a vehicle instead.
Lets do some micro economics here:
Assume now, that you are purchasing a mid range car, say one that costs Rs. 6 lakhs and runs on petrol, giving you an efficiency of about 12 km per litre. Assume further that the car will run about 10,000 km a year. These are fair & realistice assumptions. Remember that this is the second car for the family.
Fuel cost per kilometre (including engine oil) : Rs. 5 (just a third of the cab)
Over a five year period, though, there are the following:
Daily washing, quarterly servicing and (inevitable) repairs, battery & tyre replacement and tinkering costs : Rs. 100,000, or about Rs 2 per km
Insurance : Rs. 50,000, Re 1 per km
Loss of interest (post-tax!) on the amount invested in the car : Rs. 3 per km
Loss on sale of car after 5 years (@ Rs. 3 lakhs) : Rs. 6 per km. The more expensive the car, the higher the loss per km.

Total cost of ownership : Rs. 17 per km. The saving to you by using a cab covering 50,000 km over a five year period is Rs. 1 lakh.
Throw in a personal chaffeur and the cost reaches Rs. 23-Rs. 26 per kilometre.

I use this argument against a second car, rather than the first, only because a single car may be seen as vital for, say, a medical emergency and hence not subject to critical economic analysis.
The moral: public transport is not just eco-friendly, it is common economics as well.

Costa Rica: happy and green

I first met Carmen from Costa Rica in UC, Berkeley in 2001. What struck me most about this teenager was just how much she laughed all the time in the month long program she attended alongwith me and about thirty others. In Costa Rica, though, (as I read in a recent BBC report) her laughter and ready sense of humour is hardly an exception.
Costa Rica is a remarkable country. It has no army. Successive governments have poured money into books, not bullets, with the result that the country is almost fully literate.
It is the first developing country to state its aim of being carbon neutral by 2021, in part through the mass planting of trees. In the 1980s, about 20% of its land area was covered by forests. Today, about half of Costa Rica is has rich tree cover. About 90% of its energy supply comes from renewables.

Is being green also being happy ? Much as I would want the correlation established, Costa Rica is the only real example I can find, the correlation established in a report published by the New Economics Foundation, which has combined three variables - what people say about their life satisfaction, their longevity (very high at 78 years ) and their ecological footprint.

Sociologists and some others have extended this argument, making facts that are equally relevant and proven elsewhere (read Malcolm Gladwell's 'Outliers'). They say that, in addition to greenness, longevity can be connected to happiness which in turn is because of strong social networks of friends and familiers and a high level of tolerance of social divisions and opinions. A popular piece of philosophy in Costa Rica says no argument or quarrel should last more than three days.
We have a lot to learn from this beautiful country.