The media's single obsession

The transformation of the media into a money machine is a price that India has had to pay for our economic mutation (one can’t call the post – 1991 phenomenon ‘development’ without a shudder). Consider the latest issue of Outlook Business, the cover story being on small town tycoons, who have grown businesses working out of Class C towns, without ever considering a migration to the Big City. One such entrepreneur featured grew his business – manufacturing and selling pan masala and gutka – exponentially to list among the wealthiest in the country today. The issue celebrates his success, with an article that speaks of sales, profits, diversification plans and more profits.

Instead, it should have ignored his story, for he is a merchant of death, a man who has made his millions by selling an addiction, by poisoning people, by driving to poverty, families that incur huge hospital bills on a gutka addict with oral mucous fibrosis, the precursor to cancer. By placing the onus on the Indian consumer (‘we don’t force anyone to eat anything; it is the consumer’s right to choose’), these merchants of death - for there are many like him - fool no one. The gutka consumer is largely illiterate, a victim of peer pressure and hopelessly inept at understanding the implication of his consumption, instead placing trust on a brand that betrays him with vicious regularity.

Yet, for the media, such considerations don’t matter. There is no other denominator in which business can be understood by them or by their readers, other than the cold definition of profits. This is not just regressive, it is macabre.

In GK Chesterton’s quaint story, The Man in Green, the President of a country speaks with a character named Lambert about another person named Quin.

‘Is he really off his chump, do you think?’ asked Lambert.
The old President looked after him with queerly vigilant eyes.
‘He is a man, I think,’ he said, ‘ who cares for nothing but a joke. He is a dangerous man.’
Lambert laughed. ‘Dangerous!’ he said. ‘You don’t know little Quin, Sir!’
‘Every man is dangerous,’ said the old man without moving, ‘who cares only for one thing. I was once dangerous myself.’

banker.in.trouble @ gmail. com

A friend of mine – I will call him Alex (not his real name, I re-emphasise) - was one of the earliest Indian adopters of gmail, which advantage gave him a ‘generic’ mail address: his email id is, simply, alex @ gmail.com. This initially was quite a bother, since he ended up with a number of mails offering propositions of marriage. Indeed, as he says, while some offered him loans, one mail offered him a transplanted heart, many combined the two to offer lonely hearts. As you can see, Alex is not without a sense of humour, and he has put it to good use.

Sometime ago, he received a cryptic email from a relationship manager at a foreign bank Alex has no connection with. “Please find enclosed your mutual fund statement and let me know if you want me to do anything.” Quite obviously, this banker had the wrong guy. When Alex clicked on the PDF file that had the statement, he got quite a shock. There were about two million dollars of savings in there, invested (wisely, no doubt), by an adroit man of the same name as he, in a set of mutual fund schemes.

Well, Alex thought a bit and sent a reply to the banker. “Please sell everything and transfer the proceeds to my account. Don’t tell my wife,” he added for good measure.

For some days there was no return mail. You can well visualise an assiduous banker, burning the midnight oil (and catalysing his ubiquitous ulcer) in carrying out the instruction from a wealthy client who was going through some active turbulence at home. About a week later, the banker sent Alex a terse mail that read: “Please delete all mail communication from this mail id. Do not respond to this mail.” One can only imagine the spanking that he must have got from his client, whose carefully built portfolio of gilt edged funds was now liquidated into a savings account.

I am sure there is a lesson here somewhere (other than, be careful of Alex)………

Wait Loss

I read, recently, this most useful bit from a book called ‘Complications’ by Atul Gawande, a surgeon.
Quote
Human beings are subject to what scientists call a ‘fat paradox’. When food enters your stomach and duodenum (the upper portion of the small intestine), it triggers stretch receptors, protein receptors and fat receptors that signal “I am full”. Nothing stimulates the reaction more quickly than fat. Even a small amount, once it reaches the duodenum will cause a person to stop eating. Yet, we eat too much fat. How can this be?

The reason is speed. Foods can trigger receptors in the mouth to accelerate our intake – and, again, the most potent stimulant is fat. A little bit on the tongue, and the receptors push us to eat fast, before the gut signals shut us down. We eat fast not by chewing faster, but by chewing less. In other words, we gulp.
Unquote.

The lesson that I took away from Complications was to mimic the bovine: eat slowly, chew your food and enjoy your meal (have you ever seen a dissatisfied cow?).

Any benefits other than keeping your weight in check ? Yes, eating less apparently means living longer as well.

The first evidence that mammalian longevity could be increased came in 1935; restricting calories (without malnutrition) in rodents could delay the onset of diseases and extend life. In the July 2009 issue of Science, scientists reported that a 20 year study on rhesus monkeys showed substantially reducing caloric intake leads to longer lifespans in primates. An interesting lesson in this study was also that a low calorie diet started at any point in adulthood brings rewards of a longer lifespan, complete prevention of diabetes and, indeed, remarkable brain health. While humans live longer than primates and are (allegedly) more capable, the conclusions are obvious. Poetically put:

Fend off potent yellow fat
Keep the carbs far way
Chew in
deliberate circular motion
Prolong your stay.

(with apologies for some poetic licence)

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 ?