Daylight Again..in India

I hope you have time to go to India and visit my pal Rauf a photographer. You will not be disappointed.

One of his provacative sets of thoughts goes like this...

"I have always lived here in India, its like living in thousand different places. Language, food and culture changes every 100 miles. I have never been away, Under protest I don't have a passport, I am fighting with myself and the establishment. why do I need a passport and visas to see places under the same sun. You get the same sunlight as I do. If you look at the earth from space you don't see any boundries, All the lines we have drawn to divide ourselves make no sense. I have written about in some old blog.

No I don't have a blog in any native language. I have seen blogs in Malayalam, the language of state of kerala. Apart from English I speak four other Indian languages and I am not good at any of them, including English, I manage somehow.

You will be surprised to know that a comfortable train journey of 1000 Kilometers costs less than 10 dollars here in India. Food and stay is ridiculously cheap even for a low income guys like me. Though there are places to stay and modes of travel which cost the sky.
Pretty chaotic which is fun sometimes irritating, India has its own evils, though a land of enlightenment and wisdom (we Export it through countless Gurus and swamys who make merry in western countries selling our philosophy, please avoid them at any cost)

You would love it or hate it but you'll never be indifferent to India. It will be a unique experience.

Oops I was so tired last night I posted this without adding the whole post. Rauf has talked about organic food being expensive in India and the high level of pesticides. Here is an article from NYT's about Whole Foods. In previous post you can see a photo of Stagg with our Whole Foods shopping cart. One of the most amazing things is the cost of organic food in America. I am so impressed how competitive Whole Foods is here in Chicago with mainstream grocery stores. In Toronto, I would go to Whole Foods, look around, get inspired and then go to The Big Carrot or Noahs for the same food often dollars cheaper. I am glad NYT's has covered this story because Whole Foods really deserves credit for their competitive prices and beautiful displays and shopping experience. Rauf,you and I often talk of WATER and FOOD and compare North America to India... maybe Whole Foods will turn their magic and skills in other countries? When I was a teen ager, I used to do lots of road trips with my friends, one of them who brought Flax Seed Oil into mainstream diets, and we used to pull into a town and search out the health food stores...it was always a big deal, a challenge. No way I could believe it would become a popular belief system like it has nowadays. And cost effective.

In 1993, the last time anyone counted, fewer than half of urban Indians (42.9 per cent) had any access to sanitation facilities, and a puny 3.5 per cent of rural Indians. Some 16 per cent of city people and 20 per cent of rural people had no clean drinking water. Farmers currently take 85 per cent of all India's renewable water, and ,just to feed the new people, demand will rise 50 per cent by 2005. Industrial centres, most of them in the same areas as the most fertile land will triple their demand for water by the same year. As an FAO study put it, the results do not identify India as suffering from severe water stress but Indias percentage is well above worse than, the solvable water level.

On the other hand, the ramshackle sprawling chaotic ethnically complex more-or-less democracy that is India was widely expected to be an international pauper and an agricultural basket case by the 1950's, and instead it has become self-sufficent in food production and a net exporter of food grains.

On the other hand, the Green Revolution and the grand scheme of large-scale water development projects launched by Jawaharlal Nehru after independance have now run their course. India's ambitious use, or overuse, of its rivers served their purpose in their time. They helped knit the unweildly country together, and food production rose from a measly 0.3 per cent to well over 3 per cent, a phenomenal increase. But they have also caused irrigation and antagonism in downstream countries. Indias quarrels with Pakistan and Bangladesh are not just religious and ethnic, they are resource-based. The Green Revolution depended not only on more productive seed grains but on irrigation and pesticides. Both have run out their string, maximized their potential. There is no more water to be had; irrigation is increasing the amount of saline soil; and pesticieds have poisoned an unsettling amount of what land is left. And the inexorable grind of population is now negating what few grains are still to be made. from Water by Marq de Villiers