Time A Resource Curse Got Lifted

Take a map of India. Now mark the districts with forest wealth, where the rich and dense tree cover is found. Then overlay on it the sources of streams and rivers that feed us, our water wealth. Upon this, further locate mineral deposits—iron ore, coal, bauxite, all things nice that make economies rich. Don’t stop here. Mark on all this wealth another indicator: districts where the poorest people of our country live. These are also tribal districts. So you will find a complete match. The richest lands are where the poorest people live. Now complete this cartography of the country with the colour red. These are the very districts Naxalites roam, where the government admits it is battling its own people, who use the gun to terrorize and kill. Here is a lesson of bad development we clearly need to learn from.

Let’s configure this map with events of the last few weeks. Madhu Koda was chief minister of Jharkhand, a mineral-and-forest-rich but poor-people state, for about a year. Today, enforcement agencies are unearthing a mother of all scams—Rs 4,000 crore, and counting, of illegal assets he and his associates looted from the state. This is roughly a fifth of the state’s annual budget. More importantly, this enormous wealth came from the same minerals that never made his people rich.

It does not end here. This past month, when the bjp government in Karnataka was brought to its knees by defiant legislators who wanted the head of the chief minister, we did not connect this episode with the cartography of India. The Reddy brothers—Gali Janardhana Reddy, the tourism minister of Karnataka and his brother, Gali Karunakara Reddy, the revenue minister of the B S Yeddyurappa government, are mining barons. Their wealth and power comes from rapacious mining in the similar rich-poor districts of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh.

The Reddy brothers’ fiefdom, Bellary district, produces some 20 per cent of the country’s iron ore. The ore is mined with little or no consideration to environmental safeguards. Water in the region runs red because of mine discharge, the land has been mauled, forests have vanished and people’s livelihood devastated. Bellary has the largest number of registered private aircraft, but ranks third from the bottom in the human development index of Karnataka, with 50 per cent literacy level—a shame for an otherwise progressive state. The Reddy brothers (like Madhu Koda) are products of the extraordinary wealth of regions we still call poor. Why, then, are we surprised when Naxalites profit from the anger of local people, witnesses to the loot of their land?

The problem is we have never taken seriously the issue of sharing wealth with the people, whose land it is. This is not part of the development mandate. Take forests. Some 60 per cent of the country’s dense and most bio-diverse and economically rich forests are found in these tribal districts. This is where the magnificent tigers are found. Ask again: If there is extraordinary wealth, why are the people who live here so poor?

The fact is we have never built a development model for natural resources, which is sustainable and also can benefit local economies and people. The first phase of development was when the state extracted and exploited the forests. Large areas were handed over to the paper and pulp industry, much like what’s happening with minerals today; swathes of dense forests were cut, land was denuded to build the economic wealth of the country. But nothing was shared with local people. This was the forest wealth that built fortunes of governments and private companies. But not its people.

Then came the phase of conservation. The nation decided forests had to be protected; tigers and other wild animals had to be safeguarded. But instead of building an economic model which shared the benefits of conservation with people, the State once again marginalized them. Forests, went the belief, had to be protected from the people who lived on these lands. Today the callous implementation of the Forest Conservation Act, 1980, which does not allow (rightly in many cases) diversion of forestland for non-forest purposes, has become the single biggest reason for anger and violence in the region.

See, while forests are cleared for mines, or power or industrial projects, what is delayed and discounted is the little forestland local people need to build a school, a water tank or an access road. Worse, the wealth of the forests is never used to build their economies. Conservation of the tiger happens on their lands, on their backs, with little benefit to them. Are we still surprised at their anger?

This needs to change, and there are avenues. Some years ago, the Supreme Court passed an important order regarding the sharing of the mineral wealth with people. Today, there are new imperatives, national and global, such as protecting forests for water, or climate, security. Can these enable renewed futures? Can we change the rich land-poor people cartography of India? Let’s discuss this the next time.

—Sunita Narain (editor Down to Earth)

Down To Earth is a science and environment fortnightly published by the Society for Environmental Communications, India.

Instruction Manual For Life !!

Have a firm handshake.
Look people in the eye.
Sing in the shower.
Own a great stereo system.
If in a fight, hit first and hit hard.
Keep secrets.
Never give up on anybody. Miracles happen everyday.
Always accept an outstretched hand.
Be brave. Even if you're not, pretend to be. No one can tell the difference.
Whistle.
Avoid sarcastic remarks.
Choose your life's mate carefully. From this one decision will come 90 per cent of all your happiness or misery.
Make it a habit to do nice things for people who will never find out.
Lend only those books you never care to see again.
Never deprive someone of hope; it might be all that they have.
When playing games with children, let them win.
Give people a second chance, but not a third.
Be romantic.
Become the most positive and enthusiastic person you know.
Loosen up. Relax. Except for rare life-and-death matters, nothing is as important as it first seems.
Don't allow the phone to interrupt important moments. It's there for your convenience, not the caller's.
Be a good loser.
Be a good winner.
Think twice before burdening a friend with a secret.
When someone hugs you, let them be the first to let go.
Be modest. A lot was accomplished before you were born.
Keep it simple.
Beware of the person who has nothing to lose.
Don't burn bridges. You'll be surprised how many times you have to cross the same river.
Live your life so that your epitaph could read, No Regrets
Be bold and courageous. When you look back on life, you'll regret the things you didn't do more than the one's you did.
Never waste an opportunity to tell someone you love them.
Remember no one makes it alone. Have a grateful heart and be quick to acknowledge those who helped you.
Take charge of your attitude. Don't let someone else choose it for you.
Visit friends and relatives when they are in hospital; you need only stay a few minutes.
Begin each day with some of your favorite music.
Once in a while, take the scenic route.
Send a lot of Valentine cards. Sign them, 'Someone who thinks you're terrific.'
Answer the phone with enthusiasm and energy in your voice.
Keep a note pad and pencil on your bed-side table. Million-dollar ideas sometimes strike at 3 a.m.
Show respect for everyone who works for a living, regardless of how trivial their job.
Send your loved ones flowers. Think of a reason later.
Make someone's day by paying the toll for the person in the car behind you.
Become someone's hero.
Marry only for love.
Count your blessings.
Compliment the meal when you're a guest
in someone's home.
Wave at the children on a school bus.
Remember that 80 per cent of the success in any job is based on your ability to deal with people.
Don't expect life to be fair.
Always smile, at least try, if nothing, it improves your face value!
Say something good to someone (even if you dont mean it) and make his day!
Tell someone-"You made my day" and make his/her day!
Life is too short to hate!
There is a difference between people whom you hate and the ones whom you don't like!

This Man Saves Lives !!

For over ten years now, Khushroo Poacha has stood by the sole belief that to do good work you don't need money.

Poacha runs indianblooddonors. com (IBD), a site that lets blood donors and patients in need of blood connect with each other almost instantaneously. He also does not accept cash donations. The site has been live for almost ten years and with over 50,000 donors in its database, IBD is perhaps a classic example of what the Internet is truly capable of. But more importantly, it is a reflection of a single human being's desire to make a difference to this world.

It all started in the mid-'90s when Khushroo Poacha, an employee with the Indian Railways in Nagpur saw a doctor being beaten up because he couldn't save a patient's life. No one in the mob seemed to understand that it was the lack of blood that caused the death.

"A few years later, I witnessed the death of a welder because he couldn't get blood. The two incidents really shook me up," Poacha says, "And that was when I expressed to my wife my desire of doing something."

Poacha, however, had no clue about how he could make a difference until one day, sitting in a cybercafe with a 56 kbps connection, the idea came to him.

"I did not know head or toe of the Internet, let alone about domain names, but I knew this would be the tool that would make a difference," he says, explaining the dotcom extension to the site.

Over the next few months, Poacha liquidated practically all his savings, purchased a domain name and started up indianblooddonors. com. "During the time, there were no companies booking or hosting web domains in India . I was paying USD 300 every three months to keep the site live and running. Meanwhile, I had spent almost Rs 40,000 in developing the site and had gone practically bankrupt," he says.

Poacha says he even went to a local newspaper to place an ad. "I needed visibility and that was the only way I thought I could reach out to the people. The day the ad appeared, I was expecting a flood of registrations," he recollects. "No one registered."

The silver lining to the dark cloud came when someone from the outskirts of his hometown Nagpur contacted him, expressing interest. "It was a saving grace," Poacha says.

Meanwhile, the dotcom bubble had burst and Poacha was being told what a fool he had been. And then there were household expenses to be taken care of too. "There were many occasions when unpaid phone bills would be lying in the house and there would be no money to pay them off," Poacha recollects, adding that "things always have a way of sorting themselves out. And mysteriously during such times, a cheque would make its way into the mailbox."

Poacha admits that his wife was quite apprehensive about his endeavor. "But she believed in me," he says, "And that has made all the difference."

Visibility, however, was still an issue. No publication was willing to write about him. No major hospital or blood bank was interested in taking his calls. And then the 2001 Gujarat Earthquake happened. As visuals of the devastation flashed before his eyes on television, Poacha realized yet again he had to do something.

Only this time he knew just what. "I called up (television channel) Zee News and requested them to flash the site's name on the ticker and they agreed." Five minutes later, the ticker was live. Ten minutes later, the site crashed. "I spoke to the people who were hosting the site (by now website hosting had started off in India ) and explained to them the situation. They immediately put me on a fresh server and over the next three days or so I received some 3,500 odd registrations," Poacha recollects.

Realizing the difference he had made, the 42-year-old started working on getting visibility again.
Over the next few months, Poacha had contacted every major magazine and sure enough, a few responded. "Outlook (magazine) wrote about me, then (British newspaper) The Guardian followed suit and then came the BBC," he says.

Along the way, IBD had also gone mobile. All you had to do was type out a message and send it to a short code and you'd have a list of blood donors in your inbox. As luck would have it, the service became far too popular for Poacha's pocket. "By then I had stopped taking cash donations and had to discontinue it," he says.

Interestingly, IBD is not yet registered as an NGO. "We function as individuals. We don't take donations and only accept bumper stickers (of IBD) and postage stamps to send out those stickers and create awareness," he says, "I was asked to deliver a lecture at IIM during a social entrepreneurship seminar and was asked what my sustenance model was. I replied I didn't have one. And I have been doing this for the last ten years."

Today, the database of IBD is growing at the rate of 10-15 users every day and the requests have grown from 25 to 40 per day. Poacha says he eats, drinks and breathes IBD. "The zeal I had ten years ago has not diminished and the site continuously sees innovation."

The latest, Poacha tells us, is the option of being an exclusive donor to one patient. "During my journey, I realised there were some patients who required blood every month. So if you want, we can put you onto them so you can continue making a sustained difference to one person's life."

IBD is currently on an auto pilot mode and Poacha continues to keep his day job. He says, "Initially I would take the calls and personally connect the donor with the patient's relative. But I know only three languages and I'd get calls from all over India ," he laughs.

Poacha recounts an incident that never left him: "A man from Chandigarh called me and told me he was desperately seeking A-ive blood for his 2-year-old. About five minutes after the call, he got the (difficult to find) blood group he needed. Soon after the surgery he called me up crying, thanking me for saving his child's life. For me, it was just another day at work. But his whole world was at stake that day. I can never forget that call."

Last year Poacha was invited to the Asian Social Entrepreneurs Summit 2008 in South Korea where venture capitalists argued that it wasn't possible to sustain an endeavor without money. He says, "I pointed out that Mother Teresa who had no revenue model when she started the Missionaries of Charity. If you want to do good work, you simply do it."

For someone who has sustained his enterprise for a decade with just a few bumper stickers and postage stamps, Khushroo Poacha knows best. He saved thousands of lives by clicks. So can YOU !!

What is Recession ??

This story is about a man who once upon a time was selling hotdogs by the roadside. He was illiterate, so he never read newspapers. He was hard of hearing, so he never listened to the radio. His eyes were weak, so he never watched television. But enthusiastically, he sold lots of hotdogs. He was smart enough to offer some attractive schemes to increase his sales. His sales and profit went up. He ordered more and more raw material and buns and sold more. He recruited more supporting staff to serve more customers. He started offering home deliveries. Eventually he got himself a bigger and better stove. As his business was growing, the son, who had recently graduated from college, joined his father.

Then something strange happened.

The son asked, "Dad, aren't you aware of the great recession that is coming our way?" The father replied, "No, but tell me about it." The son said, "The international situation is terrible. The domestic situation is even worse. We should be prepared for the coming bad times."

The man thought that since his son had been to college, read the papers, listened to the radio and watched TV. He ought to know and his advice should not be taken lightly. So the next day onwards, the father cut down the his raw material order and buns, took down the colorful signboard, removed all the special schemes he was offering to the customers and was no longer as enthusiastic. He reduced his staff strength by giving layoffs. Very soon, fewer and fewer people bothered to stop at his hotdog stand. And his sales started coming down rapidly and so did the profit. The father said to his son, "Son, you were right”. “We are in the middle of a recession and crisis. I am glad you warned me ahead of time."


Moral of the Story: It’s all in our MIND! And we actually FUEL this recession much more than we think.

Crabby Old Man

When an old man died in the geriatric ward of a nursing home in North Platte , Nebraska , it was believed that he had nothing left of any value.

Later, when the nurses were going through his meager possessions, they found this poem. Its quality and content so impressed the staff that copies were made and distributed to every nurse in the hospital. One nurse took her copy to Missouri .

The old man's sole bequest to posterity has since appeared in the Christmas edition of the News Magazine of the St. Louis Association for Mental Health. A slide presentation has also been made based on his simple, but eloquent, poem.

And this little old man, with nothing left to give to the world, is now the author of this 'anonymous' poem winging across the Internet.


Crabby Old Man

What do you see nurses? . . . . . What do you see?
What are you thinking . . . . . when you're looking at me?
A crabby old man . . . . . not very wise,
Uncertain of habit . . . . . with faraway eyes?

Who dribbles his food . . . . . and makes no reply.
When you say in a loud voice . . . . . 'I do wish you'd try!'
Who seems not to notice . . . . . the things that you do.
And forever is losing . . . . . A sock or shoe?

Who, resisting or not . . . . . lets you do as you will,
With bathing and feeding . . . . . The long day to fill?
Is that what you're thinking? . . . . . Is that what you see?
Then open your eyes, nurse . . . . . you're not looking at me.

I'll tell you who I am. . . . . . As I sit here so still,
As I do at your bidding, . . . . . as I eat at your will.
I'm a small child of Ten . . . . . with a father and mother,
Brothers and sisters . . . . . who love one another.

A young boy of Sixteen . . . . with wings on his feet.
Dreaming that soon now . . . . . a lover he'll meet.
A groom soon at Twenty . . . . . my heart gives a leap.
Remembering, the vows . . . . . that I promised to keep.

At Twenty-Five, now . . . . . I have young of my own.
Who need me to guide . . . . . And a secure happy home.
A man of Thirty . . . . . My young now grown fast,
Bound to each other . . . . . With ties that should last.

At Forty, my young sons . . . . . have grown and are gone,
But my woman's beside me . . . . . to see I don't mourn.
At Fifty, once more, babies play 'round my knee,
Again, we know children . . . . . My loved one and me.

Dark days are upon me . . . . . my wife is now dead.
I look at the future . . . . . shudder with dread.
For my young are all rearing . . . . . young of their own.
And I think of the years . . . . . and the love that I've known.

I'm now an old man . . . . . and nature is cruel.
Tis jest to make old age . . . . . look like a fool.
The body, it crumbles . . . . . grace and vigor, depart.
There is now a stone . . . . where I once had a heart.

But inside this old carcass . . . . . a young guy still dwells,
And now and again . . . . . my battered heart swells.
I remember the joys . . . . . I remember the pain.
And I'm loving and living . . . . . life over again.

I think of the years, all too few . . . . . gone too fast.
And accept the stark fact . . . . that nothing can last.
So open your eyes, people . . . . . open and see.
Not a crabby old man . . . Look closer . . . see ME!!


Remember this poem when you next meet an older person who you might brush aside without looking at the young soul within.

We will all, one day, be there, too!

The best and most beautiful things of this world can't be seen or touched. They must be felt by the heart.

Women Grow Food Basket

from Down To Earth Magazine -- article by Aparna Pallavi


Maharashtra district revives an old farm practice and tackles drought


Whenever I went missing as a child, my mother would come looking for me in the pata, Lalitabai Meshram said, laughing out loud. “My friends and I would play in the tangled vines for hours, making dolls of corn husk and hair, eating groundnuts, beans and waluk melon. Sometimes I would fall asleep there,” recalled Meshram, now 50-plus.

Last year, after about four decades, she carved out a pata from the family’s four-acre (1.6 hectares) farm in Mendhla village in Maharashtra’s Yavatmal district. It is like an oasis in the middle of large cotton and soybean farms. Leafy vines of long beans (barbati) climbing up tall sorghum plants, interspersed with okra, pale pink bells of sesame flowers and pendulous waluk melons giving off a musky aroma. The pata now makes up the food basket for the Meshram family.

The small vegetable patch has restored the joy that was missing from agriculture, said Meshram. Agriculture in Maharashtra’s Vidarbha region had come to imply repeated crop failures, pest attacks, piling up loans and suicides.

Meshram is one of the 4,000 women farmers who have come together to revive the practice of pata in Yavatmal, the heartland of Vidarbha’s agriculture crisis.

Traditionally, pata signifies a woman’s space in agriculture. Women would plant small strips of land with vegetables, fruits and spices, between the main crops like wheat, sorghum and pigeon pea. They would maintain and harvest them, depending on family needs.

“At midday or in the evening, before going home, my mother would visit the pata and pluck vegetables for the next meal or take something for a snack,” Punjabai Bhagat, a 60-year-old from village Godhani, recalled. People working in the fields could always find something to munch on from the pata. Typically, she added, the pata supplied the family platter with fresh fruits and vegetables for about eight months in a year, and with pulses and oilseeds for the whole year; crops varied depending on the season. The pata ensured nutritional variety, Bhagat said.

That was decades ago. “The practice was lost following the Green Revolution and commercialization of agriculture,” said Vijaya Tulsiwar whose non-profit Dilasa focuses on the revival of traditional agricultural knowledge and practice in Yavatmal. A survey by Dilasa in 2005 showed only 15 families in the district were practising pata cultivation.

Three of the 260 households in my village and neighbouring Lalguda had pata, said Satibai Kumre of Mahadapur, a tribal village. “They always did fairly well despite drought or soaring food prices. This inspired us to create our own pata.” Women in Lalguda and Mahadapur villages were the first to revive the practice in the region.

“We had no seeds. Together, the three families had seven varieties of seeds, against the 16 to 18 varieties that women once sowed on their pata,” said Kumre. Then there was another hurdle—land shortage.

Commercial mono-crop cultivation in recent decades has usurped the traditional space women had in agriculture. Most farmers in this region, with an average landholding of two acres, did not want to divert plots for pata and lose income in cash, Kumre added.

Tulsiwar held meetings with women farmers in 31 villages in Jhari Jamni tehsil. The women pooled available seed stocks, which Tulsiwar’s non-profit bought and multiplied in 2006-2007 by planting them on the existing patas and on its five-acre nursery.

To overcome land shortage, the women came to an arrangement with men of their families: three furrows on a two-acre farmland was decided to be the ideal size for a pata. “Three furrows amounts to two-three per cent of a two-acre farm. The farmers now had no misgivings about losing income,” said Tulsiwar. After much preparation, 750 women from these villages planted 11 varieties of crops on their patas in the kharif season last year. Meshram was one of them.

Initially, the experiment did not instill much confidence among the women. “The patas looked too small to sustain family needs even for a month,” said Tulsiwar. But the result was spectacular.

“We did not spend on vegetables between July and November,” said Sugandha Atram of Lalguda. “We ate more vegetables during those four months than we had eaten in years,” she said. Apart from okra, bitter gourd, snake gourd and beans, Atram harvested 15kg of moong, 11kg of urad and 6kg of moth (pulses). Kumre harvested a record 50kg of moong and 30kg of pigeon pea and 350 corn cobs.

Revival of patas also helped the women revive traditional delicacies like til ka laddu, made of sesame seeds, and jowar lahya (puffed crispy sorghum seeds). With changing agricultural practices, cultivation of sesame—a rich source of calcium—had declined and the indigenous sorghum variety, moti-tura, had virtually disappeared. Their consumption was restricted to festive rituals due to exorbitant costs. But last year, almost every family in the village harvested four-five kg of sesame and sorghum seeds, said Atram. “We made laddus last the whole winter,” she said.

Women from Lalguda and Mahadapur estimate the patas helped them save Rs 3,000 to Rs 5,000 last year. More than that, they offered a variety of nutritious food. “There is happiness only when there is plenty to eat,” commented Atram.

The best part was the main crop production was not affected by the land diversion for pata, said Maroti Marekar of village Godhani. “What was lost in acreage was gained in pest reduction,” he said. Maroti and his wife Ujjwala planted marigolds on their pata; the plant acts as a pest trap. “It also yielded us fodder and compost.”

Following the initial success, Tulsiwar distributed 4,000 packets of mixed seeds in 180 villages in July for the kharif season; about 8,000 patas have been sown across the district. Scanty rainfall early in the season though did some damage to the legume crops, but the women harvested good quantities of vegetables; sorghum, corn and sesame crops also did well.

Those who had created patas last year have expanded them this year. Satibai, for instance, planted three patas this year, with full support from her husband. He was apprehensive during the trial run.

“It feels good,” he said: “There is shade in the farm and enough vegetables to eat. My daughter and her friends go to the pata these days to play. It is a happy thing.”

Donkey comes home

from http://www.downtoearth.org.in

The country’s only sanctuary offers professional care for the beasts of burden

I was surprised to find my donkey so completely cured, said Makkaji Ibitdar, a small farmer in the hilly district of Nanded in Maharashtra. When Dharma Donkey Sanctuary in Sagroli village handed him his animal after discharge Ibitdar could not stop smiling at it. Only three months earlier, he was planning to abandon the donkey after it became weak, developed bad eyesight and sores on the back. Ibitdar was relieved to find his donkey strong again. It was mid-October and Ibitdar needed it the most for hauling farm equipment across tough terrain to prepare his field for rabi crops.

In July when Sanskruti Sanwardhan Mandal, an educational institution in Sagroli established by social worker Babasaheb Deshmukh organized a medical camp for donkeys in his village, Ibitdar took his ailing donkey there.

It was diagnosed as having worms and vitamin A deficiency due to lack of green grass. The deep bleeding wounds on its back and feet were caused by overloading. The doctors at the camp gave her a tetanus shot and asked Ibitdar to take her to the sanctuary for treatment.

Dharma Donkey Sanctuary, unlike other sanctuaries to protect endangered species, offers shelter and medical care to old, pregnant and sick donkeys.

The only sanctuary of its kind in India, it was set up in 2000 by Babasaheb Deshmukh at the behest of Bonny and Ratilal Shah, an nri couple from usa. The Shahs, who had been associated with the Mandal since 1990, perhaps drew inspiration from Egypt, Kenya and Mexico where donkey sanctuaries are common, said Abhijit Mahajan, manager of the Mandal. They had helped the Mandal purchase six hectares to set up the sanctuary.

It now attends to the beasts of burden from 50 villages where donkeys are the primary carrier of farm goods, fertilizers and construction material. Donkeys can endure overloading and require little water and food. Since the government’s veterinary services are limited to farm animals, donkey owners have nowhere to go to treat the wounded and ailing animals.

Non-profits like Brooke Hospital in UK and Blue Cross of Hyderabad help the sanctuary conduct vaccination and de-worming programmes twice a year and organize free medical camps from time to time.

“About 8,000 donkeys come to our camps every year,” said Mahajan. Those who are severely ill, like the one owned by Ibitdar, are brought to the sanctuary. Here there is plenty of grass to feed on, three tube wells offering ample water and two caretakers are available round the clock, he added. Once the animals are cured, they are handed back to their owners. For the old and abandoned ones, the sanctuary is a permanent shelter. “As of now, we have 10 abandoned donkeys,” said Suresh Mogdekar, a caretaker. “Two have been living here for three years; we have named them Raja and Akash,” he said breaking into a smile. About 20 donkeys come for treatment in a year and stay in our care for some months. It took three months to cure Ibtidar’s donkey. Its wounds needed regular dressing and was given deworming medicine (albendazol), Mogdekar added. Since the sanctuary does not have a fulltime doctor, in case of an emergency a government veterinary doctor from Nanded town treats the donkeys.

While medicines and vaccines are often donated, funds are hard to come by as few understand the need for a donkey sanctuary. To meet the expenses, the management has created a mango orchard in the sanctuary; this earns them Rs 10,000 a year. Trustees bear the salaries of caretakers.

It may take a few years before the sanctuary receives required aid and attention, but it has changed the attitude of people in Nanded towards donkeys, said Ibitdar as he took his donkey back home. He now plans to give it a name.

Drought fails to crush a Bundelkhand village

from http://www.indiaenvironmentportal.org.in

Uttar Pradesh's Bundelkhand region has been devastated by drought and other adverse weather conditions over the past four years. Madhaiya Anghela village in Madhogarh sub-division of Jalaun district exhibits the typical symptoms: farm-related livelihoods are in tatters. Villagers say the kharif crop this year is only 20 per cent of normal years. The prospects for the rabi crop are very dim—the soil has little to no moisture.

There is widespread hunger and malnutrition in most villages of Bundelkhand. Pulses and vegetables are a rare sight in the diet. Most families make do with roti and chutney, or worse still, roti and salt. Several families do not get enough of even this. The farms of poor families are typically close to the ravines, adding to difficulties in cultivation.A large number of people have already migrated, and many others are preparing to migrate to Delhi, Mumbai and towns in Gujarat—to look for csula labour in hazardous conditions.

This sad story gets repeated in village after distressed village. And then there is Lachmanpura.

The barren landscape gives way to green fields. The people in this village of small dalit farmers say this greenery is a symbol of a wider change—farm productivity, income, nutrition and health have improved in recent times. "We had a good crop this kharif season and the prospects for the rabi crop are looking good. In fact, a few villagers have taken a third crop of vegetables,' says Mahendra, a farmer. Gyanwati, a resident of Lachmanpura, says, "With better farm productivity in recent years, we get better nutrition, which in turn means fewer illnesses. There is no distress migration in our village.'

The turnaround in Lachmanpura owes a lot to the local voluntary organization Parmarth's resources management project. Over the past five years, the village has witnessed soil and water conservation works, bunds, and check dams. After these public works, the village has taken the assistance of a government scheme to get Rs 1 lakh for tube wells; four of these have been sunk. Women's committees spearheaded several of these efforts.

Parmarth has emphasized low-cost technologies that protect the ecology, like composting. People have been encouraged to avoid chemical pesticides. Easy availability of seeds to needy farmers has saved several of them from turning to borrowing from moneylenders. Farmers have been encouraged to use bullocks instead of tractors. Because fodder from crop residue is now abundant, animal husbandry is in better shape; livestock population has increased 30 per cent.

Some poor families have been provided goats. Parmarth has established a revolving fund which helps small peasants avoid distress crop sales. The mobilization of villagers as a part of this project seems to have increased solidarity, leading to spin-off benefits. Small farmer have started pooling their crops and taking them to bigger markets, where they stand a better chance of obtaining higher prices.

Parmarth is also working in two other villages in Jalaun district: Kadampur and Chotiber. A recent study of theirs found the per acre production of gram in the three villages increased from 300 kg to 450 kg over three years. The production of arhar (red gram) increased from 250 kg to 425 kg in the same period. The per acre income increased by Rs 1,000. The increase in income in a 180-hectare (ha) stretch in the three villages was almost Rs 5 lakh. Soil and water conservation has bought 8 ha of hitherto uncultivated land under the plough. These statistics cover only a part of the project area: the annual increase in farm income in the three villages is likely to be around Rs 9 lakh.

Similar efforts have succeeded in Manikpur block of Chitrakoot district. Here another voluntary group, Akhil Bhartiya Samaj Seva Sansthan, has carried out soil and water conservation work. It has constructed check dams, repaired tanks and dug up new ones. These have provided relief to people, particularly Kol tribals, in times of acute water scarcity.

Go, Kiss The World !!

Subroto Bagchi's Speech at IIM -- Bangalore, 2006 (COO of Mindtree Consulting)

"I was the last child of a small-time government servant, in a family of five brothers. My earliest memory of my father is as that of a District Employment Officer in Koraput, Orissa. It was and remains as back of beyond as you can imagine. There was no electricity; no primary school nearby and water did not flow out of a tap. As a result, I did not go to school until the age of eight; I was home-schooled. My father used to get transferred every year. The family belongings fit into the back of a jeep - so the family moved from place to place and, without any trouble, my Mother would set up an establishment and get us going. Raised by a widow who had come as a refugee from the then East Bengal, she was a matriculate when she married my Father. My parents set the foundation of my life and the value system which makes me what I am today and largely defines what success means to me today.

As District Employment Officer, my father was given a jeep by the government. There was no garage in the Office, so the jeep was parked in our house. My father refused to use it to commute to the office. He told us that the jeep is an expensive resource given by the government – he reiterated to us that it was not 'his jeep' but the government's jeep. Insisting that he would use it only to tour the interiors, he would walk to his office on normal days. He also made sure that we never sat in the government jeep - we could sit in it only when it was stationary. That was our early childhood lesson in governance - a lesson that corporate managers learn the hard way, some never do.

The driver of the jeep was treated with respect due to any other member of my Father's office. As small children, we were taught not to call him by his name. We had to use the suffix 'dada' whenever we were to refer to him in public or private. When I grew up to own a car and a driver by the name of Raju was appointed - I repeated the lesson to my two small daughters. They have, as a result, grown up to call Raju, 'Raju Uncle' - very different from many of their friends who refer to their family drivers as 'my driver'. When I hear that term from a school- or college-going person, I cringe. To me, the lesson was significant – you treat small people with more respect than how you treat big people. It is more important to respect your subordinates than your superiors.

Our day used to start with the family huddling around my Mother's chulha - an earthen fire place she would build at each place of posting where she would cook for the family. There was no gas, nor electrical stoves. The morning routine started with tea. As the brew was served, Father would ask us to read aloud the editorial page of The Statesman's 'muffosil' edition - delivered one day late. We did not understand much of what we were reading. But the ritual was meant for us to know that the world was larger than Koraput district and the English I speak today, despite having studied in an Oriya medium school, has to do with that routine. After reading the newspaper aloud, we were told to fold it neatly. Father taught us a simple lesson. He used to say, "You should leave your newspaper and your toilet, the way you expect to find it". That lesson was about showing consideration to others. Business begins and ends with that simple precept.

Being small children, we were always enamored with advertisements in the newspaper for transistor radios - we did not have one. We saw other people having radios in their homes and each time there was an advertisement of Philips, Murphy or Bush radios, we would ask Father when we could get one. Each time, my Father would reply that we did not need one because he already had five radios - alluding to his five sons. We also did not have a house of our own and would occasionally ask Father as to when, like others, we would live in our own house. He would give a similar reply, "We do not need a house of our own. I already own five houses". His replies did not gladden our hearts in that instant. Nonetheless, we learnt that it is important not to measure personal success and sense of well being through material possessions.

Government houses seldom came with fences. Mother and I collected twigs and built a small fence. After lunch, my Mother would never sleep. She would take her kitchen utensils and with those she and I would dig the rocky, white ant infested surrounding. We planted flowering bushes. The white ants destroyed them. My mother brought ash from her chulha and mixed it in the earth and we planted the seedlings all over again. This time, they bloomed. At that time, my father's transfer order came. A few neighbors told my mother why she was taking so much pain to beautify a government house, why she was planting seeds that would only benefit the next occupant. My mother replied that it did not matter to her that she would not see the flowers in full bloom. She said, "I have to create a bloom in a desert and whenever I am given a new place, I must leave it more beautiful than what I had inherited". That was my first lesson in success. It is not about what you create for yourself, it is what you leave behind that defines success.

My mother began developing a cataract in her eyes when I was very small. At that time, the eldest among my brothers got a teaching job at the University in Bhubaneswar and had to prepare for the civil services examination. So, it was decided that my Mother would move to cook for him and, as her appendage, I had to move too. For the first time in my life, I saw electricity in homes and water coming out of a tap. It was around 1965 and the country was going to war with Pakistan. My mother was having problems reading and in any case, being Bengali, she did not know the Oriya script. So, in addition to my daily chores, my job was to read her the local newspaper - end to end. That created in me a sense of connectedness with a larger world. I began taking interest in many different things. While reading out news about the war, I felt that I was fighting the war myself. She and I discussed the daily news and built a bond with the larger universe. In it, we became part of a larger reality. Till date, I measure my success in terms of that sense of larger connectedness.

Meanwhile, the war raged and India was fighting on both fronts. Lal Bahadur Shastri, the then Prime Minster, coined the term "Jai Jawan, Jai Kishan" and galvanized the nation in to patriotic fervor. Other than reading out the newspaper to my mother, I had no clue about how I could be part of the action. So, after reading her the newspaper, every day I would land up near the University's water tank, which served the community. I would spend hours under it, imagining that there could be spies who would come to poison the water and I had to watch for them. I would daydream about catching one and how the next day, I would be featured in the newspaper. Unfortunately for me, the spies at war ignored the sleepy town of Bhubaneswar and I never got a chance to catch one in action. Yet, that act unlocked my imagination. Imagination is everything. If we can imagine a future, we can create it, if we can create that future, others will live in it. That is the essence of success.

Over the next few years, my mother's eyesight dimmed but in me she created a larger vision, a vision with which I continue to see the world and, I sense, through my eyes, she was seeing too. As the next few years unfolded, her vision deteriorated and she was operated for cataract. I remember, when she returned after her operation and she saw my face clearly for the first time, she was astonished. She said, "Oh my God, I did not know you were so fair". I remain mighty pleased with that adulation even till date. Within weeks of getting her sight back, she developed a corneal ulcer and, overnight, became blind in both eyes. That was 1969. She died in 2002. In all those 32 years of living with blindness, she never complained about her fate even once. Curious to know what she saw with blind eyes, I asked her once if she sees darkness. She replied, "No, I do not see darkness. I only see light even with my eyes closed". Until she was eighty years of age, she did her morning yoga everyday, swept her own room and washed her own clothes. To me, success is about the sense of independence; it is about not seeing the world but seeing the light.

Over the many intervening years, I grew up, studied, joined the industry and began to carve my life's own journey. I began my life as a clerk in a government office, went on to become a Management Trainee with the DCM group and eventually found my life's calling with the IT industry when fourth generation computers came to India in 1981. Life took me places - I worked with outstanding people, challenging assignments and traveled all over the world. In 1992, while I was posted in the US, I learnt that my father, living a retired life with my eldest brother, had suffered a third degree burn injury and was admitted in the Safderjung Hospital in Delhi. I flew back to attend to him - he remained for a few days in critical stage, bandaged from neck to toe. The Safderjung Hospital is a cockroach infested, dirty, inhuman place. The overworked, under-resourced sisters in the burn ward are both victims and perpetrators of dehumanized life at its worst. One morning, while attending to my Father, I realized that the blood bottle was empty and fearing that air would go into his vein, I asked the attending nurse to change it. She bluntly told me to do it myself. In that horrible theater of death, I was in pain and frustration and anger. Finally when she relented and came, my Father opened his eyes and murmured to her, "Why have you not gone home yet?" Here was a man on his deathbed but more concerned about the overworked nurse than his own state. I was stunned at his stoic self. There I learnt that there is no limit to how concerned you can be for another human being and what is the limit of inclusion you can create. My father died the next day.

He was a man whose success was defined by his principles, his frugality, his universalism and his sense of inclusion. Above all, he taught me that success is your ability to rise above your discomfort, whatever may be your current state. You can, if you want, raise your consciousness above your immediate surroundings. Success is not about building material comforts - the transistor that he never could buy or the house that he never owned. His success was about the legacy he left, the memetic continuity of his ideals that grew beyond the smallness of a ill-paid, unrecognized government servant's world.

My father was a fervent believer in the British Raj. He sincerely doubted the capability of the post-independence Indian political parties to govern the country. To him, the lowering of the Union Jack was a sad event. My Mother was the exact opposite. When Subhash Bose quit the Indian National Congress and came to Dacca, my mother, then a schoolgirl, garlanded him. She learnt to spin khadi and joined an underground movement that trained her in using daggers and swords. Consequently, our household saw diversity in the political outlook of the two. On major issues concerning the world, the Old Man and the Old Lady had differing opinions. In them, we learnt the power of disagreements, of dialogue and the essence of living with diversity in thinking. Success is not about the ability to create a definitive dogmatic end state; it is about the unfolding of thought processes, of dialogue and continuum.

Two years back, at the age of eighty-two, Mother had a paralytic stroke and was lying in a government hospital in Bhubaneswar. I flew down from the US where I was serving my second stint, to see her. I spent two weeks with her in the hospital as she remained in a paralytic state. She was neither getting better nor moving on. Eventually I had to return to work. While leaving her behind, I kissed her face. In that paralytic state and a garbled voice, she said, "Why are you kissing me, go kiss the world." Her river was nearing its journey, at the confluence of life and death, this woman who came to India as a refugee, raised by a widowed Mother, no more educated than high school, married to an anonymous government servant whose last salary was Rupees Three Hundred, robbed of her eyesight by fate and crowned by adversity - was telling me to go and kiss the world!

Success to me is about Vision. It is the ability to rise above the immediacy of pain. It is about imagination. It is about sensitivity to small people. It is about building inclusion. It is about connectedness to a larger world existence. It is about personal tenacity. It is about giving back more to life than you take out of it. It is about creating extra-ordinary success with ordinary lives.

Thank you very much; I wish you good luck and Godspeed. Go, kiss the world."

Tips on Living !!

A Pulitzer Prize Winner's Speech... And what a speech !!
This was a speech made by Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Anna Quindlen at the graduation ceremony of an American university where she was awarded an Honorary PhD.


We are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations.

"I'm a novelist. My work is human nature. Real life is all I know. Don't ever confuse the two, your life and your work. You will walk out of here this afternoon with only one thing that no one else has. There will be hundreds of people out there with your same degree: there will be thousands of people doing what you want to do for a living. But you will be the only person alive who has sole custody of your life. Your particular life. Your entire life. Not just your life at a desk or your life on a bus or in a car or at the computer. Not just the life of your mind, but the life of your heart. Not just your bank accounts but also your soul.

People don't talk about the soul very much anymore. It's so much easier to write a resume than to craft a spirit. But a resume is cold comfort on a winter's night, or when you're sad, or broke, or lonely, or when you've received your test results and they're not so good.

Here is my resume: I am a good mother to three children. I have tried never to let my work stand in the way of being a good parent. I no longer consider myself the centre of the universe. I show up. I listen. I try to laugh. I am a good friend to my husband. I have tried to make marriage vows mean what they say. I am a good friend to my friends and them to me. Without them, there would be nothing to say to you today, because I would be a cardboard cut out. But I call them on the phone and I meet them for lunch. I would be rotten, at best mediocre, at my job if those other things were not true.

You cannot be really first rate at your work if your work is all you are. So here's what I wanted to tell you today: Get a life. A real life, not a manic pursuit of the next promotion, the bigger pay cheque, the larger house. Do you think you'd care so very much about those things if you blew an aneurysm one afternoon or found a lump in your breast?

Get a life in which you notice the smell of salt water pushing itself on a breeze at the seaside, a life in which you stop and watch how a red-tailed hawk circles over the water, or the way a baby scowls with concentration when she tries to pick up a sweet with her thumb and first finger.

Get a life in which you are not alone. Find people you love, and who love you. And remember that love is not leisure, it is work. Pick up the phone. Send an email. Write a letter. Get a life in which you are generous. And realize that life is the best thing ever, and that you have no business taking it for granted. Care so deeply about its goodness that you want to spread it around. Take money you would have spent on beer and give it to charity. Work in a soup kitchen. Be a big brother or sister. All of you want to do well. But if you do not do good too, then doing well will never be enough.

It is so easy to waste our lives, our days, our hours, and our minutes. It is so easy to take for granted the colour of our kids' eyes, the way the melody in a symphony rises and falls and disappears and rises again. It is so easy to exist instead of to live.

I learned to live many years ago. I learned to love the journey, not the destination. I learned that it is not a dress rehearsal, and that today is the only guarantee you get. I learned to look at all the good in the world and try to give some of it back because I believed in it, completely and utterly. And I tried to do that, in part, by telling others what I had learned. By telling them this: Consider the lilies of the field. Look at the fuzz on a baby's ear. Read in the back yard with the sun on your face.

Learn to be happy. And think of life as a terminal illness, because if you do, you will live it with joy and passion as it ought to be lived".

Can Meditation Be Passionate ??

This is from an email I received.. loved it so much.. couldn't help sharing it..


CAN MEDITATION BE PASSIONATE?


Yes, that is the only way for meditation to exist. Passion is energy, passion is fire, passion is life. If you are doing meditation just so-so, without any passion, without intensity, without fire, nothing will happen. If you are praying just as a formality and it is not love that has arisen in your heart, it is meaningless, it is absurd. If you are praying to God without passion there will be no connection between you and God. Only passion can become the bridge, the thirst, the hunger. The more thirsty you are, the more is the possibility. If you are utterly thirsty, if you have become just a thirst, your whole being is consumed by your passion, then only something happens -- in that intensity, in that moment of hundred-degree passion.


Don't be lukewarm. People live a lukewarm life. They are neither this nor that, hence they remain mediocre. If you want to get beyond mediocrity, create a life of great passion. Whatsoever you do, do it passionately. If you sing, then sing passionately. If you love, then love passionately. If you paint, then paint passionately. If you talk, then talk passionately. If you listen, then listen passionately. If you meditate, then meditate passionately.


And from everywhere you will start having contact with God -- wherever passion is. If you are painting with utter passion, your painting is meditation. There is no need for any other meditation. If you are dancing with absolute passion so that the dancer disappears and only the dance remains, it is meditation, no other need, nowhere to go, no yoga postures. This is the yoga postures: the dancer has disappeared and the dance is there. It is pure energy -- energy vibrating. In that state you contact. Why in that state do you contact? -- because when the passion is great, the ego dies. The ego can exist only in mediocre minds; only mediocre people are egoistic. The really great are not egoistic, they cannot be. But their life has a totally different direction, a different dimension -- the dimension of passion.


Have you observed these two words -- passion and compassion?
Passion becomes transformed into compassion. There is a quantum leap from passion into compassion --
but the quantum leap happens only when you are boiling at one hundred degrees. Then the water becomes vapor. It is the same energy that exists as passion and one day becomes compassion.


Compassion is not antagonistic to passion; it is passion come of age, it is passion bloomed. It is the spring season for passion.


I am all for passion. Do whatsoever you do but be lost into it, abandon yourself into it, dissolve yourself into it. And dissolution becomes salvation.


From The Diamond Sutra - OSHO

Vikram Buddhi -- Anti-Bush Blogger -- Wrongfully Jailed, says Family

The article below is from the Indian Express. Its is about Vikram Buddhi, an IIT alum and a student who till 2006 was pursuing his PhD at Purdue.. that is till the time he was imprisoned in the US on allegations of having written against ex-President Bush on his blog. I remember at my Univ at Ashland, and even other places, people so openly spoke against Bush; then why this disparity??

I am surprised that Vikram Buddhi's case has been highlighted in Indian newspapers alone. When I googled his name, there was not a single US newspaper that mentioned his plight.

From the Indian Express
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/seeking-sons-release-from-us-jail-father-says-ministers-help-assured/536339/

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Three years after Vikram Buddhi was arrested in the US for allegedly posting an online hate message against then President George Bush, his father will finally hear from the Indian government on what progress it has made in its efforts to secure his release.

On Wednesday, Dr Buddhi Kota Subbarao is set to be given a government update on the action taken. Subbarao has been fighting a lone legal battle for the release of his son, lodged in a prison in Chicago. US authorities had even deported Subbarao to India; illegally, he says, to block legal help to his son.

After several requests to the Ministry of External Affairs, ministers and senators, the Indian Consulate in US, and several officials, Subbarao was finally called on October 29 for a meeting with External Affairs Minister S M Krishna, to explain his son’s case. This was after several letters to the minister and other departments seeking government intervention.

“I explained to the Minister the gross irregularities in Vikram’s case carried out by Judge James T. Moody. The minister agreed there was no valid indictment charge mentioned in the case and Vikram apparently looked to have been framed,” Subbarao said.

Subbarao, a former Indian Navy Captain, urged the Minister for government intervention and a dialogue with the US authorities and Department of Justice for a review of his son’s case.

“The Minister noticed irregularities committed by Judge Moody and referred the case to the law department for possible options before the government in securing justice for Vikram. The minister assured me that by Wednesday, I will be receiving correspondence from the Ministry on the action taken.”

Vikram, who was studying applied mathematics at Purdue University, was arrested in April 2006 and charged on 11 counts. He was found guilty but his sentencing has been getting postponed since 2007. The next date for pronouncement of sentence is November 19.

“Whatever action is taken has to be before the sentence and the government has to act fast. I said as much to Mr Krishna who agreed with me in principle and directed his officials to act swiftly,” said Subbarao.

Violinist in the Metro !!

A man sat at a metro station in Washington DC and started to play the violin; it was a cold January morning. He played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time, since it was rush hour, it was calculated that thousands of people went through the station, most of them on their way to work.

Three minutes went by and a middle aged man noticed there was a musician playing. He slowed his pace and stopped for a few seconds and then hurried up to meet his schedule.

A minute later, the violinist received his first dollar tip: a woman threw the money in the till and without stopping continued to walk.

A few minutes later, someone leaned against the wall to listen to him, but the man looked at his watch and started to walk again. Clearly he was late for work.

The one who paid the most attention was a 3 year old boy. His mother tagged him along, but the kid stopped to look at the violinist. Finally the mother pushed hard and the child continued to walk turning his head all the time This action was repeated by several other children. All the parents, without exception, forced them to move on.

In the 45 minutes the musician played, only 6 people stopped and stayed for a while. About 20 gave him money but continued to walk their normal pace. He collected $32. When he finished playing and silence took over, no one noticed it. No one applauded, nor was there any recognition.

No one knew this but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the best musicians in the world. He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written with a violin worth 3.5 million dollars.

Two days before his playing in the subway, Joshua Bell sold out at a theater in Boston and the seats averaged $100.

Joshua Bell playing incognito in the metro station was organized by the Washington Post as part of a social experiment about perception, taste and priorities of people. The outlines were: in a commonplace environment at an inappropriate hour: Do we perceive beauty? Do we stop to appreciate it? Do we recognize the talent in an unexpected context?

One of the possible conclusions from this experience could be:

If we do not have a moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world playing the best music ever written, how many other things are we missing?


---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The detailed article on this Washington Post experiment carried out at L' Enfant Plaza on January 12, 2007 can be found at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html

Two quotes from the long article--

"For many of us, the explosion in technology has perversely limited, not expanded, our exposure to new experiences. Increasingly, we get our news from sources that think as we already do. And with iPods, we hear what we already know; we program our own playlists."

"Couple of years ago, a homeless guy died right there. He just lay down there and died. The police came, an ambulance came, and no one even stopped to see or slowed down to look."People walk up the escalator, they look straight ahead. Mind your own business, eyes forward. Everyone is stressed. Do you know what I mean?"

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

-- from Leisure, by W.H. Davies

How Poor Are We ??

(from an email I received)

One day, the father of a very wealthy family took his son on a trip to the country with the express purpose of showing him how poor people live.


They spent a couple of days and nights on the farm of what would be considered a very poor family.

On their return from their trip, the father asked his son, 'How was the trip?'

'It was great, Dad.'

'Did you see how poor people live?' the father asked.

'Oh yeah,' said the son. 'So, tell me, what did you learn from the trip?' asked the father

The son answered:
'I saw that we have one dog and they had four.

We have a pool that reaches to the middle of our garden and they have a creek that has no end.

We have imported lanterns in our garden and they have the stars at night.

Our patio reaches to the front yard and they have the whole horizon.

We have a small piece of land to live on and they have fields that go beyond our sight.

We have servants who serve us, but they serve others.

We buy our food, but they grow theirs.

We have walls around our property to protect us, they have friends to protect them.'


The boy's father was speechless.

Then his son added, 'Thanks Dad for showing me how poor we are.'


Isn't perspective a wonderful thing?

Makes you wonder what would happen if we all gave thanks for everything we have, instead of worrying about what we don't have.

Appreciate every single thing you have.

SEZ who? Not the farmers..

An article from "Down To Earth" magazine (CSE - India) by Nidhi Jamwal

First public audit of special economic zones in Maharashtra kickstarts a nation-wide effort

“Zameen aamcha hakkachi,
naahi konachya baapa chi ”
(This land is ours, not somebody else’s)

On September 15, this slogan rent the air of Div village, 100 km from Mumbai. Over 300 farmers from eight districts of Maharashtra met at Div in Raigad district to participate in the first-ever public audit of special economic zones (sezs). A group of non-profits initiated the public audit.

The message was: farmers would not give away their land to industry or government for sezs. “The government can take my life, but not my land,” said Dhakibai Thakur, 60-year-old farmer from Raigad’s Vadhav village. She made this clear to a panel—comprising former bureaucrats, academics, journalists, industrialists—conducting the audit.

“The idea behind the audit is to take people’s voice to the government and question the validity of the sez Act,” said Aruna Roy, founder of the non-profit Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sanghatan. “Maharashtra’s audit is a beginning. Similar audits will be carried out in other states,” she warned.


Brains behind the initiative

In July this year, the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sanghatan, the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (tiss) in Mumbai, National Centre for Advocacy Studies in Pune and others initiated plans. The organizations identified and gave affected villagers questionnaires seeking their opinion on the sez in their area and how it affected their lives.

“The questionnaire was in Marathi. If a farmer was illiterate, volunteers assisted. Discussions were held and reports compiled. Villagers presented the reports to the panel at Div,” said Surekha Dalvi, advocate and land rights activist involved in planning the public audit.

Maharashtra has the largest number of sezs approved in the country—202—and was the groups’ obvious choice for the first audit. The decision to meet in Raigad was symbolic. “Farmers here have put up a bold front in the past and are opposing Reliance Group’s Mumbai sez Ltd,” said Roy. “It was because of their stiff resistance the state held a referendum on sez. Though 96 per cent villagers voted against the sez, the government has not made the results public,” she added. (See ‘Our voice’, Down To Earth, October 15, 2008).

At the audit, farmers called sezs a suicide pact. A group from Nagpur presented their case against mihan ( Multi-modal International Hub Airport at Nagpur) sez. “The project will consume 14 villages’ land—4,025 hectare. Half the land is acquired and lying vacant,” said Babaji Dawre of Shivagaon village. “The land acquired was fertile. Since 2000, over a million orange trees have been cut down,” said Dawre whose village would be used for the airstrip. “The government can build the airstrip over our dead bodies,” he added. The airstrip would also mean the end of a robust milk economy of Shivagaon, which earns Rs 25-29 crore annually.

Farmer groups from Nashik and Pune narrated similar stories of losses, meagre compensations and cheating. A farmer from Amravati district alleged the Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation had acquired land from farmers on the pretext of ‘public good’ and given it to private companies for sezs.

“The situation is grim. The government must pause and ponder,” said Swapna Banerjee-Guha, professor at tiss, after hearing out farmers at the day-long audit. “We will compile our report and release it soon,” he said.

Audits will next be organized in Goa, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Orissa and West Bengal. Activists and farmers will then go to Delhi and demand dismissal of sezs. “We do not want sezs pushed from one district to the other. People’s concerns are the same across the country,” said Ulka Mahajan of sez -Virodhi Sangharsh Samiti, Raigad.

Why the Fear in Love ??

Love is natural; it is already there in your heart, ready to burst. The only thing that has to be done is to allow it. You are creating all sorts of hindrances and obstacles. You are not allowing it. It is already there -- you simply relax a little and it will come, it will burst, it will bloom. And when it blooms for an ordinary person, immediately the ordinary has become the extraordinary.

Love makes everybody extraordinary; it is such an alchemy. An ordinary woman suddenly is transfigured when you love her. She is no more ordinary; she is the most extraordinary woman that ever existed. It is not that you are blind, as others will say. In fact, you have seen the extraordinary which is always hidden in every ordinariness. Love is the only eye, the only vision, the only clarity. You have seen in the ordinary woman the whole womanhood -- past, present, future -- all women combined together. When you love a woman, you have realized the very feminine soul in her. Suddenly she becomes extraordinary. Love makes everybody extraordinary.

If you go deeper into your love... because there are difficulties to go deeper in love, because the more you go deeper, the more you lose yourself, a fear arises, a trembling grips you. You start avoiding the depth of love because the depth of love is just like death. You create barriers between you and your beloved, because the woman seems like an abyss -- and can be absorbed into it -- and she is. You come out of a woman; she can absorb you: that is the fear. She is the womb, the abyss, and when she can give birth to you, why not death? In fact, only that which gives you birth can give you death, so the fear is there. A woman is dangerous, very mysterious. You cannot live without her and you cannot live with her. You cannot go very far away from her because suddenly, the further you go the more ordinary you become. And you cannot come very close, because the closer you come... You disappear.

This is the conflict in every love. So one has to make a compromise; you don't go very far away, you don't come very close. You stand just in the middle somewhere, balancing yourself. But then love cannot go deep. Depth is attained only when you drop all fears and you jump headlong. The danger is there, and the danger is true: that love will kill your ego. Love is poison to the ego -- life to you, but death to the ego. One has to take the jump. If you allow intimacy to grow, if you come closer and closer and closer and dissolve into the being of a woman, now she will not only be extraordinary, she will become divine because she will become a door to eternity. The closer you come to a woman, the more you feel she is a door of something beyond.

And the same happens to the woman with the man. She has her own problems. The problem is that if she comes closer to the man, the closer she comes, the man starts escaping. Because the closer the woman comes, the man becomes more and more afraid. The closer a woman comes, the man starts escaping her, finding a thousand and one excuses to be away. So a woman has to wait; and if she waits then again there is a problem: if she takes no initiative it looks like indifference, and indifference can kill love.

Nothing is more dangerous to love than indifference. Even hatred is good, because at least you have certain type of relationship with the person you hate. Love can survive hate, but love cannot survive indifference. And the woman always in a difficulty... if she takes the initiative the man simply escapes. No man can tolerate a woman who takes initiative. That means that the abyss is coming on her own near you! -- before it is too late, you escape.

That's how Don Juans are created. Then from one woman to another they go on. They live in a hit-and-run affair, because if you are too much there, then the abyss will absorb you. Don Juans are not lovers, not at all. They look like lovers because continuously they are on move -- every day a new woman. But they are people deep in fear, because if they remain with one woman for long, then intimacy will grow, and they will come closer, and who knows what will happen? So they just live for a certain amount of time; before it is too late, they escape.

Byron loved almost hundreds of women in his small span of life. He is the archetype, the Don Juan. He never knew love. How can you know love when you move from one to another, and another, and another? Love needs seasoning; it needs time to settle; it needs intimacy; it needs deep trust; it needs faith. The woman is always in trouble -- "What to do?" If she takes initiative, the man escapes. If she remains as if not interested, then too the man escapes because the woman is not interested. So she has to choose a mid-ground: a little initiative and a little indifference together, a mixture. And both are in a bad shape, because these compromises will not allow you to grow.

Compromise never allows anybody to grow. Compromise is a calculating, cunning thing; it is businesslike, not love-like. When lovers are really unafraid of each other and the dropping of the ego, they jump into each other headlong. They jump so deeply that they become each other. They become in fact one, and when this oneness happens then love transforms into prayer. When this oneness happens, then suddenly a religious quality comes to love.

First love has the quality of sex. If it is shallow, it will be reduced to sex; in fact it will not be love. If love becomes deeper, then it will have the quality of spirituality, the quality of divineness. So love is just a bridge between this world and that, sex and samadhi. That's why I go on calling the journey, from sex to superconsciousness. Love is just a bridge. If you don't move on the bridge, sex will be your life, your whole life, very ordinary, very ugly. Sex can be beautiful, but only with love and as part of love. Alone in itself it is ugly. It is just like this: your eyes are beautiful, but if the eyes are taken out of your sockets they will become ugly. The most beautiful eyes will become ugly if they are cut from the body.

-- Osho

The Good Old Days !! (score 6)

Someone asked the other day, 'What was your favorite fast food when you were growing up?'
'We didn't have fast food when I was growing up,' I informed him.
'All the food was slow.'

'C'mon, seriously. Where did you eat?'
'It was a place called 'at home,'' I explained!
'Mum cooked every day and when Dad got home from work, we sat down together at the dining room table, and if I didn't like what she put on my plate I was allowed to sit there until I did like it.'

By this time, the kid was laughing so hard I was afraid he was going to suffer serious internal damage, so I didn't tell him the part about how I had to have permission to leave the table.
But here are some other things I would have told him about my childhood if I figured his system could have handled it :

Some parents NEVER owned their own house, wore Levis , set foot on a golf course, traveled out of the country or had a credit card.

My parents never drove me to school. I had a bicycle that weighed probably 50 pounds, and only had one speed, (slow).
We didn't have a television in our house until I was 19.
It was, of course, black and white, and the station went off the air at midnight, after playing the national anthem and a poem about God; it came back on the air at about 6 a.m. and there was usually a locally produced news and farm show on, featuring local people...

I never had a telephone in my room.The only phone was on a party line. Before you could dial, you had to listen and make sure some people you didn't know weren't already using the line.

Pizzas were not delivered to our home... But milk was.

All newspapers were delivered by boys and all boys delivered newspapers --my brother delivered a newspaper, six days a week. He had to get up at 6AM every morning.

Movie stars kissed with their mouths shut. At least, they did in the movies.. There were no movie ratings because all movies were responsibly produced for everyone to enjoy viewing, without profanity or violence or most anything offensive.

If you grew up in a generation before there was fast food, you may want to share some of these memories with your children or grandchildren. Just don't blame me if they bust a gut laughing.

Growing up isn't what it used to be, is it?

MEMORIES from a friend :

My Dad is cleaning out my grandmother's house (she died in December) and he brought me an old Royal Crown Cola bottle. In the bottle top was a stopper with a bunch of holes in it.. I knew immediately what it was, but my daughter had no idea. She thought they had tried to make it a salt shaker or something. I knew it as the bottle that sat on the end of the ironing board to 'sprinkle' clothes with because we didn't have steam irons.. Man, I am old.

How many do you remember?

Head lights dimmer switches on the floor.

Ignition switches on the dashboard.

Pant leg clips for bicycles without chain guards.

Soldering irons you heat on a gas burner.

Using hand signals for cars without turn signals.

Older Than Dirt Quiz :
Count all the ones that you remember not the ones you were told about.
Ratings at the bottom.

1.Candy cigarettes
2..Coffee shops with tableside juke boxes
3.Home milk delivery in glass bottles
4. Party lines on the telephone
5.Newsreels before the movie
6..TV test patterns that came on at night after the last show and were there until TV shows started again in the morning. (there were only 3 channels [if you were fortunate])
7.Peashooters
8. Howdy Doody
9. 45 RPM records
10.Hi-fi's
11 Metal ice trays with lever
12 Blue flashbulb
13.Cork popguns
14. Studebakers
15. Wash tub wringers

If you remembered 0-3 = You're still young
If you remembered 3-6 = You are getting older
If you remembered 7-10 = Don't tell your age,
If you remembered 11-15 =You're older than dirt!

I might be older than dirt but those memories are some of the best parts of my life.

Don't forget to pass this along!!
Especially to all your really OLD friends....