Beyond the hype

Has there been something that you never got, something so hyped that you didn’t see what the deal was, until one day, all of a sudden you went, ohhhhhhh!

I must’ve been a prissy child growing up, because I thought I preferred apples over mangoes. Don’t get me wrong, I still love apples. The subtle tart sweetness, the crunch, the colour… but mangoes – the magic of Banganpalle, the glorious cream of Himayat – were only revealed to me later.

Same thing with this ‘hari chutney’ business. South Indian prejudice about a North Indian favourite. Then one day, with a generous slather of mayonnaise and thin cucumber slices, I had hari chutney in a sandwich. The flavours had me closing my eyes in worship. 

Somehow I have always had trouble making it though. The coconut chutney we make almost every other day has the volume-providing coconut and roasted gram, which makes it wholesome. But the ingredients in green chutney grind themselves into an insubstantial paste. Make too much, it turns black and spoils before you can use it all, make too little and there’s hardly enough for the mini mixie jar to get its teeth into. Occasionally, I’ve even taken mortar and pestle to it, so that I can make just as much as I want. I made a decent sized batch today and I foresee sandwiches, samosa and pani-puri-at-home in the near future.

Aamad Aamad!

Greetings, dear ones, on the occasion of the Summer Solstice.

Which also appropriately doubles up as the International Day of Yoga.

And then also, today’s the day when Sadhguru returns home, after a gruelling, extremely arduous 100-day solo motorcycle journey to bring about awareness that our soil is dying, and that we should do something drastic and now, if we are to save the earth from certain disaster.

 

In today's The Times of India

Before he left, outlining his route through 27 nations and a variety of climates, he had asked, ‘do you think I’ll make it?’ I’ll admit now, it had struck chill in our hearts. What did he mean? Why was he even asking such a thing? Why even think of not making it? Because with assurance comes complacency. Because in safety, we are content to sit back a little. He was living life on the edge every moment, with no safety net; the next moment of life was a gift, not a privilege. So, I suppose, it is for all of us, whether on a motorcycle adventure or no.

***

Somewhere on Day 2 or 3 of the journey, Sadhguru was riding through a drizzle. A volunteer in the pilot vehicle asked him over radio if he wished to pull over for a bit. There was a trace of a chuckle in Sadhguru’s voice: we have an event to get to, he’d said, let’s push on.

Looking back at that moment makes me laugh – little did we know the weather conditions that awaited on the entire journey. Snow, rain, sleet, winds so strong they threatened to lift the front wheels of Sadhguru’s 350-kg bike, incessant poor visibility conditions with only one mad motorcyclist on the highways of Europe. Constantly getting from one place to the other on a tight schedule, events, meetings, interviews given on the move….

Then in Arabia came the heat. 47˚C that melted the tar off the roads. I cannot even imagine being in a helmet with protective gear, poor guards against the tiny particles of sand that penetrated the nostrils and every pore of the body. Even in India, the heat continued through Gujarat and Rajasthan, and it was only when Sadhguru reached Maharashtra did the cool monsoons greet them. The last legs are done, and Sadhguru comes home today.

Ask him why he goes through this, and he says it’s because he couldn’t get through to people otherwise. For us Isha walas, it’s been a restless time. Apart from raising a din about soil, there wasn’t enough to do except watch our Guru put himself through the most trying of penances. How to sleep soundly at night, knowing he’s out there riding through god knows what peril? Many stepped out on journeys of their own making, trying in spirit to be with him. One man set off from Kashi on foot to make his way to Isha Yoga Center in Coimbatore. He reached there last week. In Europe, many meditators set out to traverse parts of the ancient pilgrimage Via Francigena to greet Sadhguru in Rome. There have been innumerable motorcycle journeys, cycle journeys, marathons, padayatras across the world; one 11-year-old roller-skated from Hyderabad to Nagarjuna Sagar.

It was the same spirit perhaps that had Shweta and me embarking on two huge itineraries in a span of a couple of months. Just before Sadhguru was flagged off in London, we toured the temples of Tamil Nadu, touching the four pancha bhuta sthalas (the fifth is in Andhra) and everything else we encountered en route. Then towards the end of the summer, we went to Maharashtra which holds four jyotirlingas and a rich cluster of samadhis.

This morning, as I cooked, Nusrat and party sang Khabaram raseed im shab ki nigaar khuahi aamad… Tonight, word has come that the beloved arrives…

Part 3: Save Soil

Sadhguru is taking the Save Soil Movement to 4 billion people in the world. Tomorrow he will address the COP 15 at Cote d’Ivoire, urging 197 nations to enshrine policies for soil health. Already, since he set off on his lone motorcycle journey from London, Sadhguru has meandered through Europe and parts of the Middle East in a 100-day journey across 30,000 km. He has been talking to people, governments, UN bodies, media and organisations to make this come about. 

 

The response has been tremendous. It is amazing to see people so open, so willing to do what it takes to achieve this goal. 

 

Please join in too 🙏! Push aside your inertia, put away your cynicism, overcome that feeling of resistance of being roped into some random do-gooding… this is REALLY important. For the sake of our children, we must do this.

In about two decades or so, we will have 40% less food and a population of 9.3 billion people. It is not a pleasant prospect. UN Agencies are foreseeing civil wars, riots for food… oh, not in faraway Africa where anything can happen… they’re forecasting this for Chicago, for the USA, for the First World. Already 27 of 30 wars in Africa in recent decades have been over fertile lands. When they run out, about 1.2 billion people are projected to migrate. Where will they go? They will be at your doorstep, eyeing hungrily your morsel of food.

What we need to do right now is this: speak up and be heard by your government.
Here is a link: https://www.consciousplanet.org/letters

The interface is simple. Put in your region, your name… it generates a letter that you can copy. Send it to the right people in your country with the emails provided. That is all. 

Also, do speak on your social media about Soil and the crisis it is facing. The facts are all there on various UN and other informative websites. If that's all too much to trawl through, savesoil.org has plenty of shareable resources. I was shocked to learn that the situation was this bad, and you will likely be dismayed as well. However it is very much possible to tackle this if we make a loud enough din, because it just means bringing soil degradation into the narrative, which it simply has not been so far. The solution itself is simple, it's just a matter of awareness and will.

When we turn around this soil crisis, you will have done something very critical for future generations: demanded a future worth living.

Part 2: Holding All the Answers

How is the ecological crisis to be approached? Do we go on obsessing over coal and carbon, over who is to be blamed, who must bear the brunt and so on? Do we look for ways to harness solar energy and minimise our footprint? Do we research new and clean energy for our airplanes? Do we stop ravaging the seas? Do we change the way we eat? There are many discussions on many platforms but you will not have heard too many people talk of averting Soil Extinction. (Yes, there is such a thing and it is happening already in many parts of the world. About 52% of the world’s agricultural soil is degraded, severely impacting the quantity as well as the quality of our produce.)

What does soil degradation mean? It means the lack or depletion of organic content in soil. Far from being inert, soil is a complex symbiotic system of organic matter, minerals, gases, liquids and living organisms. It is alive. Take all this out, and soil is reduced to sand. A handful of rich soil contains 8-10 billion microorganisms – more than all the humans on earth. The soil is in fact an underground extension and counterpart of our own bodies, with its teeming microbial presence. After all, about 60% of our own bodies are microbes, aren’t they?

Oddly enough, soil seems to be underpinning factor for a number of ecological issues that we’re facing. Our problems with excess carbon in the atmosphere, our water scarcity, our problems with cycles of floods and drought, our dying rivers and streams, our suicidal farmers (who are finding growing food a heart-breaking business), the looming migration disaster across continents and also the upcoming food crisis. All these – I repeat ALL THESE – can be addressed by simply taking care of the soil.

Rich soil, with plenty of green cover, massively sequesters carbon. Rich soil can hold eight times more water than all the rivers of the world. Rich soil feeds our rivers, releasing water slowly, sustainably. Rich organic soil doesn’t permit water run-off. Rich soil produces rich food and in turn strong, healthy human beings.

This is what Sadhguru has taken up – a global movement to save soil. It is an awareness campaign to alert the citizens of the world to this problem and at once, to introduce it to the solution. (It is characteristic of Sadhguru that he never points to a problem without bringing in the solution as well.) In this case, it is absurdly simple: bring about policy to ensure that agricultural soil has a minimum of 3-6% organic content. This is amazingly easy to do and there are hundreds of ways to do it. There are two sources of organic content: animal waste and plant matter. This needs to go back into the soil.

Governments across the world need to enshrine this into their policy – and farmers need incentives to do this. In India, a simple device like mandating a cover crop during the harsh summer months is a matter of merely Rs 450 per acre. Just throw some seed, any seed, make sure the land stays under shade, take whatever low yields there are and put the stalks and haulms back into the earth. That’s all. In 5-8 years, the organic content creeps up, enriching the topsoil and we will have successfully averted soil extinction.

Part 1: Sickening for Something

The first time I was made sharply aware that we humans weren’t doing a grand job of living in harmony with nature was when I was in high school. One of our textbooks had an extract by the fabulous Gerald Durrell, British naturalist, conservationist, and writer, from a book called Catch me a Colobus. The book is full of adventures in Sierra Leone, where Durrell sought rare endangered animals to bring home to his zoo, which was intended to help conserve various species from dying out entirely.

In the final chapter, ‘Animals for Ever’ he makes a desperate plea for some sense in our dealing with the world around us. He speaks of how humans drove to near extinction two abundant species that no one before could’ve imagined dying out. One of them was the Passenger Pigeon, one of the most numerous avian species ever and the other was the North American Bison. The latter was hunted as a matter of policy, and its slaughter was carried out as a way to starve Native Americans into submission. ‘Every Buffalo Dead Is an Indian Gone’ – that was the cry that led to this horrendous pile of buffalo skulls in this picture taken in Michigan, USA, in 1892.

A passage from his book so stirred my emotions, it awoke a gnawing worry for this planet that has never since left me. Durrell writes:

“…even today the majority of people do not realise the extent to which we are destroying the world we live in. We are like a set of idiot children, let loose with poison, saw, sickle, shotgun and rifle, in a complex and beautiful garden that we are slowly but surely turning into a barren and infertile desert. It is quite possible that in the last few weeks or so, one mammal, one bird, one reptile, and one plant or tree, have become extinct. I hope not but I know for certain that in the same time one mammal, bird, reptile, and plant or tree, have been driven just that much nearer to oblivion.

The world is as delicate and as complicated as a spider’s web, and like a spider’s web, if you touch one thread, you send shudders running through all the other threads that make up the web. But we’re not just touching the web, we’re tearing great holes in it; we’re waging a sort of biological war on the world around us. We are felling forests quite unnecessarily and creating dust bowls, and thereby even altering the climate. We are clogging our rivers with industrial filth, and we are now polluting the sea and the air.

…Conservation means preserving the life of the whole world, be it trees or plants, be it even man himself. It is to be remembered that some tribes have been exterminated very successfully in the last few hundred years and that others are being harried to extinction today – the Patagonian Indians, the Eskimoes, and so on. By our thoughtlessness, our greed and our stupidity we will have created, within the next fifty years or perhaps even less, a biological situation whereby we will find it difficult to live in the world at all. We are breeding like rats and this population explosion must be halted in some way. All religious factions, all political factions, the governments of the world, must face facts, for if we persist in ignoring them then, breeding like rats, we will have to die like them also.”

Grim words, but so prescient! Fifty years, he’d said. He wrote this in 1972. Exactly half a century ago. Climate change is now a fact of life, we are further devastating the planet in myriad ways, driving our fellow creatures into desperate pockets for basic survival, and in many cases towards outright extinction. Right now, of the assessed biodiversity, there are more than 142,500 species on The IUCN Red List, and more than 40,000 species are marked as being threatened with extinction, including 41% of amphibians, 37% of sharks and rays, 34% of conifers, 33% of reef building corals, 26% of mammals and 13% of birds.

Our agricultural practices are so unthinking, we are losing about 27,000 species (yes, 27,000 species!) of soil microbial life every year. Sawing off the very branch that we sit on… do we really imagine we can live well without having a healthy planet as well?

Just Back

Just got back yesterday from a huge 12-day temple run of Tamil Nadu.

A ‘south tour’ is a pretty much mandatory school excursion but I don’t know how it came about that I had never visited many of these places before. But I am glad that these were not ticked off in while in an unripe state, but instead visited with my faculties open, sharp and receptive.

Thillai Nataraja Temple, Chidambaram

What an experience! What to say first, how to order my thoughts, which aspects to touch on? Too much to say, too much to imbibe, too many bags to unpack, too many clothes to wash.

So I’ll be doing a small series in the days to come, trying to share the most essential aspects of this memorable tour.

(Picture: By Jean-Pierre Dalbéra from Paris, France - Le temple de Shiva Nataraja (Chidambaram, Inde), CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37214047)

Phir wahi dil

As I made the bed this morning, loath to waste even five minutes to a mundane job, I played on YouTube the superlative ‘Aawaz deke humein tum bulao’. Just under five minutes and it sucked me into a vortex of nostalgia. 

Movies in India have morphed so much. There are grim, dreary, bleak reflections of society, there are political statements, social statements… always, always pontificating on something or the other; revealing the underbelly of something or the other, taking a stand on something or the other. In a sense, they have all become very masculine: hard, primarily concerned with the outside, with the larger picture; rather than feminine, which is soft, and more about the particular, the subjective and individual experience.

Are we never to see any particular stories about human beings anymore? Or for that matter even a genuine lip-sync song? Have we been embarrassed out of our natural and spontaneous musicals? It seems the only songs that are sung out are those performed on stage, or item songs. The rest are background scores. Am I wrong?

I don’t remember the plot of ‘Professor’ and don’t remember the context for this intensely romantic song set in Raga Shivaranjani. How inspired were Shankar-Jaikishan with this one… the faintly ominous large drum in the beginning, yielding space to the tabla and Lata Mangeshkar’s soaring voice… The song pulls you in, makes you wonder what is up with these two people…
How wonderful would it be if we could have such mellow, romantic stories made with all the wonderful filmmaking techniques and technology we have today!


 

***

I was discussing this with my sister the other day. How is it that OTT platforms, which have mushroomed in such large numbers, have not yet tapped into this wonderful bank of old classics in any language? Where are the Hitchcocks, the Gene Kelly musicals, the b/w favourites? The Shammi Kapoor hits, the Joy Mukherjee must-watches, the Best of Dev Anand, Dilip Kumar, Filmfare awardees of 4-5 decades ago? Where are the Telugu mythologicals and socials? I don’t know about the economics in connection with Hollywood fare, but surely Indian goldies must be low hanging fruit? 

Maybe they'll get there eventually?

Handover

Twelve years since these anguished posts [1] [2] [3].
 
Twelve years since my mother passed. A full solar cycle comes to a close in a few months. It seems just like the other day, and yet it feels like a lifetime or two have passed.

I think I've said before that my mother dealt with the news of imminent death with a rare fortitude and pragmatism. She called for the ‘bank bag’, signed a few blank cheques, made sure the papers were in good order. She roughly planned the menu for the 13th day death rites. She said her goodbyes with love, and kindness almost – she left behind a legion of bereaved people, each of whom had experienced her friendship in their own unique way.

As she lay very fatigued from the aggressive cancer, I remember bringing her a dozen dabbas from the kitchen, ascertaining the precise nature of the myriad unlabelled powders on the shelves. “That is vangi bhaath powder, that is Nagamani aunty’s recipe for curries… that pickle mix is old, throw it away…” A handing over of the kitchen in a manner of speaking.

And I took down a few recipes and ratios the way she made them – the staple idli and dosa, a couple of powders. “For adai,” she told my sister, “just leave it to your father. Only, he tends to make the batter a little too thick, so just add a little water when you make them.” She was so right – my father’s adai hittu ranks among the best in the world.

To mark that sharply-etched time, I have Johana West’s (bitter)sweet haiku.

old family recipe
hoping our hands
are the same size

From a time when recipes weren’t written in cup measures but were an intuitive affair involving a pinch of this, a dollop of that and as my mother said back then, indicating less than a quarter of her hand, ‘ondu ishtu uppu’ (this much salt).

Ram naam ras paan

Kumarji has been an acquired taste for me. Although I’d hear some pieces repeatedly, the unique aesthetic that he crafted escaped me with the more technical renditions. But he’s grown on me over the years. During the Samyama program (one of the advanced programs at Isha), they played on loop a few Nirguni bhajans by him. In the state I was in – open, empty – my Master seeped into me in Kumar Gandharva’s voice.

For a few days now I’ve had this earworm. Raga Kalyan in which Kumarji sings a small tukda from Ramcharitmanas. A gorgeous gorgeous piece. Someone in the comments elucidates that the whole verse goes like this:

देखराबा मातहिं निज अद्भुत रूप अखंड।
रोम रोम प्रति लगो कोटि कोटि ब्रह्माँड॥
अगनित रवि शशि सिव चतुरानन।
बहुगिरि सरित सिंधु महिकानन॥
काल कर्म गुन ग्यान सुभाऊ।
सोउ देखा जो सुना न काऊ॥

This, I understand, is from an episode from the Baal Kanda, where Kaushalya is given a glimpse of the Lord’s vishvaroopa:

She saw therein countless suns and moons, Sivas and four-faced Brahmas, and a number of mountains, rivers, oceans, plains and woods, as well as the spirit of time, the principle of action, the modes of Prakrti (Sattva, Rajas and Tamas), the spirit of knowledge and Nature and many more things of which she had never heard before.
(Translation from Ramcharitmanas.org)

Of Krishna’s vishwaroopa darshanam I had heard many times but I had not known that Tulsidasji describes Rama showing his mother the Truth as well.

Listening to these four lines leaves me in a jumble of replete bliss scrubbed in with shades of longing, regret, and a certain grasping greed. If four lines, taken out of context can be so beautiful, the mind wishes to acquire all of Ramcharitmanas. It doesn’t work that way, but that is the mind’s way.

Anyway, here it is, Kumar Gandharva with Aganita Ravi:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyWhNcKGmHY

Two Sticks and the Exception

I remember a time when I thought chopsticks fiddly and a distinctly oddly conceived tool. Two sticks, I ask you! But so it always is - one culture's way of doing things will seem very difficult to another. I remember Sadhguru chuckling once about how South Indians manage runny rasam saadam with their hands and THAT while eating on banana leaves. It is a feat, no question.

Lack of skill notwithstanding we found chopsticks intriguing and I remember laughing a lot at our clumsy attempts at picking up mango pieces on a sleepover at Alina's. And being soooo impressed with Karishma Kapoor's nonchalant skill in Dil Toh Pagal Hai. Such mastery seemed a far cry away.

Now however, one way or the other, I've become handy with these utensils that have been in use since 1200 BC. East Asian shows, for one - the Koreans eat rather a lot in their dramas, and by just observation almost, I've picked up the knack. As for how hungry Korean dramas make you, that's another story. (I wish Indian TV and OTT producers would get their act TOGETHER! Contact me on email for consultation on how to re-orient the industry.)

But to chopsticks again, my cousin brought me some nicely tapered ones from her travels, my sister gifted me a stainless steel pair in the Korean style, and I have a few blunt Chinese-style ones in wood and plastic, so now I've a nice collection for every kind of application. I find myself reaching for them when cooking anything chunky that needs dexterous turning on the pan. Can't reach for a piece of pickle at the bottom of the bottle? No problem. Need some alma murabba or prunes halfway down the jar? Piece o' cake. 

Obviously I now eat noodles with chopsticks but there is one exception. Maggi - done the desi street-side way, with tamatar, pyaaz, capsicum, chillies and masala - simply cries out for the fork. Not the elegant sort with long tines and embellished handles, but the thin cheap variety where the tines could possibly impale your tongue, where the handle could cut your finger if you held it too tightly. That kind of fork, scraping against the steel plate as you try to salvage as much masala as you possibly can.

Bin Sataguru aapno nahi koi

This Guru Poornima, sharing this exquisitely imagined and executed song video from Sounds of Isha.

Kabir, singing again in the female voice of the seeker, says the comforts of the maternal home will no longer do. The maternal home, traditionally considered to be among the most secure and comfortable places to be... where you are well looked after, where you are pampered, allowed the freedom to simply be. But even this haven will not do.

There is a 'nagari'...  Saeein ki nagari, the Master's Realm, where none of these physical symbols apply - no sun, no moon, no elements that make up our physical world... she seeks that place.

 

Who would tell the beloved of my longing? Who would show my the way? Who would take me there? 

Presenting Naiharwa...

https://youtu.be/5h2566_fTDw

 

Touch and Go

Balancing out the pleasure you get from online games is the hoops the makers put you through in order to get you to buy from them – coins, energy, gemstones… all the in-game currencies that apply in that universe. Understandable, I suppose. But I’m miserly and would much prefer to watch their advertisements to support them than fork out cash just because I’m impatient.

Most games would like you playing them – a lot. Anything to keep you hooked and coming back for more. Running out of currency? A sudden gift or windfall will keep you in the game for while longer.

Then I came across Murder in the Alps. It’s a hidden objects game with a lovely 1930s theme. Anna, our protagonist, is the journalist-detective and you must help her find the clues to piece together this very intriguing locked room mystery in which corpses keep turning up with delicious regularity. The set of suspects includes a cuckoo Indophile professor who is chasing after the elusive Vedic recipe for the elixir Soma. The artwork is spectacular, the voice acting is fantastic, the interface smooth and exciting – the atmosphere of the game is top-notch.

 

Except, they don’t want you to play.

You get 200 energy to start off with. And as Anna examines a scene looking for these hidden objects that will help her understand what the hell is going on in this forsaken, snow-boarded inn in the Swiss mountains, every item you touch on her behalf will drain you of 5 to 30 units. Depending on how frenzied you are, you could play for 10 or 20 minutes at the most.

And then, unless you are willing to pay quite handsomely for more energy, you wait. The energy replenishes itself at the rate of one unit in eight minutes. Which means a wait of upwards of 26 hours to max your quota – which, I repeat, lasts you gameplay of 20 minutes. If you are desperate, there are ads to watch that’ll give you 10 energy at a time.

It's perfect sadhana actually. You touch the screen with the utmost awareness and only when you must. And you learn to wait. This view is solipsistic and you must grant me the indulgence: considering I have a tendency to be addicted to games, that’s the sound of my Guru having the last laugh.