In Sand, the Grain of Life: Why Sand Matters

The spectacular growth of the construction industry has had unintended consequences for every river in India today.  The mining of sand – which is an essential part of construction – has often been in the news, largely due to the control of local mafias over this minor mineral.  Most people also intuitively recognise that sand mining has damaged, and continues to damage, the delicate ecosystem of India’s rivers, on which millions of people depend for their drinking and household needs, livelihoods  and irrigation.  Yet, what is little understood is this: why is sand necessary for the river and what role does it play?

Sand, very simply, is the soil of the river, providing and sustaining virtually all life that exists in the river itself.  Alongwith another very important mineral, gravel, it forms part of the hyporheic zone, an intermediate zone between the surface water of the river and the groundwater beneath. 

The hyporheic zone has been studied extensively all over the world for the last seventy years and it is now well accepted that this zone performs critical functions, each necessary for the long term survival of a river.  These include

-          Recharging the ground water table far beyond the river basin itself by slowing down the flow of water in the river and allowing for percolation, not just downwards but laterally across large areas on either side of the river as well – exactly how large an area is recharged by the river depends on various factors, including nature of the soil, the topography and so on.  Indeed, a study in the United States showed that where the hyporheic zone was minimal, water recharge was limited and wells often went dry in summer. 

-          Being a refuge for fish and an incubator for eggs and for spawning.  While lakhs of fishermen in India are critically dependant on fishing , fish itself is a vital source of rural protein and, as is now being studied, the humungous  scale of sand and gravel extraction (along with the number of hydel projects coming up) is impacting fish availability across the country. Ironically, many fishermen, in an effort to keep their incomes from falling, are part of the extensive sand mining network, working the river-beds for a fraction of the amount that the sand is sold to the end user for.

-          Buffering agricultural lands and towns from rising water levels during floods.  This function is performed by sand by its very nature of being porous and is a process known as bank storage.  To understand this better, one only needs to fill a glass with sand and pour water into it!  This value of sand – that of being a vast storage tank of clean water – has an additional priceless property: during the dry months of the year, sand releases some of this water to keep the river flowing, ensuring (sand-filtered) water for our needs.

-          Harbouring unique invertebrate fauna and micro-organisms such as fungi and microbes that filter the water, due to its physical, chemical and biological conditions. The sediment particles, for instance, impede the flow of silt and particulate matter as water enters and moves through sand.  A second, biological filtering mechanism works in a manner similar to the trickle filters of sewage treatment plants, where nutrients dissolved in river water are taken up or transformed by microbial bio-films coating the sediments, into food for the many species of invertebrates that live in the hyporheic zone.  The chemical conditions prevalent within the hyporheic zone allow the precipitation of dissolved minerals and metals, which is then trapped by the physical filter, where it may be degraded biologically.  These are complex processes, evolved over thousands of years, and the removal of the sand-and-gravel layer of the river ecosystem is inhibiting the self-cleaning mechanism of the river, even as India’s rivers receive increasing loads of toxic and sewage wastes from urban and agricultural areas.  The removal of sand and the increasing pollution are irreversibly damaging the ecology of every river in India today. 

Dams, while they do not remove sand, have decimated this cleansing property of a river as well.  Indeed, a report by the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (NEERI) attributed the self-purifying ability of Ganga’jal’ to river sediments, notably sand, and data indicated that the blocking of sediments behind the Tehri Dam had diminished this property. 

What is needed therefore is an urgent national effort to develop an ecologically safe, cost-effective, technically comparable substitute for sand and to critically evaluate the impact on the hyporheic zone prior to the clearance of a hydroelectric project.  To ensure water security for India’s future, we need to keep sand where it belongs – in the river.

On a Flight Away from Reason

As the aircraft taxied to its take-off point, I pulled out my reading material.  The Business Standard on June 12th carried on its front page the heading “India's pvt wealth to rise 150% by 2018: Study”.  Apparently, the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) says in a recent study that India’s millionaire households increased from 164,000 in 2012 to 175,000 in 2013, and that by 2018, private wealth will be around five trillion dollars in our country, ranking us 7th in this pecking order.

India also made its entry into the club of top fifteen ultra-high-networth households (defined as folks who have more than a hundred million dollars in private financial wealth) – there were 284 such households, who, in a different way, have difficulty in deciding where their next meal would be coming from, such are they spoilt for choice with a thousand fine-dining options. 

As I folded the paper, there were mixed feelings: business newspapers tend to celebrate such news, for their editors and readers believe fervently in the ‘trickle-down’ theory which says, make the rich richer, and money will trickle down to the poor making them richer as well.   

As we took off, an article in Down To Earth, well-researched and tidily written, caught my attention.  The article, titled “Crushed and Torn” was a personal journey along the closed tea gardens of West Bengal that were ‘enclaves of death and destitution’.

The Jalpaiguri region, with 195 tea gardens, accounts for over a quarter of the crush, tear and curl (CTC) tea produced in India. Workers in these plantations are mostly tribals whose forefathers were brought to the region by British planters as indentured labourers – there are an estimated 1.1 million of them.  Over the last twelve years, a number of estates in Jalpaiguri have shut down due to bad management, some re-starting only to shut again.  The owners of these estates – rich men from Kolkata and elsewhere - did not pay the workers’ dues, have enslaved them holding out the hope of a better tomorrow and making false promises while picking off Government aid, and desisted from providing the most basic conditions of living necessary for human existence.

I read of the death of a thousand people from hunger and malnutrition.  There was no drought, famine, flood or natural calamity here in the hills, instead, extreme cruelty and inhuman, insulting, shocking indifference that allowed affluent humans beings to walk away from a wretched, dying community of starving men, women and children who were headed for certain annihilation.  The story had gut-wrenching accounts of men and women surviving on half-a-meal a day of a chappati and tea leaf (yes, you read that right), with a pinch of salt.  I saw a picture of a man’s with a bony, emaciated chest, taken days before his death, that made me look away involuntarily.  And as my flight reached cruising altitude, I read of the large scale trafficking of women and children from the gardens, for such was the depredation and pathetic indigence in the district.

…..and I read of a new breed of estate owners, businessmen who know little about tea but were there to speculate in the large real estate that the gardens possess; they have raised money from the banks stripped the estates and their factories of assets and then run away, perhaps to add another name to the list of India’s millionaires that the Boston Consulting Group spoke of. 

This is not economics or a business venture gone astray.  It is murder, to be treated on par with the holocaust.   And these businessmen are murderers, with blood on their hands.  India does not need – has never needed – such millionaires, who perhaps seek to assuage their conscience with a recourse to their version of false religion, large donations to ‘charitable’ institutions or bill boards proclaiming public messages of altruism (as Vedanta does). 

One of the first things we learn as children, sub-consciously of course, is that life on this planet is not fair.  As we grow to adulthood, we often seek to question, before accepting such unfairness as a part of human existence.  But the story at Jalpaiguri is not just another story to accept as an unfortunate reality and move on. 

While re-reading the article, I thought of the cup of Darjeeling tea at the airport that had cost me Rs. 130.  And I read about Jasoda Tanti, a former tea leaf plucker in Jalpaiguri (which is, incidentally, contiguous with the Darjeeling hills), who now sieved stones on the riverbed for a living, working twelve hours a day to earn thirty rupees – she would have to work five days to buy this cup of tea, made from leaves that she may have herself plucked if she was employed.  This is not a shining example of ‘value-addition’; this is an unjust, unacceptable, indefensible, exploitative model of illusionary economic growth that excludes the poorest and the neediest from the essentials of human dignity.  No argument – no powerpoint presentation, data-powered, Armani-worn, academic argument – can justify this callousness, just as no argument can counter the Mahatma’s only advice to us: Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man whom you may have  seen, and ask yourself if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him. Will he gain anything by it? Will it restore him to a control over his own destiny? 

As with most problems, solutions exist at Jalpaiguri.  The Government  can take over the gardens that have no owners anymore – seven at last count, on which twenty five thousand people were dependant - and employ all the workers who now face certain decimation, paying them from the MNREGA program.  Under the guidance of its sparingly-employed scientists and in partnership with committed, compassionate NGOs, the Government must then undertake a reforestation program to turn the tea gardens back to the forests they once were, a process that will take thirty years of nurturing.  The unintended consequences of this will admirable – land restoration, better human health, less chemicals in the soil and its improved health and an important message to the businessmen who seek to profit from their chicanery.

When I landed in Bangalore, there was an Air India aircraft at a bay next to ours, the engines of which were opened up for repair.  One could not but marvel at aircraft technology – a phantasmagorian collection of parts, assembled with precision – and yet contrast this with the human failure to provide the most basic of needs to a million people in the gardens of Jalpaiguri; we do not need technology as much as we need compassion, humanism and a deep-rooted belief in equality.  And, as a nation, we need a re-think of how we spend our money - a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the twenty thousand crores that is being pumped into a black hole to keep the terminally ill Air India alive would save a million people. 

And, as for the trickle-down theory, John Kenneth Galbraith, my idol in economics whom I rank only behind Keynes, had this to say: Trickle-down theory – the less than elegant metaphor that if one feeds the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows. 

After note: I have written to the Rural Development Minister at the Centre in some detail about a possible solution on the lines outlined above.  If you feel as strongly as I do, write to him with your ideas as well.  It’s the least we can do.

Wishing for Chandra

When, some years ago, I saw Sunil Narine bowl in the IPL for the first time, I thought of Chandra.  I do not know why, for there is little in common among the two spinners, but then you know how the human mind is, connecting dots when it shouldn’t and often ignoring the obvious.  Perhaps it was the odd way in which Narine did his stuff. Or it possibly was the befuddled look on the face of the batsman as he played and missed at a ball that was defying the interpretation of a seasoned pair of eyes.  And, every year since, watching Narine, I think of Chandra.

My generation was the first really to be obsessed with cricket to the point of distraction, where each of us wanted to grow up and be one of them – the hallowed eleven who turned out in white, to the cheers of a million fans.  I was, of course, no different, yet amongst my peer group, I was mocked for not wanting to be a batsman or a fast bowler, but for my fascination with Bhagwat Chandrasekhar, arguably India’s greatest freak-cricketer. 

Afflicted with polio in childhood, his right arm and wrist had the capacity to rotate and twist in surprising ways.  Since he was besotted by cricket, he fought his way past superstition and belief and first tried unsuccessfully to become a fast bowler.  Switching to leg spin, Chandra discovered a rather simple fact – he was often un-playable. Batsmen had no clue which way the ball would turn or just how fast it would spin off the track and, he would argue, he agreed with them.  He played a bit for a Bangalore Club and then a bit for Karnataka and, then, bang, he was in the India team in 1964, a few months before I was born.  

Chandra, though he had the typical features of a Kannadiga,  was a bit of a wild-looking chap, thin as a reed, with long sideburns and a big mop of hair that tended to lean to his left temple.  While he had an easy, smiling demeanour, there were moments when that yielded to a hasty, butcher-like gleam in his eyes when he was on a roll.  Chandra bowled his best when India attacked and a good captain – Wadekar was the perfect example – knew just when to bring him on. Unleashing Chandra on the opposition at such moments was the modern day version of the Roman Arena.  As he moved in to bowl, batsmen would fidget and shift uncomfortably, their eyes betraying discomfort, confusion and, at times, fear.  He’d come bounding in, much like a bear who has been on a diet and now wants to catch up, and fling-over – no word actually comes close to describing the action – the ball at the batsman.  He could generate uncomfortable pace with his top-spinner and get the ball to rear up to the batsman’s eye, all without any particular intent to harm. 

The 1960s were a difficult period for India: war, food crises, political instability and an absymal sporting record combined to produce few real heroes.  Into this vacuum stepped India’s spin quartet – Bedi, Prasanna, Venkat and Chandra – four heroes amongst whom, Chandra, the underdog of sorts, was not just a star, he was the star.  Here’s what Giridhar and Raghunath wrote in CricInfo of those magical days :

"....leggie for whom we have a special place in our hearts is the one and only Bhagwat Chandrasekhar who won nearly a dozen matches for India with his bowling.  Immortalized for his heroic role in India's triumph over England at the Oval in 1971, Chandra was a sight to behold when in full flow.  Sleeves buttoned down at the wrist, shirt tail flapping, unruly hair flying, a brisk bounding run, a hundred thousand spectators at the Eden Gardens in Kolkata chanting "Chandra! Chandra!" and five predatory close-in fielders waiting like vultures around the bat...cricket, when Chandra bowled, had an electricity that has never since been matched.  In the series against England at home in 1972, such was Chandra's domination that he took 35 wickets, while the rest of his bowling comrades put together had 40 wickets.  He had the Englishmen in such a trance that he even got a batsman caught at short leg of a bouncer, a delivery that Chandra did unleash once in a while."

The spin quartet ruled the late ‘60s and ‘70s, alongwith another quartet, The Beatles.  Chandra, like George Harrison, was the quiet one, the enigma, the one who would come on in the middle to do a breathtaking solo and then move silently away leaving us wanting more.  Yet, he had a sense of humour: once, after a series of futile appeals for leg-before-wicket against a New Zealand batsman, he bowled him.  As the batsman stared despondently at his shattered castle, Chandra appealed.  The umpire asked him why he was doing so, when the batsman was clearly bowled. Chandra apparently replied, “I know he is bowled, but is he out?”

In those days before television,  I’d keep newspaper cuttings and action photos of matches for years and, during a match, carry my radio around the house while Chandra’s spell was on, for you never knew – never ever knew - just what would happen; he could at times bowl a terrible over, in which case a sensible captain would take him off and give him a rest.  Yet, no Captain held it against him for such was his demeanour and such was the empathy for the Hand that could spin a web when it mattered most.  Each of his two hundred and thirty odd wickets were picked up by confounding the best of the best of batsmen the cricketing World has ever seen – the Lloyds and Richards, the Greigs and Boycotts and the Chappells. 

  

Around the time I turned thirteen, Chandra’s decline began.  He had a terrible tour of Pakistan (as indeed the team did) and, one day, was not in the team anymore.  A while later, he stopped playing for Karnataka and faded away into the mists of memory of a generation that was now enamoured by fast bowlers.  Unlike the three of the famed quartet, he chose obscurity, emerging a couple of years ago to speak against polio in a touching two minute film. 

Watching Sunil Narine bowl, I get my ‘Chandra-feel’, a sense of excitement and anticipation and a deja-vu.  In my mind’s eye, I see a teen walking around the house with the radio in his left hand, devouring every word that the commentators had to say in Hindi or English.  I see this teen filling in the gaps and creating the imagery needed to complete the picture.

…because, the best part is, I never actually saw Chandra bowl.

When the curd rice goes sour

The business of venture capital is a funny one: you meet many business owners who seek your company’s funds for their business, yet you invest in about three per cent of them.  The analogy of searching for a gilted needle, one that hopefully will not prick you, in a haystack is possibly appropriate.  There is another  technique of VC investment which a friend of mine perfected; he used to invest in everything that came his way (or almost everything), in the hope that you’d win some and that averages would work out; in the sophisticated language of finance, this technique is called Spray & Pray.  I am, though, not going to elaborate on this further, focusing instead on archetype characters who came to us seeking funds, particularly in the mid-nineties, for their growing businesses.

Many of these companies were in Chennai or Coimbatore, run by conservative first-generation businessmen, largely in engineering.  The typical owner of such a business knew nothing about venture capital (except a belief that it was free money).  Flocks of intermediaries – in the sophisticated language of finance they are called investment bankers -  would descend on him promising to present his company’s story attractively to VCs and get (free) money.  The stories were typical – say, an engineer who once worked for a Tata Motors or an Ashok Leyland strikes out on his own in an industrial shed by pawning his wife’s jewellery.  Much sweat, working capital and toil in the Chennai heat later, he is ready.  Ready? For, well, more money (so that he can sweat and toil more and beg his Bank Manager for Working Capital enhancement).    After much persuasion, one intermediary would get the mandate to raise money for him.  And then the tamasha would begin.

The investment bankers would initially let us know that there was an incredible opportunity coming our way, at which point I'd fish out a well-used notepad.  They would begin their pitch by asserting that the promoter of the company was ‘God-fearing’, prompting me to doodle a decorated ‘G’ – often with an elephant head - on my pad.  Most of these promoters were (and are) extraordinarily superstitious and will believe in any vibhuti-spinning saffroner who tells them that their best times are yet to come and put up his photograph alongside the pantheon on the stained factory wall.  

Inevitably, such promoters, the investment bankers would continue, came from a ‘Good Family’, enabling the adding of a ‘GF’ to my scribbling pad.  Evidently, this was meant to illustrate that the promoters would never, never cheat you.

This assertion always carried with it a body language of insistence, as if I was displaying incredulity at the thought that anyone could possibly come from a good family.

Since scepticism is a part of my genetic algorithm (also called chromosomes), I had two moments of truth to form my own judgement : the first was to compare the company’s profits with the cost of the car that the entrepreneur used to drive around in (often an imported Merc). Many businessmen had cars that cost more money than the annual profits of their company. Those were the days before car financing was popular, and an outsized car (as was most often the case), meant that the business was making more money that the financial statements cared to admit.  In 1990s Coimbatore, in particular, an entrepreneur’s notch in society was defined by his car, so this was one reckless decision these fellows normally took.

The second moment of truth came when you asked the investment banker or the owner (at a subsequent meeting), why the profit margins were low.

The standard reply would be: ‘Saar, we don’t show all the profits on the books’.  Easily interpreted, this means that some – possibly much - of the business happens outside the company’s accounts in different names or cash, to evade tax.

Actually, the standard reply was not just what is above.  It would be: ‘Saar, we don’t show all the profits on the books, but after you invest in us, we definitely will,’ on the rather sanguine assumption that he was talking to a naïve, believing optimist (occasionally, one will admit, it was not an assumption).  

It never ceases to amaze me that these businessmen had (and have) compartmentalised sections in their heads: the section on religion and the one on ethics were entirely mutually exclusive and did not even acknowledge each other.  Most of them though had a mathematical equation between religion and tax evasion: a defined part of the evasion was duly deposited in their favourite temple’s hundi (hence, my belief that temples should be taxed at 30 percent).

But back to the story.  So, he was God-fearing, came from a good family, yet was willing to shaft the Tax Departments, but would never trick the biggest risk-taker in his business, his equity partner; it was dizzying to make sense of.  The standard scribble on my notepad for the occasion was ‘GAT-F’, for God-And-Tax-Fearing.  (I often wondered, if after our meeting, as these guys gulped their curd-rice-and-mango-pickle down, what they though of us as a species: idiots and troglodytes?)

The most important question that I would then ask concerned the family: if there was a son, what was he doing? An MBA in Australia instantly meant that he was being primed to take over from the father, in which case, you could be assured of trouble if you did not exit at the right time – prompting a ‘Son-in-MBA’ or SiMBA doodle from me on the pad.  As the case headed to a conculsion, the SiMBA doodle was the most damaging piece of evidence, the confession-in-open-court, so to speak. 

If the page on my notepad  contained SiMBA and GAT-F, the final scribble would be ‘F-O’, which, while left to your imagination, meant a rejection of the investment ‘opportunity’.

Chingari Koi Bhadke

The United Nations, in the month of December last year, decided to declare March 3^rd – today – as the World Wildlife Day. Part of the objective of this declaration, as I understand from the material available on it, is to celebrate diversity and plant and animal life on our planet.  And yet, reflecting on the path traversed by our country, let alone the rest of the planet, and looking ahead with approximate extrapolation, it is impossible to feel anything other than pessimistic. 

The two keys to preserving India’s wildlife are habitat conservation and protection.  Yet, even as copious sums of money seem available to set off on a mission to Mars, celebrate the birthdays or anniversaries of forgettable men and allot Rs. 1000 crores to India’s sugar mills to export its excess production – a profligate waste of national wealth if there ever was one -  every National Park in India is understaffed by at least fifty percent and annual Forest Department budgets for operations and intelligence gathering are squeezed and cut, since our forests do not have ‘economic value’ and our tigers do not vote.  Eight rhinos have been poached from Kaziranga in 2014 alone for their horns (about thirty were taken in the previous year), while a number of leopards have been killed in man-animal encounters, the result of unchecked, flagrant destruction of their habitat.  Small animals such as pangolins and otters, and many species of birds have been decimated to the point of extinction for their meat and pelt.   The situation in the Wildlife Sanctuaries and Reserve Forests, lower in the protection category than National Parks and where tigers are generally not present, is much worse, with a collective war being declared on wildlife of any kind and the mass logging of forest cover.  Many of these areas have been opened up to quarrying and mining, reducing large areas to moonscapes as in the case of Bellary in North Karnataka. 

Indian wildlife is in unprecedented crisis.

Voltaire famously said, “With great power comes great responsibility” (the quote now being attributed to Spiderman’s creator).  Yet, the Governments at the Centre and State have been active, irresponsible participants in the carnage of wild India.  For every token expression of care and love for wildlife exhibited by the Ministers and their minions – a sponsoring of a tiger in a zoo here, or a billboard on wildlife protection there – a mass and unhindered ‘Movement for Mass Destruction’ is underway across India to destroy wildlife habitat and, in the process, fauna itself, by providing environmental clearances for projects irresponsibly, without due diligence or the application of science.  The intents of the perpetrators are no less criminal than that of a poacher, but are clad in the respectable cloak of ‘development’: the large hydro projects in the North East that are destroying thousands of hectares of forests are a flagship example. 

In 2013 alone, according to Sandrp, 21805 megawatts of hydro generation was sanctioned in the North East.  If and when this is all done, half of whatever is generated will be lost in the transmission losses to the destinations across the country, while a large part of the rest will be used to supply subsidised power to the superficial indices of urban lifestyle, with no accountability or economic incentive for energy conservation.  The ecological value of these forests in the North East is incalculable, not just from what is known of it, but, critically, from what we do not know.  As an analogy, would you, blindfolded,  pick a piece of jewellery from your locker and throw it away on the assumption that it is an imitation piece?  Yet, our Nation does this every day in the pursuit of a seemingly respectable growth rate in GDP, our benchmark being China which has destroyed its habitat and wildlife almost completely.  This is not just insanity, it is deliberate, sustained malevolence against Nature and its constituents to whom we have now dedicated certain days in the year in pathetic recompense. 

As criminal as the Government’s fondness for hydro projects in the North East is the deliberate mendacity of the Kerala’s political establishment in twisting Dr. Madhav Gadgil’s report on the Western Ghats to meet its own ends, thereby encouraging the steady, unswerving logging and land usurpation along the Western Ghats, South India’s jewel in the crown.  Entire classes of the animal kingdom, such as fish, have not even been considered as wildlife where protection is concerned, which is why the science of fish conservation has no takers and the nationwide mining of sand at an unprecedented rate for the construction industry continues, in flagrant violation of the orders of the National Green Tribunal.  When all the sand is gone, the result would be the partial or full drying up of our rivers in summer, a classic case of culling the golden goose.  Across India, lands have been opened up for mining, with Big Business building a case for ‘mining our way to prosperity’, a false, and hopelessly inadequate argument.

These are grim, worrisome stories that are the sad harbinger of a future where India’s spectacular wildlife will be reduced to the sepia-tinted photographs of a then-remorseful generation.The media has (with few notable exceptions) eschewed from reporting much of this with the seriousness it deserves, focusing much more on the ‘decision-paralysis’ in the Government. But even they have been surprised with the unseemly haste with which the current Minister occupying the chair in Paryavaran Bhavan, who has no knowledge of wildlife or forests whatsoever, has rubber stamped his approvals on large projects with high-impact possibilities that needed considered, independent evaluation.  He has been ably aided in this effort by a sham of a committee group called the Expert Appraisal Committee, which is staffed by a bunch of bureaucrats with little appreciation of the impact of their thumb impression; as an example, the River and Hydro group of the EAC is headed by a undistinguished former Secretary of Coal.  Under the Minister, they have shown little capability to dissent, for didn’t Upton Sinclair once say “Its difficult to get a man to understand something, if his salary depends on his not understanding it?” And backing the honcho at the Ministry is the Head Honcho who, despite his election to the Rajya Sabha from the North East, understands little of its wildlife or forests.  In the science of ecology, it is ignorance, not familiarity, that breeds contempt.  The Head Honcho has, in the evening of his political life, wearing the blinkers of long-discredited economic theory that does not recognise the value of ecosystem services,  initiated the assault on India’s wild heritage, for it is from his office that missives on relaxation of environment conservation norms have originated.

India’s political leadership of the Twenty First Century has, in essence, abandoned a truly rich culture of tolerance that was displayed over centuries of co-existence in chasing a chimera.  It has forsaken its responsibility, blinded by greed for ill-gotten wealth and the continuance of political power. 

It is Anand Bakshi whose words drive me to pessimism, for he said

Chingaari koi bhadke
To saawan us’e bujhaaye
Saawan jo agan lagaaye, us’e kaun bhujaaye?
Patajhad jo baagh mein ujaade
Woh baagh bahaar khilaaye
Jo baagh bahaar mein ujade, us’e kaun khilaaye?

(If someone lights a spark

Then the rains will put it out
But if the rains start a fire, who will put it out?

If a garden is destroyed in the Autumn
It will bloom again in the Spring
But who can revive the garden that is destroyed in Spring?)

Pessimism does not, however, mean losing hope.  If March 3^rd is to have any meaning for us, it should be reflected in our actions.  At the risk of sounding didactic,  I would ask you to look beyond your immediate world of home-and-work to get involved: since none of us can actually be there,  involvement means learning about wildlife conservation issues and taking action sitting just where we are, using the social media tools available to us.  Two websites that I recommend for regular, sustained engagement are

www.conservationindia.org

www.sanctuaryasia.org

The few men and women who are fighting to save our wildlife need your active, sustained and vocal support and there are notable recent examples where, for instance, the usage of social media to register your voice of protest has created real change.  Do let me know if I could help catalyse your involvement in any way.  

For Whom the Bells Toll 'Bong'

“…and let me tell you something you don’t know,” the short, dark, tubby man said, half rising from his chair, glaring at me with bloodshot eyes and thumping the table with his fist in anger, “when I was at IIT, I once got into a fight and killed a fellow.  I am capable of doing it again.” Now, you might expect me to be alarmed by this, but to those who knew Dhruv Jyoti Das it was as innocuous a statement as expressing an urgent need to use the washroom.  I suppressed a smile with some difficulty, for his face was a comical sight and, of course, this only made him madder.

No one who has met Das can ever forget him.  We had funded  DJ (as the humanoid was affectionately called) a small sum of seed money to develop a technology where he added a product resembling thermocool to concrete and then applied this on the roofs of tobacco-curing barns, saving a whole lot of energy.  The farmer would pay for this and, from then on, save the equivalent money in firewood costs in a single tobacco season; the Tobacco Board was as excited as the farmers were, there was no competition in the market, the pricing was immensely profitable and my company obviously believed that we had a winner. 

…till we got to know Das well (which took about ten minutes on the outside).  He was a dark, balding, paunchy fellow, with a clipped, bushy moustache that enhanced a permanent scowl.  He was as short in height as he was on the basics of finance and, indeed, as he was on temper and, by the time I joined the company, my colleague was searching for a basket to throw his towel in.  On my first day at the venture fund -  in 1992 - I was asked to take over the monitoring of our investment in Jyoti Agrotherm, and SNS, for he was that colleague, promised all support (SNS was never one to miss out on good, clean fun, albiet from a respectful distance).

DJ lost little time in letting me know just who was the boss in the room and meetings with him remain etched in memory.  Cheryl, our irrepressible receptionist, would call on the intercom, when he walked into our office with an authoritative stride.  In her sparkling, formal tone, she’d inform me of his arrival, but would immediately depart into the recesses of the office, coughing as she suppressed her laughter at hearing me groan and complain.  For, at every meeting that DJ had with us, there would be a general increase in the room temperature, owing to his entirely ridiculous demands from us, rather needless aggression and the absence of any progress on the project.  As he got agitated (over everything), he’d begin to talk loudly, even shout, his tummy swaying with animated fervour, hands gesticulating wildly, often pounding each other or the table, and indignance rendering him speechless with anger, while his moustache did a delicate dance of emotion.  He once began drooling out of the corner of his mouth, and I wondered if he was having a heart attack or if there was something behind me – a poster perhaps -  that I should know about, but I dared not ask, just in case he’d throw an excited fist in my direction.

I learnt to take some of this in my stride, yet most of those in office – we had a staff of about thirty then – found the performance supremely entertaining.  Our conference room had a half-glass partition and a lazy afternoon presented everyone a perfect opportunity to walk by and sneak a look at a fuming DJ from the corner of one’s eyes, giving the waiting minions an update leading to a collective doubling up in laughter, which I’d clearly hear.  On his leaving the office, I would be surrounded by colleagues who’d want a detailed Minutes-of-the-Meeting tabled immediately, with stereophonic sound and special effects. 

The only person DJ was scared of was his formidable wife - a nominee on the company board -  whose name I now thankfully cannot recall.  As a little child reading Amar Chitra Katha comics, I had nightmares of Shurpanakha, yet never believed that something like that apparition could approach reality, but it did.  On one occasion when I was stupid enough to agree to a Board Meeting at their home, the husband was joined by his wife in a no-holds-barred verbal assault on my employer.  We were, I was informed, the single biggest reason for the company’s failure by not agreeing to invest more money and asking for ridiculous reports such as a Income Statement or expecting to make profits from such a venture.  As the lady raised her voice, I noticed DJ recede into a hitherto-unseen shell, much as an wolf would on seeing a leopard.  He emerged about half an hour later and spent a few minutes calming her down, making me believe that, with adequate training and possibly a gene transplant, he could become human one day.

Now, all this meant that the company could only go in one direction and indeed it did.  When he owed enough creditors sufficient sums of money, DJ did the disappearing act one morning leaving us to file a winding-up petition, which exercise probably cost more than the investment in the company.  Yet, for everyone in the company, me possibly excluded, the investment had generated an incalculable Return on Investment. 

Many years later, sitting in front of a furious young Mr. Mehta in another office, I wondered if I had signed on for The-Reincarnation-of-DJ-Das or that the Higher Power had singled me out for treatment on account of some past unforgivable sin.  But I shall leave that story for another day…..

 

  

The Case Against Sugar

In the first week of January 2014, a group of medical and nutritional experts in the U.K. launched a rather unusual initiative called ‘Action On Sugar’ to influence the food industry to reduce added sugar in foods by 40% over four years.  If anything, this was long overdue.  Across the Western World and increasingly in India, sugar is emerging as the single biggest cause of a growing lifestyle disease epidemic.  India, I read, is the World’s largest consumer of sugar and with a growing appetite for junk food; Pepsi recently announced an investment of about five billion dollars (rupees thirty thousand crores) in helping us on our collective way to the hospital. The Action on Sugar needs to originate here.

Refined sugar is a relatively new invention to the World and is newer to India.  In our country in the 1970s, when I was growing up, sugar was rationed carefully and it was common for the poorer economic sections of society to drink their tea without it; indeed I clearly remember my gardener drinking his tea, with a piece of jaggery by the side, that he’d bite into once in a way.  Historically, sweets (or ‘sweetmeats’ as Indian sweet dishes were called) were consumed on special occasions and made with jaggery.  Acreage under sugarcane in India grew dramatically in the 1970s, with irrigation support and the green revolution, and sugar has since been widely and easily available – interestingly, this is the period in which obesity, blood pressure and illnesses resulting out of a sedentary, rich-food lifestyle have made their firm presence in all of urban India and in parts of rural India as well. 

Refined sugar has no nutrition at all and is a source of completely unnecessary calories; there are multiple sources of sweet carbohydrates in every part of India that have higher nutrition.  Sugar is known to be addictive as well: in a French study in 2007, it was reported that when rats were given the choice between sugar and cocaine, they chose sugar overwhelmingly.  Even the rats that had been given cocaine over a period, to get them addicted to it, seemed to prefer sugar.  There is enough anecdotal evidence of this in our lives as well; the craving for a sugary dessert after a meal can be intense and continuous.  While sweet dishes as dessert after every meal, rather than a fruit, are conspicuously sugary, it is the insidious addition of sugar to human diet that has caused the addiction.  All of us, children in particular, consume sugar in most processed foods: sauces and ketchup, ‘healthy’ juices that have added sugar, brown and white beverages, cookies and bakery products, junk food and bread spreads.  

As I began to study the health effects of sugar, there was as much learning as there was worry; what follows in this paragraph must make us sit up and take notice.  Refined sugar is obviously a major contributor to obesity and is a toxin for those with diabetes.  In addition, a US study by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta and Harvard School of Public Health showed a link between high levels of sugar consumption and a 275% percent higher relative risk of dying from cardiovascular disease where refined sugar consumption was about a quarter or more of a person’s calorie intake.  Dr. Aseem Malhotra, an eminent cardiologist in the UK who is leading the fight against sugar, suspects that sugar causes the liver to produce more uric acid, and this leads to high blood pressure and much of the resultant illnesses, including dementia.  Sugar, he further adds, could be as inimical to the liver as alcohol, contributing to a non-reversable condition called non-alcohol fatty liver disease – the second biggest cause of liver failure after alcohol (which, by the way, is from sugar as well!). Others point to a possible role that sugar could be playing in some cancers.  No wonder then that Professor Simon Capewell of the University of Liverpool’s Institute of Psychology, Health and Society labels sugar ‘the new tobacco’.  Much of this information has been known for years, but it all came together to make a compelling case only with the increased focus in the Western World on public health which now centres around the consumption of toxic junk, including refined sugar.

So, how much sugar is OK to consume?

In January 2014, a peer-reviewed article in the Journal of Dental Research suggested that added sugars should not be more than five per cent of calorie intake, to protect teeth and gums and most health specialists agree with this estimate.  This means a maximum of six teaspoons of sugar for a person consuming two thousand calories a day.  To most of us, this will mean a lifestyle change.  Remember the sugar you consume in your tea or coffee is part of the story and much of the sugar you consume is involuntary, as you eat processed food: as a yardstick for comparison, a can of any of the cola brands in the market contains the equivalent of nine spoons of sugar (actually, high fructose corn syrup, a cheaper alternative to sugar, but with the same deleterious effects), which is your quota for a day and a half. 

It is time to act now – individually and collectively - to neutralise an avoidable epidemic. Cut your sugar to the minimum – it’s the least you can do to help yourself.