Boondon ke baan

Sitting in a house that has been wisely built on a high foundation, on a part of the street where the ground swells rather than troughs, I say it’s been a wonderful monsoon in Telangana. The people down our street would come after me with their hawaii chappals, because they’ve been inundated once too many, but there it is.

(One wall is leaking with the incessant dampness and the newly laid paint is bulging along a crack. I’m suffering too, just saying.)

But *backs away cautiously* yeah, sorry, your troubles are bigger.

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One week we didn’t see the sun at all. But at least there was the reliability factor. It was raining, that was it and we wrung everything out to the max, hung clothes on the indoor clothes-rod and pressed the fans into service.

This week, it’s been hide and seek. A drizzle will come, everyone shouts and warns the neighbours, the whole family rushes out to pull the clothes off the wires (added to which is the complication of clothes pegs). I go for the drier things first, my father aims for the nearest garments. We get in each other’s way, some more shouting ensues. A rueful word and shake of the head to the neighbours who are in a similar flurry. Then soon after we’ve managed to get the hangers and hoist everything up on the perch inside, the sun comes out. C’est la vie.

To honour those grey skies, these benevolent, fierce and moody rain gods, the sudden downpours, the raging gutters, this gorgeous haiku by Susan Constable:

cloudburst
the sound of raindrops
changing size 

 

TN Tour 3: The Auspicious One

The very first temple we halted at was significant to the purpose of our journey. Sadhguru was just setting off on a huge environmental movement, a push to make the whole planet more conscious, more sensitive to all life, all lives. On the Mahashivratri preceding this mammoth journey, Sadhguru had said, “Shiva is Pashupati, the lord of all creatures. Most earthly of all Divine entities and the master of Biodiversity.”

So, in this most auspicious of starts, we halted at the Pashupatiswarar koil in Karur. This is a shrine of great antiquity, one of the famed 275 Paadal Petra Sthalams*. So potent, the poet saints Sundarar and Sambandar are said to have composed thevaram pathigam here. 

 

Here, we bowed to the lord of all creatures. Our human-centric way of dominating the planet is too crude a way to live, the damage we are wreaking on the seas, on the forests, on the grasslands, on the soil is too horrendous. It is very clear we cannot go on this way. 

This temple is also the spot where the great siddha Karuvurar chose to leave. One of the 18 lofty siddhars of Tamil Nadu, this man’s achievements and accomplishments are so many, it is breathtaking. He was the yogi who prompted and guided the building of the stunning ‘periya kovil’ at Thanjavur by Raja Raja Chola I. (But more of that anon.)

Karuvurar’s shrine lies to a side behind the main temple and we sat for a while absorbing what we could. The universe is immense and the vessel we hold is paltry. But dissolution is possible. Peeling off a thin strip at a time will do the trick.

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*The Paadal Petra Sthalams, also known as Thevara Sthalam, are 275 temples that are revered in the verses of Saiva Nayanars in the 6th-9th century CE and are amongst the greatest Shiva temples of the continent.

TN Tour 2: Panguni Uttiram

We had never heard the words ‘panguni uttiram’ before this. We were making hotel bookings and a chatty manager of a Palani hotel told us he was so sorry he couldn’t take our reservation, they were full up because of panguni uttiram. What’s that, I asked him. Oh, a very important festival in Tamil Nadu with special significance to Muruga, he told us. We looked at the panchanga for the first time then, and found that the full moon was to fall on 18^th March. Our plans had formed suddenly – Sadhguru had left for the Caribbean on 5^th March and we had given ourselves a couple of days to chart out the itinerary, pack and make arrangements. A purely practical plan without any reference to auspicious days or anything.

Palani was already special to us for a few reasons, so we readjusted our plans slightly. Since we had both been to Madurai in the past few years, we decided to skip the overnight stay there and head straight from Rameshwaram to Palani. It was a longish haul but we thought it would be the perfect place to be at on the auspicious Purnima.

Turns out, the festivities for panguni uttiram aren’t just on the full moon day, but occupy the entire ‘paksha’ or waxing moon phase leading up to it. In fact, precisely the period we were to roam Tamil Nadu, hopping from temple to gorgeous temple.

***

We got the perfect ringside view of the festivities at Kanchi. We trundled off by auto to Ekambareshwara only to find the doors barred. The god was out visiting – the utsava murti had been taken out for a procession. As to where, the details escape me now but Kanchi is known as the city of a thousand temples: through this fortnight, the deities were all out in street processions, in a complex schedule of visits to other deities before they returned to their own abodes. Our evening call on Ekambareshwara didn’t yield glimpse of him, but it was richly rewarded by way of a wonderful mela (a 13-day affair, I understand) at the temple. Bright sparkling lights, milling crowds, food of various kinds, a cultural show featuring (some rather good) Bharatanatyam performances by a series of promising youngsters and troupes… it was heady. 

 

In Chidambaram, we were waiting to see the final aarti and puja where Nataraja is put to bed. We stood first attentively, then restively and then all of us sat down altogether while the priests dawdled here and there. Muruga of the ancillary temple was out on a social visit and till HE returned to the temple complex, Shiva couldn’t be closed, see? We finally walked back to our hotel by almost midnight, having missed dinner but fortified by a banana and a mouthful of prasadam.

Similar scenes everywhere: Srirangam was bedecked, in Kumbakonam, we caught the train of Lord Sarangapani as he was taken with pomp to his Devi’s shrine and back. Things really started to heat up as we reached Rameshwaram. Each village set out on its own procession to the nearest temple of significance. Drumbeats everywhere, crawling traffic honking through large dancing processions, men with sacred ash smeared on their foreheads, vels pierced through their cheeks, trucks and gear being prepared for men to undertake parava kavadi …. 

Photo: G Karthikeyan

 

The actual day in Palani was simply electric – wave after wave of devotees came, carrying decorated kavadis, bearing water that they’d consecrated for 40 days for Muruga’s abhishekam (one man generously gave us some teertham to sip at the temple), women, girls decked up in their best finery, carrying pots of milk and water, pulsating drums non-stop.

It was an exhilarating atmosphere to be caught up in.

TN Tour 1: The Obligatory Grand Tour

As I’d said many weeks ago, the ‘South Tour’ is pretty much an inevitable high school excursion in our parts and I don’t know how it came about that I missed the grand tour of Tamil Nadu’s temples.

But still, the desire came and the plan formed itself. I am glad to have waited. Not to have wasted the first breathtaking glimpse of all this grandeur on a callow, self-absorbed teen but instead to approach it in adulthood with at least a modicum of appreciation and a certain capacity for awe. And also a certain ripening of Bhakti.

Ours was not an overly devout upbringing. Certainly not the temple-hopping kind. Yes, there was a puja room in the house and a certain openness to the Divine, but I was as confused as the next person about religion and spirituality. I remember puzzling over Ganesha. Was I to take him literally? Or as a reference or pointer to something more subtle? Now, after being initiated on the spiritual path, I have evolved into an even grander canvas of confusion.  

So was this a pilgrimage? Yes. Adventure? Most certainly. A mission? Yes. We were setting off just as Sadhguru had left for the Caribbean for the Save Soil Movement. For the arduous, extremely demanding 100-day journey that he was embarking on, we were excited, concerned and eager to beseech the benediction of the gods. 

Once we decided that we were going to do this, Shweta and I sat down to planning in a hurry – we had to do all the biggies, we had to include the four pancha bhuta sthalas in TN, we had to visit the Devis, we had to go to Rameshwaram, we had to go to Palani. Tamil Nadu being Tamil Nadu, there are a host of samadhis too and Shweta had a parallel list of various places of high energy that we had to include. And then what about all the spectacular architecture… it was a mission! But we managed to simmer it down to a workable circuit.

And this, more or less is how we went about it.

***

“When God is your tour guide…” Shweta muttered once.

That’s how it felt.

It seemed like every step was charted out for us. Everything seemed to fall in place. The timing, where to be at what moment, where to go, where not to go. You will feel, as we did, that these are an extraordinary number of lucky coincidences for anyone to have. And yet, that’s how it was.

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?