I employed the products of modern technology too, by building a gobar gas plant, setting up dairy, poultry, and silkworm-rearing sheds. Soon, much like the other farmers, I got into debt. No matter what I did, I was unable to repay the loan. I knew something was going wrong somewhere. I had my share of problems with farming. If the seed was right, the sprouting wasn’t; if the saplings rose fine, the water wasn’t sufficient. There was too much rain or too little. One way or other, the vagaries of nature, or rather, not understanding nature or not being able to tune in perfectly, hit me hard. Beyond nature were the market forces; they too conspired to harm me. I got a good crop but did not get a good price. I was getting deeper and deeper into debt. I did everything recommended by the government, agriculture and horticulture departments but things simply didn’t seem to work.
My struggle with farming lent my life a spiritual dimension. I sensed within me a sense of oneness with the environment. In one breath I took in the mystic aura of the early morning sunrise; the sweet fragrance rising from freshly churned earth as I walked across the fields. I was in search of a natural method of understanding the crops, the seasons, and the soil. On the one hand, I was trying to be a conventional farmer. I sought to cultivate crops, sell the produce in the market, and get paid in order to repeat the cycle. I had the bank loan in mind, too. However, this quotidian aspect of life did not keep me from being sensitive to the deep symbiosis of the forces of nature: the soil, the crops, and the cultivator. It was a great beginning, and all I knew was that I didn’t know much about farming.
There were problems. There were viral attacks, pests, and weeds. I planted bananas, an evergreen crop. I got the first crop but the second was attacked and destroyed by virus. I learnt it the hard way that there is no medicine in the world to combat the banana virus.
I was also able to get an insight into the debt cycle of farmers. It was a triple jackpot for the local money-lender. He gave farmers seeds on credit and made money on the exchange value of seeds and also on the interest on the loan. He gave farmers fertilizers and pesticides on credit and made money on their worth plus the interest he charged the farmers. He bought the farmers crop on mortgage, cheap and below the market price, and made money on that too. The money-lender made profits on all counts even before a farmer brought his produce to the market. Conversely, the farmer got beaten at all the four points of sale: seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, and crops. As there was no market reference for their produce, they undersold a crop before it was due for the market. Most farmers therefore found themselves in debt. The money-lender deducted principle and a usurious interest, often leaving the farmer with nothing to take home. There was no way the farmer could get out of the vicious cycle of debt and usury.
In addition to the cycle of usury, I also grew to realize one curious lesser-known little fact: the modern farmer inputs more than the output.
The farm offered me lessons in natural history, and I imbibed them voraciously. There were millions of insects on the farm. I saw that when they died, their remains returned to the topsoil and replenished soil fertility. While the intensive use of fertilizer and pest-control chemicals brought in relatively high yields in a short time-frame, the techniques were double-edged. Aggressive, intensive, deep-trench tilling exposed soil to the elements of nature, resulting in erosion. The use of fertilizers and chemicals acted on the biotic activity of the topsoil; they too stripped the soil of its natural layer of nutrients. Artificial fertilizers also altered soil chemistry and rendered it sterile.
I began realizing that farming was not just about phosphorous and nitrogen compounds or chemical pest and weed killers. These were the agents of interference that we had brought into play in our limited understanding. Farming was wholly about building and nurturing natural relationships. Modern science asked farmers to aggressively use chemicals at all stages of food crop production. It did not realize that by doing so, the soil was stripped of all its nutrients. The first crop might benefit from the artificially introduced nutrient, but after one crop, the soil did not sustain the yield unless greater quantities of chemicals were used.
I saw that farmers were being asked to replenish the soil with artificial fungi and earthworms (vermiculture). What this overlooked was that earthworms are a part of the natural life of the soil. They don’t need to be cultivated. It is like generating some oxygen for yourself at home; like polluting the city and then visiting an oxygen bar to get a whiff of life.
We have taken it upon ourselves to regulate natural agents. Who, or which agency, prevented termite attack in the forests, for example? Forests sported the most luxuriant and wildest of growth and undergrowth but one did not hear of disease afflicting a prime forest. A queen termite lays 15,000 to 20,000 eggs every day for more than ten years. There is therefore no way their propagation can be prevented; termites like ants are a force of nature. And why indeed should it be prevented? The termite is a part of the balance established by nature and effectively returns hardwood to the earth.
These experiences gave me insight into the logic and method of scientific discovery. One experience I can describe as a kind of eureka moment! On a visit to the wildlife sanctuary of Bandipur, something caught my eye. This came in handy in evolving useful farming practices. I saw that only dead trees were attacked by termite; the healthy ones were untouched. Could it be, I thought, that termites did not attack healthy trees because there was plenty of food for them below the trees? Food was present in the form of tree-droppings such as twigs and branches, leaves, flowers, ripened fruit, seed, bird-droppings, and the carcasses of insects and animals. The termites ate their fill and left the trees alone.
When termites attacked the coconut trees on the farm we had used benzene hexachloride to get rid of them. When it rained, the spray was washed down into the soil and the stream nearby, carrying the residual chemicals along with it, polluting the soil, the stream, the ponds, and the groundwater. The chemical pesticide killed all the organisms in the soil and also affected the ecosystem of the stream. I quickly realized that termites were attacking the coconut trees because the soil was like a clean concrete floor, offered them no nourishment. In our obsession to keep the soil clean we had been removing all twigs, branches, dead organisms, thereby disturbing soil ecology.
I was trying to understand how to farm naturally and yet get a high yield. Nothing worked to my advantage at the time, I was sore about the way the market worked. Prices of all products were on the rise, except for farm produce. I was annoyed that businessmen took a salary over and above expenditure and still ensured profits for themselves at the end of the working year. However, my acutest and most intense cause of chagrin was that a farmer never took a salary and was never able to gauge whether or not the year had been profitable. A farmer worked from dawn to dusk. There is no farmer in this country who has an ounce of unwanted fat. My city friends spoke of gyms and exercise. A farmer would think you were crazy if you suggested to him that he should take ‘exercise’. Exercise was futile labour for him. He walked several kilometres a day: to and from his fields and around them. He worked all day in season, sowing, ploughing, weeding, shooing birds off the crop, harvesting, winnowing, and storing the grain. He personally carried the produce to the market, stretching each sinew of his body. There is sweat and blood, and many a tear, in the life of the farmer.
The wedding day drew near! As I wanted to put most of the money in the productive areas of the farm, I grudgingly built a room 20 ft by 30 ft. One corner served as the bath partition, one was devised as the kitchen, a third was the bedroom where my wife and I would sleep. Raju would sleep in the tent which would continue to remain where it was earlier.
I travelled to Hassan and picked up six cane chairs and other furniture for the house. I spent Rs 1200 extra on the house which had been budgeted for Rs 3000 and felt that I had spent a fortune on it. Looking back however I feel truly sorry for what I put my wife through. I could have built a slightly more comfortable hut. At the time however I was so obse
ssed with the farm that an extra rupee spent on the house would have been considered an unjustified indulgence.
Dowry was as much a social reality in those days as it is now. If it was not explicit in the abstract form of cash, it existed in tacit forms. It made me proud that my father had taken nothing from mother’s parents. I had nothing to do with dowry and bluntly told the bride’s mother not to send anything, not even the traditional saris that accompanied the bridal trousseau. I wanted a simple wedding and wanted no gifts to be given to my mother or sisters or brothers. I said I would buy them saris.
Indian weddings are contexts for one-upmanship. People like to show that they are a notch higher in social status than they actually are. The pressure is immense on the girl’s father. I have seen it in my own family. When my sister got married, my mother put tremendous pressure on my father and he was forced to borrow money. I had witnessed the difficulties my father faced and decided I would not allow needless grandeur and pomp. I was severely critical of this lavish extravagance but little did I realize that some of these very practices would help my helicopter business in the future. One day, a rich businessman would use the helicopter for dropping rose petals on the wedding couple at the time of the wedding ceremony. Another would bring the groom’s baraat to the bride’s residence in the helicopter rather than on a horse!
I held a feast at my village temple in Gorur. The Yoganarasimha Swamy temple is right on the banks of the river in Gorur and we couldn’t have asked for a more picturesque venue for it. The entire village was invited. There were relatives, friends from the village and from the army. My army friends teased me about my having become a total farmer, and took me out on one last bachelors’ drinking binge.
The wedding took place in Hassan. This town is sometimes referred to as the poor man’s Ooty because it enjoys a salubrious climate throughout the year and its cost of living is reasonably low. It was a typical Iyengar Brahmin wedding and the ceremonies lasted three days. We had chosen the simplest of ceremonies for observance. Sanskrit shlokas on marriage were chanted.
Uncle Gorur Ramaswamy Iyengar attended the wedding. We sat around a bonfire after the wedding, chatting, exchanging stories and anecdotes, and sharing jokes. My wife looked beautiful in a traditional Iyengar silk sari. She looked petite (not that I am toweringly tall). My uncle observed everything keenly and said to me, ‘Today is your day in the sun. Make the most of it.’
He then related a raunchy story, the import of which I understood much later. He narrated an event that had taken place in Sabarmati Ashram. He said there was a man who was an ethnic Baluch or Pakhtun. Was he referring to Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, who was later called Frontier Gandhi? I am not certain. The Khan was an extremely tall man. This particular man in uncle’s story had a wife who was very short in stature. The inmates of the Ashram had a standing joke about the Pathan. They had given him a nickname bhoochumbi, which, loosely translated, means ‘earth kisser’. The reference was very physical and the humour lay in the image of this man bending almost as low as the earth to kiss his bride. His bride was so painfully short in stature that the act of kissing his bride, his friends at the ashram imagined, would almost certainly be like kissing the earth. It was a joke, of course, and the audience laughed. Uncle however kept a straight face. I wondered for quite a while what the joke was about, but later when it flashed on me, I walked away, laughing.
I invited thirty-five people to my farm on the day following our wedding and told them that as I had just one room to spare they would have to squeeze in and make themselves comfortable. I lighted a roaring campfire and arranged for rum. The guests sat around the fire in the open and partied late into the night. It was about two in the morning when it began raining. We therefore went in and huddled together. We slept end to end, shoulder to shoulder. The room looked like an avalanche of bodies and it accommodated exactly thirty-five people, wall to wall. The following morning, when the guests began to leave, I could see that the finality of marriage was overwhelming my new bride. She looked at her mother, tearfully. Marriages are a mixture of joy and tears. It must have been a worrying thought for her parents that they were leaving their daughter behind to live in a thatched hut at the back of beyond in the wilderness, with just me as company. On the other hand, they must also have been consoled by the other side of reality that it was the beginning of a new life for their daughter. In a sombre tone that was carried through only by the strength of her dignity, my mother-in-law said, ‘Take care of my daughter’. Her eyes welled up with tears but she bravely held herself back from breaking down altogether. I too was overwhelmed by the awareness that a new life was beginning for me and felt also a deep concern: would she be able to take the rigours of such a life? There was no running water, no electricity, everything had to be devised from scratch, and I possessed none of the interesting distractions or modern gadgets of urban life apart from a simple radio, a few kitchen utensils and a slew of cane chairs. That was the material world in which Bhargavi now found herself.
Each day there was one moment of magic at the farm: that single moment at the fall of dusk when the entire stretch of the farm was bathed by the setting sun in a pale golden glow. It triggered a strange feeling in those who happened to witness it: a nostalgic mix of joy and vague longings. This golden moment conveyed to me in a mysterious way that a new life was about to begin, not only for me and my new bride, but for the farm as a whole.
The next few years were the most wonderful in my life. My new bride and I had a lot of time with each other. We did not speak very much but silence is a golden link and conveyed more than words. We had friends visiting us once in a while. It was however mostly Bhargavi and I alone on the farm. We took long walks every morning and evening. She was, and is, an excellent cook. We ate our meals together and enjoyed a drink each, in the evenings. I would sometimes see her from a distance. She looked beautiful and delicate as the flowers on the farm. She became part of the landscape—and of my life!
The farm however needed tending and I found it increasingly hard to repay the bank loan and ploughed all my earnings back into the farm. We led an absolutely frugal life, in material terms, but spiritually there was so much wealth and so much depth in the little lineaments of our life!
I devoted my entire self in the search of alternative ways of income-generation. The way out of difficulty is not frustration, not fear nor despair. I had sensitized myself sufficiently closely to be able to listen to nature’s subtle and nuanced ways of being. I also read authors who had spent their lives observing and understanding how nature works. I read Rachel Carson, David Orr, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, David Attenborough, Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, Masanobu Fukuoka, Edwin Schrodinger and Lewis Thomas. Thomas was a great biologist and pathologist. He served as president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. Among his great works are Lives of a Cell (1975 ) and The Medusa and the Snail (1986). Lewis Thomas describes the intricate relationships and symbiosis between the creations of nature. There is mystery to the ways of nature but there is also an underlying science. Scientists who explored the limits often did not see a difference between nature and the mystical, seeing rather a common thread running through the universe of life and matter. I gleaned insights into agriculture from their writings although they do not directly speak of farming as an activity.
Cloud-Watcher: More Incidents on the Farm
During the early days on the farm people often asked me what I did. I told them in a matter of fact way, ‘I am a cloud-watcher.’ I was indeed one. All farmers are cloud-watchers. Farmers have a deep psychological relationship with the idea of timely rain, because their life depends on it. That was the case with me too. Each day I would gaze intently into the western sky hoping to see signs of rain-bearing clouds. I did not have electricity on the farm and was hoping that my recent representation to the electricity department would bear fruit quite soon. I did not therefore invest in a diesel pump-set. In the olden days farmers used vari
ous versions of the Persian wheel to raise water from a stream or waterbody. I had seen many in operation as a child. The yeta leverages a weight on one side and allows an operator to scoop water from a well and pour into a trough from which it flows into a channel. This is a regular fixture in every areca-nut plantation in Karnataka. A man stands astride a wooden plank at the edge of a pond. Above him is a see-saw contraption that leverages a fulcrum. The back end of the see-saw is weighted by a heavy stone while at the front end is a trough that dangles by a rope. The man who stands astride on the plank pulls down the trough to the bottom of the pond, fills it with water, and raises it up. When the trough comes up to ground level he tips it into the half-sawed section of wooden channel and the water flows out to the field.
The yeta is now seen only in the remote interiors. In the distant past every farm had a pond with a yeta and every house had a deep well for drawing potable drinking water.
I was on a shoestring budget. Buying a diesel pump-set would now be useless, I thought, because when the electricity came, I would have to sell it. I was an incurable optimist. In my solipsistic optimism, I refused to see that things had a way of their own. I did not see that I was confusing foolhardiness with a positive outlook. This predilection of mine often saw me through the worst of crises, but it got me into deep trouble as well. I could not decide whether it was a good or bad thing.
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