Sam

It stretches out like a snake moving through open fields in search of it's prey. The long wide roads make you push the accelerator and the car whizzes along kissing the rush of wind that caresses it's smooth metallic body. The early morning sun smiles at you from a distance welcoming the day with warmth in it's eyes.

The ride is smooth and the road long. One of your sense's is caught up in MLTR's The milky way upon the heavens is twinkling just for you... From acceleration to exhilaration you are now touching 130 kmph. Dazzled by the sun's generosity and catching the wind in your hair, whatever's left of it, there's a near ecstatic feeling about the drive.

All of a sudden your dazzled but alert eyes catch a distortion in the smooth lines ahead at about 300 mts. All this driving around has made your instincts on the road sharp. Something tells you that ecstacy is going to be denied. You are already pressing the brakes at 100 mts for what seemed like a distortion is suddenly a monstrous chasm in the road. WHAT THE HELL! Press... press harrrrd... Wo wo wo..... The final countdown... 100-80-60-50-40-20... the car skids, turns right angle... 10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1-0...!

Your heart is beating at 200 mph. A trickle of sweat rolls down the side of your face. A small shiver rises from your legs, creeps up your spine and heads straight for the head. You turn slowly to look out of the left window. Where there was a slick and smooth road, all you see is a rugged, rocky and rubbly gash stretching for a 1000 mts. You have stopped right where this gash in the road begins and at right angles to the road. PHEW! That was close... real close!

Some truck drivers parked on the side of the road get down and approach me sympathetically. "Eee roada ille", says one of them. Yes I can see that the road is not there! I nod in affirmation. "Diversion boarda ille." "Rombha danger," he adds. Yes I can see that too... no diversion board and it's dangerous. As we are exchanging these pleasantries another car approaches. I am thinking of moving out of the way when the truck driver starts waving lest he comes right into us. Thankfully that guy is coming much slower. Probably he's not witnessed the smiling sun nor has the wind in his hair. However, he is startled to see the road end suddenly and I almost laugh at him. Yes, isin't it funny.

That's driving on Indian highways in a nutshell. Never take the roads for granted. Always keep your third eye open even if the other two are focused on the sights and sounds of the beautiful countryside. And finally, if you survive, you need to take the rough with the smooth as it comes. The journey must go on like the road which twists and turns into the smiling sun.

Road ke har mod pe,
dekho tho gaur se...
kaatil raaste,
milte hain charon aur se!

Some roads are good, some roads are bad and some roads are UGLY. A good metaphor for life itself! Of course the bad and ugly roads are the ones you need to watch out for. And almost always there are multiple ways or getting to your destination provided you are adventurous enough. Ok, I am not jhadofying philosophy here but talking of real roads, those which we depend on to get from place to place. Since I have been literally on the road for sometime now, I am kind of becoming an expert on roads. There are many factors which make a good road good, a bad one bad and an ugly one ugleee.

It's not just the physical condition of the road but also the ambiance, the contours, no. of lanes, does it have a divider or not, the vegetation, wildlife (people), villages and towns you pass, animals, no of crushed dogs that you pass, fellow travelers, neighboring vehicles, passing vehicles, hotels along the way, skies, water bodies, trees, fields, mountains, color of the landscape, potholes on the road, depth of the holes, rain, whether you got a stepni or not, fuel bunks, people at the fuel bunks, cost of the fuel, toll booths, toll charges, music, how sleepy you are, max speed of your vehicle and other vehicles etc etc.

I am wondering if the roads research chaps factor in all these when they are developing a road.

Roads they lead into shimmering lights
Roads they pass wayside streams
Roads they twist and turn like memories
Roads they talk to those lonely trails
Roads they hug the vintage trees
Roads they beckon a wandering soul

Vande Mataram,
Sujalam, suphalam, malayajasshitatalam,
Sasyashyamalaam, mataram,
Shubhrajyotsana pulakitayaminim,
Phullakusumita drumadala shobhinim,
Suhasininm sumadhura bhasininm,
Sukhadam, vardam, Mataram!

The English translation of the stanza by Sri Aurobindo is:

I bow to thee, Mother, richly-watered, richly-fruited,
cool with the winds of the south, dark with the crops of the harvests, the Mother!
Her nights rejoicing in the glory of the moonlight,
her lands clothed beautifully with her trees in flowering bloom,
seat of laughter,seat of speech, the Mother, giver of boons, giver of bliss!

I have always liked the sound of Vande Mataram. Many many years ago when TV was a novelty, I heard the song for the first time in the movie Anand Math and the imagery of the Mathis going out to war on the note of Vande Mataram still sets the heart beating.

Sujalam, suphalam, malayajasshitatalam, Sasyashyamalaam, mataram - you don't need to know Sanskrit to feel the flow of the verse. No doubt the song was written from great inspiration. Hemanta Mukherjee's music gave it life and a beat set to the trot of horses moving into battle, a kind of marching song.

Later I came across the use of Vande Mataram in the context of the Indian freedom struggle. It had become almost a war cry for those fighting the British rule. Just the two words "Vande Mataram" came to symbolize opposition to oppression from foreign rule. Gandhi's non-violent tactics gave the words a new dimension, a new meaning. The imagery of sacrifice got entrenched in the psyche of the Indian masses. Vande Mataram became synonymous with "love for your motherland".

Both these instances of Vande Mataram had its separate contexts. In the original one, it was opposition by the Anand Mathis to Muslim invaders and the latter to British rule.

Today the song only evokes meaningless debate. In an increasingly globalizing world there is no scope for patriotism. The imagery and the essence of the words are lost. That is why we have all kinds of products being advertised against the backdrop of the song.

We need a new song for the new world. Not a brave new world but one that has mortgaged it's freedom to greed and the desire to destroy. "Love for motherland" has to give way to "Love for mother nature and humanity".

Rachel Carson called them "The elixirs of death". Her book Silent Spring unleashed a popular wave of indignation and awareness about how the chemical companies were in the business of poisoning entire populations to death. Carson died of cancer in 1964, two years after the release of her book. She has left behind a classic reference point to all that is wrong with man's quest to control nature.

However, 'intelligent' as we are, we still move in circles. That is karma. Forty-four years later the world's second most populous country is grappling with the fact that two of the most advertised and pushed beverages in human history ie. Coke and Pepsi are synonyms for a cocktail of chemicals most of them deadly carcinogens. See: Soft Drinks Still Unsafe

The reality in India today is that you may not have water to drink in the villages, but you surely find Pepsi or Coca-cola to quench your thirst. The West of course cannot get over it's inventions, so they are still waking up only to find that infertility, diabetes, obesity, cancer and many such are their comrades in arms.

The other reality is that even if they would like to, Pepsi and Coke probably cannot make pesticide-free drinks in this country. The raw material that they use viz. sugar and water are the carriers of these chemicals. Sugarcane for eg. is heavily dosed with all kinds of chemicals (about 50 types) to make it yield. Those chemicals get carried into processed sugar. A good portion of the same chemicals leach into groundwater. Some of it escape into the air. In this way the air, the earth and water all of them die a little even as the microorganisms, insects and birds that feed or live off the sugarcane and other plants are wiped out. We "innocent, ignorant people" who consume these drinks are also dying a little at a time. Pepsi, Coke, Aamir Khan, Sharukh Khan, Kareena Kapoor, Aishwariya Rai and all those glamorous faces, meanwhile, are laughing their way to the brink.

The brink it is. We need to test the milk we drink, the eggs we eat and the grains, pulses, vegetables and the meat and rest assured we have a gigantic problem on our hands. If that is not enough we need to test our fat tissues and we would be shocked to find that all of us have become carriers of these 'invisible' chemicals. Invisible? Because diseases like cancer are silent killers. Not to sound alarmist, but we are sitting on something that could become as devastating as the disappearance of the dinosaurs. Let's give it a thought for that's all you would do probably.

Ref: http://www.cseindia.org/misc/cola-indepth/cola2006/health_effects.htm
http://www.rachelcarson.org/
http://cseindia.org/

Viji the turtle girl was forwarded to me by a friend. It's the most amazing story of India's first woman herpetologist J. Vijaya.

In recognition to her work, Vijayachelys silvatica is the name that has been given this year to a genus of cane turtle that she studied. Viji died at the age of 28, an astonishingly young age for an accomplished researcher of turtles.

The article says she was "found dead in April 1987, of unknown causes, in the forest she loved". Viji's story reminds me of only one other woman Dian Fossey who was murdered because she put up a determined fight for the survival of mountain gorillas in the Virungas of Africa.

Noticed two interesting articles of the day:


India's GDP grows annual 9.3 pct in Jan-March
and
Farmers choose death in India's booming economy

According to the first one, "It's a big positive surprise on the growth front. The strong report comes on the back of higher-than-expected farm sector and manufacturing growth" .

The second one tells you how statistics hide more than what they reveal.

Last week the government finally moved to ban Diclofenac the drug identified as responsible for the death of vultures.

If implemented, this should help the vulture populations to recover from the endangered status back to being found in decent nos. around the country.

Well I hate to say the farmer
Was the last of a dying breed
Living off the land
And taking what he needs
Don't say much for the future
When a family can't survive
I'd hate to say the farmer
Was the last of his kind.


Have you heard of the crisis in Indian agriculture? If you are a city slicker with no roots in rural India, living on packed vegetables and grains picked off the shelves of malls that dot the city-line and consuming information dished out by the popular media, it's unlikely you really heard of any crisis. You are in the seventh heaven, where there is only pleasure and pepperoni pizza.

For the last two years, Indian farmers have been killing themselves from Punjab to Kanyakumari. It's no coincidence that this happens to be the period when the economy is booming like never before. There is not enough space or time in the media to sing paeans to the robust and vibrant economy.

Then what's happening with the rural economy? To understand that we may have to go back to the days when we were a nation just subsisting on agriculture. The concept of a nation surplus in food was a great dream sold to our well-intentioned leaders aka Jawaharlal Nehru types. To achieve this our well-informed scientists floated the concept of the "Green Revolution whereby we would have enough food to feed all the hungry millions and still have some left over as a buffer against national emergencies.

Surely enough in the next few decades India became a nation with surplus food stocks, enough to feed the country's population for 3 to 6 months. This was mainly achieved by increasing the yield of farms by using various techniques developed by agricultural scientists. This primarily included a three-prone strategy of using high-yielding varieties of crops, fertilizers and pesticides. Over the years these techniques have been adopted widely by Indian farmers all over the country. As long as the statistics showed an increase in output, no one really was bothered about looking more closely at how this was being achieved. The pioneers of these technologies in India were Dr. M.s Randhawa who is known as the father of Green Revolution and later Dr. M.S. Swaminathan who is a well-known figure today in the country.

To cut a long story short, what they did was to artificially boost the productivity of the soil and the plant by modifying the genetic structure of the plant and by pumping chemicals into the soil to boost plant yield. Over the years the cropping pattern and dependencies of the farmer changed. He was more focused on cash crops which he could sell and in the quest to attain more and more surplus he would beg and borrow from the seed cos, banks and moneylenders to fulfill his appetite. The soil on the other hand, abused thoroughly by the chemical alterations started getting worse and worse cultivable. From diversity of soil and plant life we have today reached a stage when the yields have started falling and the soil does not respond to any manipulation.

The farmer has been reduced from a self-sufficient entity to a pauperized one living at the mercy of the seed cos. and moneylenders. The farmer who was once a highly creative individual clued into the nature and diversity of his world, has been reduced to an idiot dependent on "inputs" to tell him how and what to grow. That is the tragedy of Indian agriculture.

It's ironical that the very person who pioneered the "revolution" is today singing a different tune today. It also indicates how serious is the crisis and what he has aptly highlighted: Agriculture cannot wait

Just read that the Vinci film is to be released with an 'A' certificate. Guess better sense has prevailed among the clergy. On the other hand the film has been panned by critics. After the exciting build-up to it's release, the film may turn out a huge disappointment.