When You have a Right to be Angry

In mid-2014,  an intrepid report in Down to Earth documented the horrific plight of the tea garden workers in the Dooars region of West Bengal, the result of a decade of abuse, false promises and chicanery.

The story was reminiscent of the zamindari system of vicious apartheid: pathetically poor estate workers laid waste by starvation living in hideous labour lines; rich owners, most of whom had purchased gardens for the value of the large parcels of plantation land - a rich bet for their unaccounted wealth – living in Kolkata and elsewhere in pampered luxury.  Most of them cared little for their people, the environment or tea and postponed paying wages for months on end when times got rough.  When the costs exceeded revenues and continued to do so, they fled, leaving starving workers -  hundreds of whom have died over the years – and widespread malnutrition and disease.  The story was graphic and telling: a photograph of a woman – a bag of bones and rags - whose meal comprised two chapatis with a filling of tea leaves inside, as she could not afford anything else.  An image of a man on the brink of death, his ribs outlined against a shrivelled skin.  A child with little hope of survival, its eyes glazed.

And I saw these photographs that made my stomach churn, for this was inhumanity, avarice, callous premeditated murder.  

I petitioned the National Human Rights Commission which issued a show cause notice to the West Bengal government.  Who then replied with assurances of minimum food and a dole.  I was satisfied and even self-congratulatory.

I could not have been more wrong.  The story continues, for nothing in the realm of misery for the poor in India changes to their advantage.  What is different this time is that there is a villian who is big fish. 

GP Goenka is not just another businessman.  He has, for many years now, owned Duncans, a tea company that owns a number of estates in the Dooars.  Duncans was, not so long ago, a profitable company, but Goenka made some bad decisions, using the money from tea (and a load of debt) to buy a fertilizer business.

He, though, is not paying the price. 

In 2015, thirteen workers in the Duncan estates died of starvation, for no wages were paid to them and there was no food to eat, the West Bengal Government having a non-functioning PDS.  Thousands of others are in the whimsical hands of Destiny and Empty Promise, as the malnutrition levels of workers and their children in the Duncan estates soar.  Reports speak of human trafficking, of immense agony that each of these families goes through as they have no options but to wait, borrow, wait again.... until there is no borrowing option anymore.  Which is when they resort to selling the only piece left: themselves. 

Why can’t they just move out of there, you ask?  Well, some have, most haven’t.  Because moving, you see, is not easy  for those who have been trod on, cast out, abused and starved.  No labour force can be that mobile for, if it were, the wages paid to labour in India’s cities would never have increased.

Goenka, of course, has his point of view, but, dammit, no perspective, no excuse, no disingenuous self-flagellation (albiet slight in his case) can condone such deliberate, negligent, callous egocentricity.  How can he and every one of his managers stand by silently watching these workers emaciate themselves to physical ruin?  Are they, these ‘tea barons’, not accessories to their deaths? How could any of their defensive actions  be an excuse for a ‘let-them-be-damned’ approach, when the certain consequence of such inaction would be their demise?  Why is this not premeditated murder, a phrase I use again?

There are times in life when excuses do not count.  This is one of them. 

In 2012, I had embarked with enthusiasm on a new book that would be a travelogue through tea country; a collection of stories and anecdotes from the Brits to the Twits (my term for Twitter users).  Travelling around Assam, I met planters.....and some workers.  The planters’ stories were quaint and olde-world and their anachronistic lifestyle was charming, but the workers’ labour lines – equally anachronistic, but in a very different way – were as appalling as they were putrid.  When one planter – an Assistant Visiting Agent (which is a senior designation) - referred to his labour as being ‘bull headed’, suggesting that they were unthinking enough to not be much better than vacuous-headed animals, I knew I was barking up the wrong tea bush.  I had no wish to meet any more of these wise men, so I abandoned the project.

Goenka is a bad guy for sure, but he must savour the company of rogues he is with.  An article in The Mint on January 22^nd 2016 by Sudeep Chakravarti details an investigation by BBC News and Radio 4 into the working and living conditions at the largest plantation companies in Assam, Mcleod Russel (India’s largest tea enterprise by area) and The Assam Company.  The findings were shocking: he quotes from the BBC report  “Images of workers’ toilets and accommodation at the McLeod Russel estates made facilities in Indian slums appear salubrious in comparison, accompanied by details of abject poverty, malnutrition and disease.”  And “Assam Company came in for criticism for not providing workers in an estate protective gear while spraying agrochemicals, and for employing child labour.” After pressure from international buyers, the article states,  Mcleod Russel is making some amends, but you will forgive my pessimism, for I have long abandoned the notion of business being a source of social good.

As if to prove me right, Mcleod Russel declared its financial results four days after this write up, on January 26^th, 2016: profits have dropped big time, one report lamented.  In the three months ended December 31^st, 2015, the company made profits after tax of about fifty seven crores, against about eighty crores from the earlier year’s comparable quarter. I could picture the Khaitans – the absentee Anglophile satrap-owners of Mcleod (with a 45% stake) – weeping at this drop and at the stock market’s phlegmatic view of the company: their own stake in the company was now worth a piffling seven hundred crores thereabouts.  One shivers at their sorry plight, the poor little rich boys of Mcleod Russel, a plight serious enough to make them forget the starvation of a thousand others.

There are times in life when excuses do not count.  This is, I insist, one of them.

Fifty seven crores of profit in a quarter is about seventy six lakhs of profit every working day.

Enough money, you will agree, to do the right thing.

Gulven

We crossed the jeep on our way to the Brahmaputra and I saw the foreigner I had seen earlier in the day, now seated in the back seat.  He recognised me and we exchanged a smile and a wave.  With his floppy hat and white beard, he looked much like the many others who travel around India looking for the wildlife experience.

When we reached Nameri two days later, there he was again, at the lunch table of the Eco Camp.  As we settled down to a meal at the next table, he introduced himself, his slow, careful English marked by a distinctly French accent, and asked politely, though hesitantly, if he could join our fun-loving group.  It wasn’t particularly unusual and he seemed a decent sort, so we invited him.

 

Gulven, his name was.  An unusual name, I thought, and have remembered it since.

He was quite an odd chap: in his mid-sixties, of medium height but heavily built, with lidded eyes and a puffed pinkish face behind his poorly trimmed beard, his clothes rather shabby and unwashed (he wore the T-shirt I had seen on him two days ago), the stubby fingers – equally unwashed - tearing the roti and dipping it in dal and veggies.  I instantly recollected a word from the Enid Blyton days – ragamuffin!

He chewed his meal deliberately, much as one would consume an unloved but necessary vegetable, and was entirely unfussy in his choice of food though it was, he said, his first trip to India.  He had flown in from Paris to Dubai to Bangalore and then to Guwahati – all without an overnight break.  Immediately after landing at Guwahati, he had taken a bus to Kaziranga for a couple of days and the previous day had taken a handful of local buses, hitched rides and walked the last few kilometres to reach the Nameri Eco Camp.  If this was not unusual, he added that he had had no reservation at the Eco Camp (which is generally full); he just landed up, asked for any place to stay and was given a small room used at times by a field researcher.

Wow. 

He did seem jetlagged – the eyes struggled to stay open -  but, as I realised over the next couple of days, Gulven always looked this way. 

Though his conversation was mild and polite, I wasn’t particularly impressed with his personal hygiene and thought of drawing the conversation to a close as lunch ended.  He then took out his bird book – Field Guide to Birds of the Indian Sub Continent – and I could see a common interest.  The book was new but had been well thumbed already. 

We began chatting about what we had seen and, almost instantly, he disagreed – perhaps a trite too sharply – with my identification of one of the birds that I said I had seen in Kaziranga.  A rude, unhygienic Frenchman, I thought, and we have to put up with this for a couple of days, and, what’s more, it’s his first trip to India and he thinks he knows it all.

“I spent four years in Bangladesh,” he said, almost reading my mind, “and did a number of trips around the country, which is why I know a bit about your birds.” When he spoke of his birds, he was frank, unapologetic and to the point. 

He wandered off with a guide into the jungle, but requested before leaving that he join us on our rafting trip down the Jai Bhorelli river the next day, offering to pay for his share.  Our group, after a quick thought, agreed and that was about all I saw of Gulven for the day.

As we set off down the river the following day, Gulven came into his own.  Along with the expert guide, he seemed to recognise every bird and know a bit of its genealogy, aided by a  photographic memory.  Seeing a bird shoot out over the canopy over us, he emphatically declared it to be a peregrine falcon, with the additional explanation  “Normandy has them.”, even as he pointed out a Nameri jewel– the ibis bill – to the rest of us. Indeed, watching and identifying birds was his only interest, almost to the exclusion of all else. My friend, Jairam, recalls that evening: i remember when we invited him over for a drink, he said, 'never say no to a drink', with a twinkle in his eyes. He sipped his drink quietly, watching the merriment in our group with amusement.

The following day, I joined him and a guide on an early morning trek to see a particularly rare bird, the white winged wood duck.  It was the day before our departure and he mentioned that he too would be leaving Nameri, onwards to Manas National Park.  Did he have accommodation there? No. Did he know anyone there or indeed a broad idea of the route? No, again. This peculiar, lone, scraggly stranger had an extraordinary capacity for travel, I thought, almost to the point of self-flagellation.

During the walk, he was completely focused on birds in the awe-inspiring canopy above and being in his company was an education in birding, no less.  The guide led us to a stream and we sat behind a bush in complete silence for the better part of an hour, until, voila!, there was a rush of noise and quacks and four wood ducks flew past the stream, not stopping by, possibly because they had sensed our presence.  That moment, that single second of spotting, seemed to make his day, though all I had seen was a white and blackish blur that, as it flew by, seemed to remonstrate angrily at the humans around.

That evening, Gulven told me of his life in France: way past his working prime, struggling for money with a broken marriage behind him, no children and afflicted with bi-polar disease, a damaging psychological condition of extreme mood swings, that he now took medication for.  He spoke of a partner – “She’s my girlfriend, nobody gets married in France anymore…” – with little enthusiasm, much less than he had reserved for the ibis bill.  She had no interest in accompanying him and he wanted no burden, so here he was alone.  He mentioned that he’d want to go back and apologise to her for something, but at this point he was speaking more to himself.  He saw the longevity of people in the developed nations and the complexity of their relationships differently: it was a curse if you ran out of money before your end, for you were certain to be alone.  His tone as he spoke was soft and, as when he described birds, precise, always factual and never quite feeling sorry for himself.

The next day, we dropped him to the market in Tezpur town on our way back to Guwahati, with his two modest shoulder bags, one with his binocs and bird book and water, the other with the minimal needs for travel.  As we said our byes and I got back into the car, I could not help but feel sympathy and admiration for this curiously odd fellow from beyond, who had chosen to live for the moment and not beyond it, on his own uncertain terms and often clinging to flotsam, in a world of birds that he had chosen to inhabit alone.

An Easy Chair that Rocked

The photographs – all of them in black and white – lie carelessly scattered on the bed.  I love the process of sorting them out, a careful, time-consuming and entirely thankless task, but for the chance to live out a memory or two that would bring a smile, an involuntary nod or a shrug of nostalgia.

My eye catches the rather ordinary photograph of an elderly man – thin, with a clean, plebeian face and an unsmiling expression - sitting in his trademark easy chair in the portico. 

I rarely saw Ammamma otherwise.  He was always sitting there, by the three steps that led to the little living area at the stately family home in Palakad, Vrindavanam, his Mathrubhumi newspaper beside him and a cup of tea, wearing his trademark white mundu and a vest.  And, in my early teens, watching him sit right there for hours reading the paper and looking out yonder and over the rim of the paper, I used to wonder “Just what is he thinking?”

At meal time, he could be found at the head of the table in the dining room – a small table in front of the larger one being his right as a ‘karnor’ or family head - sipping his ‘kanji’ with a spoon and until he had begun his meal, we wouldn’t quite begin ours (though kids were generally excused).  A quiet, serious, stern man who spoke in grunts and monosyllables, my grand-uncle had a reputation for gruff, no-nonsense disapproval and an expression of ire – the eyes narrowed and focused, the lips pursed, the sometimes-rapid, hoarse, gravelly smoky voice – that could freeze the bone marrow and make the guilty wet his starched mundu. 

It was rumoured by those who knew him well that his bark was much worse than the bite, but he nevertheless frightened the wits out of all those around most often, astonishingly, by doing very little – a crisp few words perhaps or a scowl.   Everyone, including the many visitors to Vrindavanam, walked by him in deferential silence with the obligatory word or two exchanged, head bowed or at an angle that suggested submission.  Occasionally, relatives of his age and a couple of chosen nephews (my father included) sat beside him and had conversations – if you could call a few verbal telegrams a conversation - on issues that men of the 1970s spoke about: politics, farming and the weather, marriages, finances perhaps and renovation to the family home.

Ammamma managed the family’s agricultural fields in his younger days – now, alas, all gone -  marshalling a couple of trusted hands to his cause and, I am told, when he worked, his sternness set standards anew.  My cousin Jayan, who had a cheeky sense of humour, outstanding timing and an ability to make stories come alive, mimicked Ammamma with abandon at a safe distance eliciting much chuckles and laughter from all of us.  Yet, when in front of the patriarch, this worthy could be found crawling on his ample belly, like all of us, for he took no chances.   I learnt from another cousin the priceless titbit that Ammamma never used the toilet, but had a hole dug for him every evening that he could use the next morning.  Knowledge of such facts, I admit, are of little value in, say, new drug discovery, but I have a head (and an unhealthy fascination) for useless information. 

He (Ammamma, not my cousin) stayed a bachelor all his life, though, he did have an interest in his younger days in a pretty girl who lived not far away.  Apparently, her brother was to marry his sister – my great aunt – while he married her, and this fairy-tale-ish ending never did happen, much to his regret.  My aunt seems to recall his sentient oath to bachelorhood as a consequence and, in my mind’s eye, I can imagine the thunderous promise of Bhishma, as the earth shook, the wind took its breath in and the flowers thought it was wise to close shutters for the day. 

He had his spartan little room by the living area, but retreated there only to sleep, for much of the day would be spent in the portico.  If he had one weakness, it was for cigarettes – the brand ‘Scissors’ was his favourite and on one trip I pleaded with my cousin sister to collect a trunk load of used Scissors packets for me that I could then cart across the country back to Assam. He was much amused by my interest in this useless stuff and he let me know this by a miniscule lift of his upper lip and a twitch of a cheek muscle; this was the equivalent of today’s much-abused term LOL.  Indeed, the only occasion on which I actually saw him smiling was when the news was conveyed to him that I had asked around why Ammamma never smiled.  The women in the household found it femininely funny and my puerile impertinence on that day caused much flutter around the home. 

The women – my great grandma (Ammamma’s mother), my grandmother and grand aunt - spent much of their time in the vicinity of the kitchen and communicated with him in rich monosyllables and there were few men folk of his age (and stature) he could spend time with, so it must have been a lonely life as he sat there out in the portico waiting for Godot….and thinking.  As he aged, the lure of a city’s medical facility had no draw, for he represented a generation that refused to leave its roots.  One day, about thirty years or more ago, as illness took its toll, he left that easy chair for good.

As I put the photographs away, I remember the last time I visited Vrindavanam a couple of years ago.  It was a warm, humid day and, crossing the lovely little ‘padipara’ – the gate with a little roof – I walked briskly upto the front door and paused by the portico.  The chair and its occupant of course were missing, yet the setting had not changed a bit, for at Vrindavanam, nothing really changes.  In the heat of that day, my mind's eye could see the man in the easy chair, the torso lost behind the day's newspaper opened out in front, the elbows at rest on the easy chair.   I was tempted to whisper a ‘good morning Ammamma’, the usual acknowledgement that would be met by a brief look in my direction and a responding grunt, even as I would hurry up the steps into the safety of the home.  

And I wished I had asked that question to him once.  “All those days you spent out here on the portico….what were you thinking Ammamma?” 

Why Vaz Was Wise

Among the many unanswered questions on the planet is one that deserves scrutiny if you happen to study motivation.  The question – an inverse one as it might seem – is, how did Mrs. Vaz remain, well, normal? 

Normal, for this elevated purpose, is hereby defined as a condition in which a person is not transmogrified, by circumstances, into 

a) a weeping wreck

b) a furious furnace

c) a cowering catastrophe

d) a depressed decadent

e) all of the above and exhibiting delirious symptoms suggesting that there would be more to come.

Mrs. Vaz was the only lady in a small group of lecturers who taught our class in St. Josephs – PUC and B.Com, and she did so relentlessly for five years which suggests a resilience last seen in The Charge of the Light Brigade.  She was of medium height, always dressed  in a sari with her hair tied in a neat bun, a quiet, demure lady with an impassive freckled face and  an occasional slow, shy smile.  

Every year, much to her dismay, she would be alloted  subjects like Economic Geography, which were, to put it mildly, unteachably boring.  Let me emphasise this in case you missed it in a hurry to get to the end – the most boring, tedious, dull, dreary, mind-numbing, lifeless, lacklustre, unexciting, routine, plebian, pedestrian, wearisome subjects were allotted to her, because no one else wanted them and she was far too good natured to argue with the clever Head of Department. And every year she’d turn up in class at the beginning of the year, her face a picture of resignation and posture defeated but with a pretence of defiance. 

My class tested her sorely.  Every year she would hesitantly step onto the wooden podium (that had once housed a stack of crackers under it).  And every year she would look down and see a class of about a hundred boys and girls, the vast majority of whom stared back at her with a collective vacant look of vacuous, languid asininity, particularly if it was the class after lunch.  If she felt the need to return the compliment, she did not show it, for such was her bearing and sense of dignity.  Some of the girls – the quiet, half-sari and curd-rice for lunch type - at least attempted to smile in an effort at feminine bonding, but the boys just ignored her presence, and just an odd fellow would shout out, ‘Welcome Ma’am’ in the falsest of notes, while she would nod her head passively knowing perfectly well that he meant no such thing.

She took most of this really well, having developed a certain detachment from pedogogical ideology.  If Dr. Seuss were watching, he would present her case:

“Let them ignore

Roar.

Snore.

Let them stare

Dare.

I don’t care.

I will for sure

conduct the tour.”

So, much as Dr. Seuss’s immortal Horton the Elephant sat on an egg way past his bedtime (Horton Lays An Egg – don’t miss it), Mrs. Vaz laboured through every single class with commendable doggedness, reading out chapter after chapter, her voice a montonous refrain that triggered drowsiness on a warm afternoon.    The large contingent of back-benchers who should have been serving time in solitary confinement for their disservice to civil society, would stretch and yawn with a loud remonstrative groan, day-dream and express their creative, artistic expression in a notebook. Many caught up on their sleep.  Others simply did nothing, they stared out of the window in meditative contemplation (two such worthys are now senior managers in organisations and I understand they do much the same thing). 

Occasionally, though, a loud giggle would break out at the back.  Or even some laughter.  Or someone would visibly display somnolent behaviour that was calculated to test the patience of a certified saint. Or there would be a question asked by an otherwise disinterested superstar (who had spent the last few minutes combing his rapidly thinning hair), followed by much tittering around him and words of encouragement that were as hilarious as they were provocative.  In these not-so-unusual situations, her voice would rise, the rapid flow of words followed by a gesture to the main protagonist to exit the room, something about three quarters of the class was desperately waiting for.  As the offender quickly stood up to leave, others would offer to accompany him or offer loud advice, or say sorry on his behalf or even suggest substitution.  Most of this inflamed her anger greatly; her gentle face would become a rather noticeable red and her demeanour change.  On one or two occasions, she stormed out of the room, but that was playing right into everyone’s hands.  After a few seconds spent in silence, the mass of prospective Chartered Accountants, MBAs and businessmen would evacuate the classroom to the comfort of the college canteen. While I generally kept quiet when there was mayhem, there were times when it was difficult to not be swayed by the peer group and I did join in the collective merriment – not at her expense, but clearly not at her instance!

It was honestly, a hopeless situation. 

My primary emotion, though, was one of compassion.  She was doing the best she could, for you can, after all, only play with the cards you are dealt and, when one did need help, she was always ready, her gentle nature acting as a balm.  I did well in my tests for that was then a matter of pride and she treasured that (years later, she told me that she ‘knew’ I would do well in my career, a unforgettable compliment but happily untrue for I exited the career race early).

The exact root of the word ‘retired’ is not something I know, but surely it is derived from ‘tired’.  Mrs. Vaz retired some years ago and is now probably savouring the company of her grand children, even as an ex-student thinks he should have probably said a quick ‘sorry’ for adding to the torment on occasion and a ‘thank you’ for those flashes of education when they did happen.   Not that she has a bone to pick.  She never did.

The Requiem for a Cloud

Last week , the monsoon – the South West monsoon to be precise - went away.  It disappeared silently, without notice or a whimper, retreating on its tippy toes and leaving behind mornings that have been a charming change from the pattern of the last two months.  Only a couple of weeks earlier, the monsoon had hammered the city into submission one macabre evening, drowning the muffled cries of its ill-prepared denizens, stacking traffic back to oblivion and soaking up the earth (in places where there still existed soil).  It had given notice at that time, dark, lumbering, ominous notice, a brooding face of proclivity, a caustic grin in the clouded sillouette of intent.  I had then been driving and, looking up at the black sky, had stepped on the accelerator, but to little avail for, like others, the car took its share of the battering.  A sixty kilometres away, a bare twenty four hours later, the pounding breached the lake by the farm, and soaked our land, sending its wildlife scurrying to higher ground and providing the perfect storm for the cacophony of frog-sound to commence, a chorus that continued in happy unison through the night. 

This was its swansong for 2015.

The first day of clear sky was magical, for the air breathed clarity, lightness, vision and had a spring in its step.  In the following days, the mornings have had a touch, a faint kiss, of mist.  I can see it condensed on the windows of cars parked outside, can breathe it in the air and feel it clouding the vision of the skyscraper being built far away.  Thankfully, far away.  The air has the feel of winter, but from experience we know that winter, too – like the skyscraper - is far away, and it will only get warmer in the days to come. 

Yet, this is not autumn, for that is typically British weather.  We don’t have anything like it and I am grateful.  The autumn we have read of in English books – books of James Herriot, Dolye and Dickens, books with charming weather interludes, long drives, the moors and the dales and monsters and murders – is an autumn of falling leaves, shorter days, uncertainity and foreboding.  We are happy to be exempt: why have an autumn, when, as here, we can have a post-monsoon season, a cheery, warm couple of months of happiness as the oranges come in to the markets and the seat on the balcony under the morning sun begs to be taken. 

The birds seem to feel the change as well, for there is greater energy in their morning perambulations – I saw the coucal today fly in a downward arc from tree to tree and its flight was the grace of pronounced joy.  Some of the perennial flowers have begun to blossom, months after I had expected them to.  They reach for the warmth gratefully – gratitude for nothing out of the way.  It is a quality that we have long forgotten and that is why I love flowers, dogs and my tea cup.  There are no expectations and each moment is welcome and bliss.  Each is happy to be happy. 

And, therein, lies the learning from each moment spent with our never-swerving companion, Nature. 

A Confession From Volkswagon

...and VW's statement in the confession box said just this:

The Press have always loved to call my brand ‘iconic’
And every car I have thrown up has been positively chic
I am known for my Beetle, my younger boy’s a Jetta
But what I have been up to, you’d never ever betta

Those misanthropes from EPA, their rules are Yankee dum
And to measure my emissions, they stuck a pipe up my ….
My software held the breath in, bloated the intestine
And, instead of the explosion, they recorded a whine.

As the market share graph was on a firm upward loop
The Japs were shouting ‘Tasukete’, Ford was in a soup,
Some goddam smart alec (a Jap for sure) with a fish bone to pick
Did some data crunching (Achtung!) and figured out my trick.

I have chopped a few heads off, led by Winterkorn
Whose “I didn’t know” was as fake as a Nano’s tooting horn
I will make amends, I promised, to indomitable Herr Merkel
No vehicle emissions in future, we will stick to the cycle.

Growing Nuts is a Vicious Cycle

On July 12th, The Hindu documented the death of Renuka Aradhya, a 35 year old farmer, who committed suicide at Kaarekurchi in Gubbi taluk of Tumakuru district.

If you missed reading about his demise, you can hardly be blamed. The story is a familiar, predictable one - depressingly familiar and infuriatingly predictable - to anyone who has an ear for news that concerns the lives of 263 million farmers (the number, as per the 2011 census, that includes both cultivators and agricultural labour).

Two hundred and sixty three million human beings and their children, whose futures have been missed between two economic stools in the last twenty four years of liberalisation, who have been designated ‘laggards’ in the growth process of an emerging economy, who live outside India’s urban agglomerations and suffer the real pain of being exposed to the real costs of ‘development’.

Aradhya had four acres of land on which there were coconut and arecanut trees; apparently, he had taken a gold loan of Rs.90,000 from State Bank of Mysore, Rs.70,000 from the Primary Land Development Bank and Rs.3 lakh from private money lenders.
 He killed himself because his borewell failed.
 …..which meant drilling another borewell. In Tumakuru district, among India’s most water stressed districts, this is a minor form of fracking, no less; it means reaching into the depths of the Earth, over a thousand feet below the ground. The cost? At least a couple of lakhs, which he could not raise in loans.
 ……as a result, his coconut and arecanut farm dried up.
…..which meant he would not be able to pay the annual interest on loans of Rs. 1.30 lakhs (@ 15% on loans taken from banks, @ 36% on ‘private’ loans). The question of principal repayment must not have crossed his mind.

The only reason I remembered to cut this little news item out was that I had spent a couple of days near Tumakuru in a training campsite, a day before Aradhya killed himself.

This is original hard rock country, the outstanding beauty of the scrub and the weathered adaptation of the human and cattle contributing to an ineffable beauty at sunrise and sunset. While arecanut is a traditional crop in the area, the last two three decades have seen three changes in the economics of arecanut, each debilitating in its impact on the farmer, all taken together a recipe for a crisis
1. The first change is the intensity of arecanut plantation, driven by the rapid growth of the pan masala and the gutka industry. Walking around the area, I saw arecanut everywhere, intensely planted and profusely watered from the bowels of the Earth. Water, from underground aquifers that have been charged for decades, now being consumed with imprudence born out of ignorance, short-term economics and peer behaviour. Yet, for every two farms that exhibited the verdancy of assured, timely irrigation by borewell water, there was one that had been abandoned, the plantation standing forlorn in a caked, brown field, cast to the dry winds, just as its owner had been cast to an uncertain fate.
2. The second change is in the rainfall or, more accurately, its absence. Tumkaru has shrivelled into a dehydrated zone, its lakes long gone, the underground aquifers rapidly receding as farmers pump even more water out in a viciously spiralling downward cycle of recession.
3. Yet, this is not all. Arecanut, with its volatile economics has, over the years, become the femme fatale of the farmer. An example: the price of arecanut rose rapidly in 2014 to Rs. 900 a kilogram in August 2014; more areas were planted up, more borewells dug in a mindless frenzy, many farmers seeking a way out of earlier distress, other simply avaricious . Today the price is about Rs. 280, a drop of seventy percent in one year.

Most of us who live in cities do not really appreciate the import of such a drop. To put this in perspective and use an example, imagine you had all your income coming from an index fund on the stock market that you hoped would appreciate above the rate of inflation. Imagine now that, instead of crashing, as it did, by about 4% on Black Monday in August, it crashed 70% to about 7000 points – the number it was at about ten years ago. Considering the inflation in the last decade, you would be at least twice, possibly three times, poorer than you were then.

India’s cash crop farmers – growing cotton, sugarcane, tobacco, arecanut, ginger – have recessed into a state of permanent poverty because their Sensitive Index has crashed. It is a crash that has driven millions in the last few years to poverty from a level that might have been modest, yet above subsistence .

So, why did the price of arecanut drop precipitously?
In 2013, the arecanut crop in the Malnad and coastal Karnataka region declined by fifty percent due to heavy rain that caused a fungal infection in the plant. As the price of arecanut shot up as a result; many farmers made the switch from food crops to arecanut in a classic, much repeated, example of a failure of systems thinking – doing something without knowing that all others in the boat are doing pretty much the same thing.

The firms engaging in processing arecanut then decided to import it , triggering a slump in prices: in 2013-14, about 18,000 quintals were imported, in 2014-15, over five times this quantity came in.

.. …and why can’t the Government impose import duties on arecanut?
The answer lies in bilateral trade agreements – SAFTA and SAARC - where the member countries enjoy total exemption from import duties.

As you read this, is there the ol’ vicious cycle feeling, a sense of helplessness, a feeling of inevitability, of ineluctable decline in Agriculture’s condition?
There is, equally, the larger question to be asked amidst this tragedy: all this for what purpose?

The accelerated desertification of an entire district, the crippling of its farming community, the felling of natural vegetation and the increased wildlife conflict, all to produce a crop that is the crucial input for a final product known to be addictive and carcinogenic, the single largest cause of oral cancer in India today.

My belief - and you are welcome to agree or disagree - is that the starting point is a ban on pan masala and gutka. If you do agree, please write in to the Health and Agriculture Ministers, asking them to do what is right and, yet, provide the agrarian sector the expertise and support needed to move away from arecanut to more sustainable crops that are benign, useful and remunerative.
It's the least we can do for our planet.