Author: Hari Balasubramanian

Recently, I visited my perippa and perimma’s (uncle and aunt’s) farm in a small town called Sathyamangalam — Sathy in short. Sathy is one of a series of agricultural towns in the southern state of Tamil Nadu along the Bhavani River, a tributary of the better-known Cauvery. On either side of the roads in this region, you’ll find plots of banana trees organized in neat rows, rice paddies sparkling with water, and – ever pleasing to look at – tall coconut trees with their thin, elegantly curving trunks.

The farm in Sathy has been and continues to be a special place for everyone in my extended family. I’ve always felt welcomed and at home there, and my perippa and perimma have guided me through some vexing and important personal decisions. I’ve been visiting the farm since middle school. When I went to college in Tiruchirappalli (also in Tamil Nadu), I used to take inter-city buses to Sathy during the holidays. Even after moving to the United States, I’ve managed to return once in a few years.

As a town, Sathy has grown considerably, but the farm still looks about the same. There’s the white house with the slanting red roof that comes into view soon after you enter the dirt road off the highway; there’s the spacious patio where my perippa often sits to work these days. Walk around a bit and you run into the sheds for the cows, the wells for water, and the rectangular plots for crops — turmeric, coconut, areca nut this year, and in the past rice, sugarcane, and Casuarina trees. I love standing on a ledge of the wells to see the steeply rising mountains in the distance. The cloudy weather on the days that I visited only enhanced the beauty of the farm. I spotted kingfishers, peacocks, owls, and woodpeckers with little effort. The place felt more a wildlife preserve than a place for cultivation.

My perippa’s family has owned the farm for at least two centuries. In the 1960s, with the coming of the Green Revolution and high-yielding crop varieties to India, the family started to use synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Perippa wholeheartedly adopted these newer Western methods: what he now calls “chemical farming”. His brother worked in Rallis, a company that sold agricultural products. The farm served as an informal center for R&D. Agricultural scientists and researchers from Rallis visited Sathy to test the effectiveness of the company’s products.

In the 1990s, however, after noticing the detrimental effects of chemical farming on soil health – and in fact his own health – perippa shifted to organic farming. Perimma has jointly managed the farm since her marriage in 1973 and has been an equal partner in this transformation. The two of them have turned the 10-acre plots into a model organic farm, now famous in southern India.

Every day my perippa – now 82 years old and unmistakable in his lean, upright frame – attends to a constant stream of messages and calls from other farmers who need his assistance. His six decades of experience, equally split between chemical and organic farming, is highly valued. Visitors from far-off villages drop by unannounced. He is invited often to give seminars and workshops in Tamil Nadu and other states. There are plenty of YouTube videos (in English as well as Tamil) in which he tells his story. (The first video has some good views of the farm.)

In all his interviews, perippa credits other farmers who have successfully tried alternative cultivation approaches and whose methods he adapted. Names that often come up include G Nammalvar, an early pioneer of organic farming in Tamil Nadu; Shripad Dabholkar of Maharashtra (whose book Plenty For All has been a major source of inspiration); Bhaskar Save of Gujarat; and Narayana Reddy of Karnataka (who often visited the Sathy farm to provide guidance; Reddy, in turn, was influenced by Masanobu Fukuoka’s One-Straw Revolution). In investigating the life and work of these farmers, I got the impression that a robust response to the negative effects of the Green Revolution had quickly emerged in India. Today, however, the declining labor supply in agriculture poses a bigger challenge: no one aspires to be in farming anymore, and all over India, there’s been a hollowing out in rural areas as people move to urban centers.

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I would often mention the Sathy farm with great pride to my friends in the United States. However, the truth is that I didn’t really know (and still don’t know) the basics of agriculture. Perippa often explained his techniques when I visited, and though I sensed his passion each time, I had not made the effort to follow the details. But this time was different. This time, when he took me around the farm, bent down to pick a handful of topsoil and explained how his goal was to increase the diversity of microorganisms in it; or plucked a plant to illustrate the structure of tap and feeder roots; or described how he was using certain plant species called cover crops to fix much-needed nitrogen in the soil – this time, I tried to learn as much as I could, and there was far greater emotional resonance.

What’s changed in the last few years is my curiosity about the history of life on Earth and how all life is interrelated. At its core, perippa’s organic farming vision was to create a healthy soil environment that allowed symbiotic relationships between plants, fungi, insects, and micro-organisms to prosper. These relationships, in which there is a lot of give and take of nutrients, are hundreds of millions of years old. For instance, plants provide carbon to fungi living in their roots; in exchange, the fungi extract nutrients such as phosphorous from the soil, which the plants absorb. In popular culture, evolution is often presented as a competitive struggle for survival and it is to some extent that. But there are also myriad examples of species collaborating in mutually beneficial ways. We are yet to fully fathom the magnitude and complexity of such partnerships.

I’d read about these concepts in books such as Lynn Margulis’s Symbiotic Planet and Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life. The great pleasure of my visit to Sathy was to see these concepts in action. I still don’t understand enough about farming but if I do learn something in the future – that’s a big if, given my academic commitments! – then I’ll view this trip as a true start.

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I took all the pictures above except for the picture of my perimma — that’s from an article in the newspaper The Hindu in which she was interviewed about traditional varieties of rice. (Unfortunately, this article is behind a paywall.)

I am reading C Rajagopalachari’s Mahabharata again after more than twenty years. This is the abridged prose version of the epic Sanskrit poem: at 1.8 million words, the longest epic poem in the world, which has seen countless retellings across millennia. Although the historicity of the Mahabharata is still being worked out, the story is set in North India in the millennia before the common era.

I chose to revisit the Mahabharata to alter my reading habits a bit. I’ve been absorbed with Western books on natural history, biology and science in the last few years. They have helped me look at the world in a completely new light. But I also felt the need to read something with a totally different worldview — at least something outside the bubble of Western science. So, as I flew to Bangalore, India, to be with my parents for a few weeks this winter break, I decided to take the Mahabharata along. My parents are devout Hindus and their 9th story flat is so full of images of the deities they worship and the television they watch is so full of commentaries of old Hindu texts, that the milieu of the Mahabharata fits seamlessly here.

Ninety odd pages in, I am really enjoying it. The stories in the book seem charged with a deeper meaning, now that I am much older than when I first read them. Each chapter features a character, sub-plot or theme, with a clearly defined beginning and end. Yet each chapter also fits into the larger narrative of dynastic conflict and war between two groups of cousins: the Pandavas and Kauravas.

In addition to the primary cast — Bhishma, Kunti, Drona, Duryodhana, Krishna, Arjuna, Bhima, Draupadi: all household names in India — dozens of fleeting characters come and go, playing small but important roles. There are forest sages with yogic powers who can foretell the future and deliver powerful curses (and yet soften their impact if sincere pleas are made). There are celestial deities, demons and monsters who seem quite apart from humans in their special abilities but still remain very human in their desires and foibles. The chain of cause and effect — actions at one time resulting in karmic consequences in another — is a recurring theme throughout. The stories involve  exceptional acts of generosity and sacrifice but deceit, long-standing grudges and a yearning for revenge play an equally important role. In fact, it is the vices, which most characters succumb to, that make the Mahabharata so interesting.

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One of my favorite stories is of a king named Yayati, an ancestor of the Pandavas and Kauravas. Yayati marries Devyani, the daughter of a famous sage named Sukracharya (Devyani has her own chapter in the book and an equally fascinating story). Without telling Devyani, Yayati secretly also marries Devyani’s attendant, Sarmishta. Devyani is naturally distraught when she finds out. Her furious father Sukracharya curses Yayati with premature old age which takes immediate effect.

Shocked, Yayati begs Sukracharya to remove the curse. Sukracharya says that the curse has to take its course, but relents that if Yayati “can persuade anyone to exchange his youth for your age the exchange will take effect”. Yayati desperately wants his youth back since he is “still haunted by the desire for sensual enjoyment”. He still wants to enjoy the company of women. He turns to his five sons, and this is what he asks them:

“The curse of your grandfather has made me unexpectedly and prematurely old. I have not had the fills of the joys of life… One of you ought to bear the burden of my old age and give his youth in return. He who agrees to this and bestows his youth on me will be the ruler of my kingdom. I desire to enjoy life in the full vigor of youth.”

What an extraordinary request — of course no one wants to give their youth away even if a kingdom is received in return! The first four sons refuse. But, in an astonishing act of selflessness, the youngest son Puru agrees to his father’s request. Moved and delighted, Yayati embraces Puru and immediately finds that his youth is back while Puru has turned old. He tells is son he will “enjoy life for just a while more and then give you back your youth.”

Yayati indulges himself for many years. He spends time with a beautiful woman (an apsara) in an exotic location (Garden of Kubera). But after years and years of trying of fulfill his sexual desires, there’s a key moment when he realizes that repeated gratification has not helped him. He returns to Puru with this realization:

“Dear son, sensual desire is never quenched by indulgence any more than fire is by pouring ghee on it. I had heard and read this, but till now I had not realized it. No object of desire — corn, gold, cattle or women — nothing can ever satisfy the desire of man. We can reach mental peace only by a poise beyond likes and dislikes. Such is the state of Brahman. Take back your youth and rule the kingdom wisely and well.”

Yayati retires to the forest to lead a simple life of austerities. The chapter, thus, ends with a well known teaching of Indian spiritual traditions: that one must develop the wisdom to not run after sense pleasures. The interesting part is that Yayati was quite aware of this, yet simply hearing or reading about it did not compel him to act differently. Only repeated experience — seeking gratification again and again and failing to find anything substantial or lasting — convinced him. Perhaps the true message of Yayati’s story, then, is that there is no short-cut to such realizations, that the path can be long and convoluted.

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An interesting footnote: A few days after publishing this post, I was browsing at a bookshop in Bangalore when I stumbled upon a novel by V.S. Khandekar titled Yayati. This chance encounter with Khandekar’s novel — just a few days after publishing this post — belongs to the department of interesting coincidences! (Much like how I saw a slug for the first time in Amherst, a few days after reading Elizabeth Tova-Bailey’s The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating.)  It turns out that Yayati is a classic of Marathi literary fiction in which Khandekar re-imagines and elaborates on the story through different first-person narratives.

I hardly read any fiction these days! Books on science and history have all but taken over. Maybe it’s the terrain that comes with being an academic — too much scholarly, intellectual stuff . The one exception is Joyce Carol Oates: I keep returning to her fiction again and again. In 2017, I read her exceptional short story collection Lovely Dark and Deep. Two recent collections of novellas — Evil Eye and Cardiff by the Sea — have left an even stronger and lasting impression*.

Most stories in these books are about women (students, junior co-workers, younger family members) who find themselves, willingly or unwillingly, drawn into the orbit of influential and successful men (wealthy patriarchs, distinguished poets, famous scientists and professors, or just husbands, sons, fathers, grandfathers). The men are the unequivocal villains of most stories: they are manipulative and sinister, often using their power, either at work or in a family relationship, to coerce or harass the women their lives. Still, Oates endows them with an intriguing complexity**.

Ensnared in relationships with such troublesome men, the women find themselves disoriented and sometimes physically threatened. A sense of foreboding pervades the stories and deepens as the narrative progresses. The suspense comes not from the plots (which tend to be straightforward) but from the psychological portraits of the characters, a slow unveiling of past traumas and sudden shifts in perspective. I am also amazed at the precision with which Oates sketches, in a few quick sentences, details of a coastal landscape, a large centuries-old house, a small New England town, an office building, the dresses and physical appearance of her characters. These details and the often tumultuous inner worlds of her characters blend seamlessly in Oates’ signature narrative style: short, urgent paragraphs interspersed with italicized words and phrases.

Not since The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories — a dazzling collection of Tolstoy’s fiction — have I come across such powerful short stories and novellas.

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* I also read Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars, Oates’ 2020 novel last summer. I wasn’t as taken by it, but some scenes, characters, and passages  were as astonishing as the best of her short stories.

** The uncle of the female protagonist in the lead novella of Cardiff by the Sea — a story that does not quite follow the narrative template I’ve outlined above — is the most interesting of the male characters.

I was in Santiago, Chile recently for the IFORS conference. Two universities — the University of Chile and the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile — jointly hosted the event. There was the usual socializing, dining and fun that happens at conferences. I met colleagues and friends from Latin America, Asia and Europe, and was able to explore the city a bit.

Santiago, home to 7 million Chileans, sprawls along the foothills of the Andes. Majestic, snow-capped mountains loom in the eastern skyline. Smog from the traffic, unable to escape the wall of mountains perhaps, lies suspended in a haze over the high rises. Graffiti was everywhere, with no wall or building left blank; this gave the city a somewhat edgy look. Still, when compared to the other Latin American cities I’d visited — Lima, La Paz, Quito, Mexico City — Santiago seemed wealthier.

The conference included a day trip by bus to the towns of Valparaiso and Vina Del Mar along Chile’s rocky coast. The drive took us through small towns, wineries, farms and hills with cacti, palms and eucalyptus trees. Our tour guide, Rafael, spoke of Chile’s history during the journey: how the Spanish, after their success in toppling the mighty Incas in the north, arrived in Santiago in 1541, after an arduous crossing of the Atacama Desert. They came looking for gold, a recurring fantasy of Spanish conquests in the Americas. In the decades that followed, they faced fierce resistance from the indigenous Mapuche. Like other Andean countries such as Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia, Chileans have a mixed Spanish-indigenous ancestry. Though, according to Rafael, Chileans are more European and are therefore lighter-skinned. He had the precise numbers for himself: “I am 54% Spanish, 44% Mapuche, and 2-3% African.”

Rafael also spoke of the country’s modern history: the coup d’état against Salvador Allende’s government; the adoption of neoliberal policies by Augusto Pinochet‘s regime; the massive protests of 2019-20 and ongoing turbulence in the country’s politics related to the re-writing of its constitution. In a memorable phrase, Rafael called Chile a ‘bipolar country’, swinging between the extremes of the left and right. Born in 1977, Rafael grew up during Pinochet’s military dictatorship. His father, a construction worker, was once detained by authorities. But his father’s hands were so battered from bricklaying and cement work that the authorities released him. Because of that incident and the detention and disappearance of thousands of other Chileans, Rafael grew up disliking Pinochet. But now he has a more ambiguous view. He feels that had Pinochet not intervened, the situation in Chile might well have been worse.

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After the conference, I climbed up the San Cristobal hill and visited the Chilean Pre-Columbian Art Museum. I found some thought-provoking exhibits at the museum. Such as this 7th century pot from Peru’s southern desert region with a painting of three hummingbirds feeding on a flower. Because I’d seen a hummingbird the previous day in Santiago, hovering around and dipping its bill into an orange-petaled flower, I felt an instant connection to the unknown artist (or artists) who had painted a similar scene 1500 years ago. (Though I doubt that three hummingbirds can amicably feed together as depicted!)

And this beautiful, abstract-looking exhibit below is a quipu . The Incas, who commanded a vast Andean empire, used quipus for administrative purposes. Each quipu consists of a primary “inner” cord to which all the radiating secondary strings are attached; each secondary string has a cluster of knots. Variations of this basic arrangement were used to record and convey quantitative data using a base-ten numeric system. Exactly what the logic is, I don’t quite understand; I guess you could think of the quipu as the string or textile version of an abacus. But — as I learned from the appendix of Charles Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus — some scholars have hypothesized that quipus were not just for storing numbers, they may also have been an unusual kind of writing system that is yet to be deciphered.