Last month the Doomsday Clock had moved closer to midnight than at any point since it was created in 1947. Maintained by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the clock is meant to signal how close humanity stands to destroying itself, whether through nuclear conflict, climate breakdown or new technologies. Its latest shift suggests that we are living through a particularly dangerous moment.
That is one way to look at the year ahead.
Another comes from a friend of mine who follows astrology. “2026 will be intense,” she told me after we had worked out the time difference to talk. “There are major planetary shifts happening. But that also means there is potential for growth.”
Between scientific warning and planetary symbolism sits a familiar question. Are we heading towards catastrophe, or simply moving through another period of change?
It is difficult to judge the scale of events while we are inside them. Perspective usually comes later. At the time, everything feels amplified. The media leans towards urgency. Our own thoughts do the same. The expectation of upheaval can sometimes be more overwhelming than the experience itself.
In recent weeks there have been many reminders of transition: the turning of the calendar year; the Lunar New Year observed across China, parts of Southeast Asia, Korea and the Himalayan region; the beginning of Ramadan for Muslims around the world. These moments draw people together in ritual and reflection. They offer continuity, even when the wider world feels unstable.
At the same time, global leaders speak in stark terms. The Secretary-General of the United Nations recently described a world marked by conflict, inequality and unpredictability. Climate scientists warn that we have entered uncharted territory. Heat records continue to fall. Rain arrives in sudden deluges. Winters in some places are no longer as cold as they once were.
For centuries, seasonal rhythms have provided reassurance. Spring follows winter. Festivals return at roughly the same time each year. Even the Gregorian calendar, introduced in 1582, was an attempt to bring order to time.
The Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, wrote that no person steps into the same river twice. The water flows on, and so do we. It is a simple image, but it captures something steady and true about human life.
What feels different now is the speed. Changes that once unfolded across generations now seem compressed into years. Climate patterns shift within decades. Technology reshapes industries almost overnight. Artificial intelligence systems are altering the nature of work, leaving some people optimistic and others uncertain. I know people who are struggling to find employment, both those nearing the end of long careers and those only just starting out.
My friend attributes the turbulence to a conjunction of Saturn and Neptune. She links economic instability and political upheaval to movements in the sky. When she mentioned the recent increase in visible auroras, I thought of astronomers pointing out that the Sun is nearing the peak of its eleven-year solar cycle. Different explanations, same phenomena.
Whether we turn to science, philosophy or astrology, the underlying experience is similar. Things feel unsettled. Time feels faster. The future feels closer than it used to.
It is tempting either to tune out the warnings or to become consumed by them. Neither response changes what is happening. Ignoring risk does not reduce it. Constant alarm does not resolve it either.
We cannot return to a previous version of stability. The seasons will continue to shift, though perhaps less predictably. Technologies will continue to develop. Political arrangements will evolve. Some changes are small and gradual. Others are abrupt and disorienting.
The real question is how we live through them.
After our conversation, my friend sent a message: “Changes aren’t endings, but thresholds.” It is a hopeful way to think about uncertainty. Crossing a threshold suggests movement rather than collapse.
Perhaps this year calls for small, steady practices. Paying attention to what we consume, digitally and otherwise. Slowing down our thinking when everything pushes us to react. Staying connected to the people around us. These are modest responses, but they are within reach.
We step into the river again. The water is different. So are we.
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Keith Lyons (keithlyons.net) is an award-winning writer and creative writing mentor originally from New Zealand who has spent a quarter of his existence living and working in Asia including southwest China, Myanmar and Bali. His Venn diagram of happiness features the aroma of freshly-roasted coffee, the negative ions of the natural world including moving water, and connecting with others in meaningful ways. A Contributing Editor on Borderless journal’sEditorial Board, his work has appeared in Borderless since its early days, and his writing featured in the anthology Monalisa No Longer Smiles.
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Pongal Pot. Photo Courtesy: Ravi Varmman K Kanniappan
On the 15th of January 2026, while much of the modern world was busy checking notifications, updating calendars, and worrying about quarterly outcomes, traditional Tamil households across the globe were doing something far more radical, watching milk boil. “Pongal”, the harvest festival, is one of those ancient cultural practices that stubbornly refuses to modernise. It does not arrive as an app update, cannot be streamed, and has no subscription model.
Milk is poured into a pot, heated patiently, and allowed, indeed encouraged, to overflow. This overflow is not considered inefficiency or waste, but it is the very point. It signifies abundance, wellbeing, and prosperity not merely for humans but for the entire ecosystem that made the meal possible, the sun, the rain, the soil, the cow, and the quiet, unseen labour of nature itself. Rice, lentils, jaggery, nuts, legumes, and raisins follow, and the resulting sweet dish is shared freely among family and friends, because prosperity that is not shared is considered incomplete.
This is an economy based not on accumulation but on circulation, not on profit but on participation. Something I believe is deeply unsettling to modern sensibilities.
Into this defiantly non-consumerist ritual wandered a chickpea with an extraordinarily well travelled past. This was no humble backyard legume, nor had it been picked up at the nearest market. It had sprouted in Mexico, been packed in Lebanon, purchased in Sierra Leone, and generously gifted by my wife Greeja’s friend, Saras, and her husband Pieter, a Belgian whose kindness, like the chickpea itself, clearly knows no borders. The chickpea’s journey to Malaysia, where, after crossing more continents than most humans manage in a lifetime, it finally fulfilled its destiny, being cooked into a traditional Tamil Pongal.
By then this chickpea had crossed more borders than most people ever will, navigated more currencies than a multinational executive, and yet arrived without a single stamp of self-importance. If globalization were ever to seek a spokesperson, it would do well to choose this chickpea, which achieved in silence what conferences and treaties have struggled to explain. The chickpea does not attend Davos, does not publish white papers, does not tweet about resilience or sustainability, and yet it embodies globalisation with a calm confidence that makes economists look unnecessarily stressed.
We often speak of globalisation as though it were invented sometime in the late twentieth century by economists with impressive haircuts and Power Point skills. But the chickpea, unimpressed by timelines, has been global for at least nine thousand years. Its origins lie in the “Fertile Crescent”, that much abused cradle of early civilisations covering modern day Turkey and Syria, where early cultivation was recorded between 7500 and 6800 BCE. The wild ancestor, “cicer reticulatum”, still grows in southeastern Turkey, quietly ignoring the fact that humans have spent millennia fighting over the land around it. From this region, chickpeas spread naturally to the Middle East, the Mediterranean basin, and India by around 3000 to 2000 BCE, becoming a staple across cultures, religions, and cuisines. This was globalisation without shipping containers, trade sanctions, or consultants, just humans carrying seeds because hunger is wonderfully non-ideological.
India, once it encountered the chickpea, embraced it with characteristic enthusiasm and then proceeded to dominate its production. Today, India accounts for more than 70 percent of global chickpea output, a statistic that has made the chickpea an unlikely participant in modern trade wars. Protectionist policies, tariffs, reciprocal duties, and import bans imposed by major players such as India, the United States, and Mexico have transformed this humble legume into a politically sensitive commodity. It turns out that even the simplest food becomes controversial once spreadsheets get involved.
Thiruvalluvar (an ancient philosopher), writing two thousand years ago, anticipated this uncomfortable truth with brutal clarity:
“Only those who live by agriculture truly live; all others merely follow and feed upon them.” - Kural 1033
The verse throws stylish shade at modern life, while we sip lattes under perfect air conditioning and call it “work”, farmers are out there negotiating with the sun, rain, and stubborn soil to keep humanity fed. Our sleek jobs, fancy titles, and glowing screens? Well, they are merely luxury addons. Strip away agriculture and civilisation collapses into a very well-dressed famine. Turns out, all our progress still runs on dirt, with attitude.
The chickpea’s journey to South America, especially Mexico, is a reminder that globalisation has often travelled under less noble banners. Portuguese and Spanish explorers introduced chickpeas to the New World in the sixteenth century, carrying them across oceans as reliable, non-perishable protein sources. From these initial points of contact, chickpeas spread across Central and South America, embedding themselves into local agriculture and diets. In modern times, Mexico has emerged as a significant exporter, specialising in the Kabuli variety prized for its size and quality, with major production zones in Sonora and Sinaloa. Argentina and Chile also joined the club. Thus, a crop born in ancient Anatolia, nurtured in India, and sanctified by ritual, found itself repackaged for global markets, complete with branding, logistics, and regulatory oversight. The chickpea, once again, remained silent.
Silence, however, does not mean insignificance. Homer knew this. In TheIliad (Book 13) he famously compares arrows ricocheting off Menelaus’s armour to chickpeas and dark-fleshed beans flying off a threshing floor in the wind. The metaphor works only because the audience knew exactly how dried chickpeas behave, hard, resilient, and oddly bouncy. By likening lethal weapons to pulses, Homer not only emphasises the strength of the armour but also performs a subtle act of cultural grounding. The epic world of gods and heroes is momentarily tethered to the everyday agricultural reality of farmers winnowing grain. War, Homer seems to say, may be glorious, but it is ultimately sustained by food. Chickpeas, by 800 BCE, were so deeply embedded in Greek life that their sound and movement were universally recognisable. Even epic poetry depended on legumes.
Indian tradition offers an equally revealing, if more logistical, narrative. In South Indian tale associated with the Mahabharata, an Udupi King is said to have managed catering for the massive armies at Kurukshetra. Legend holds that he could predict daily casualties by observing leftover food. In some versions, the king visits Krishna at night, who eats a handful of roasted chickpeas, the number consumed corresponding mysteriously to the thousands who would fall the next day. This allowed precise meal planning and zero waste on an industrial scale of destruction. These divine data analytics allowed the king to cook exactly the right amount of food, avoiding waste on a genocidal scale. It is perhaps the earliest example of just-in-time inventory management, achieved without software, powered entirely by chickpeas and divine omniscience.
If you have ever wondered why Udupi cuisine is famous for efficiency and planning, this story offers a clue. Here, chickpeas function not just as food but as instruments of cosmic accounting.
Interestingly, while early Vedic texts sometimes viewed certain pulses as unsuitable for sacrifice, the Mahabharata period saw chickpeas elevated into sraddha rites (funeral rituals) and daily offerings. They transitioned from questionable to sacred, a promotion many humans would envy.
Thiruvalluvar’s ethical framework accommodates this evolution effortlessly:
“Sharing food and caring for all life is the highest of virtues.”-- Kural 322
A noble idea, until chickpeas quietly steal the spotlight. Modest, beige, and absurdly cooperative, they divide endlessly without complaint and nourish everyone from monks to gym bros. While humans argue ethics in panels and podcasts, chickpeas get on with the job, feeding the masses without ego. In the moral economy of virtue, they don’t preach but they simply multiply and sustain, humbling us one hummus bowl at a time.
Across civilisations, chickpeas became the dependable fuel of endurance. Roman soldiers consumed them as part of their standard rations, boiling them into thick porridge known as “puls” when meat was scarce. Gladiators relied on pulses for strength, earning nicknames that emphasised grain and legume consumption rather than heroism. Spanish and Portuguese sailors trusted chickpeas on long sea voyages because they did not rot, sulk, or demand refrigeration. During World War II, Allied researchers turned again to pulses to address vitamin deficiencies among troops, while the modern Indian Army continues to include chickpea flour and whole chickpeas in field rations due to their high caloric density and reliability. Empires rise and fall, but soldiers keep eating chickpeas.
Modern science, arriving fashionably late as usual, now confirms what ancient armies, monks, and farmers already knew. Chickpeas are celebrated as “brain food,” dense with nutrients that support cognitive function, mood regulation, and neurological health. Nutritional psychiatry highlights their role in reducing inflammation and stabilising the gut brain axis, making them valuable in alleviating anxiety and depression. Unlike the sugar-fuelled spikes and crashes of contemporary diets, chickpeas offer slow-release energy, the kind required for sustained thought, emotional regulation, empathy, and decision making. In a world addicted to instant gratification, caffeine dependence, and burnout worn as a badge of honour, the chickpea is almost offensively patient. That patience makes it profoundly incompatible with modern lifestyles, and incompatibility, in our times, is the surest mark of subversion.
If this sounds like ancient wisdom romanticised through hindsight, it is worth noting that modern civilisation has recently spent billions of dollars rediscovering precisely the same conclusion, often during lunch breaks. Sometime in the post-Covid era, somewhere between a glass walled co-working space and an overbranded café serving ethically sourced air, a young startup founder sat staring at his laptop, attempting to optimise a problem modern life seems uniquely skilled at inventing, how to eat “mindfully” without actually having time to eat. His company was building an AI-driven wellness platform designed to “personalise nutrition using real time biometric feedback.” Investors liked it. The pitch deck had the correct fonts. The valuation was impressive for something that had not yet solved hunger, distraction, or exhaustion.
Lunch arrived in recyclable packaging engineered to survive a nuclear winter. Inside was a bowl labelled Ancient Protein Medley. It contained quinoa flown in from the Andes, kale grown in a vertical farm two kilometres away, avocado sourced from somewhere geopolitically awkward, and, almost as an afterthought, roasted chickpeas. The chickpeas were rebranded as “plant-based protein spheres,” presumably because “chickpea” did not sound sufficiently disruptive, scalable, or fundable.
As the founder ate mechanically between Slack notifications, his smartwatch vibrated with updates. Blood sugar stable. Cortisol marginally elevated. Cognitive focus acceptable. The AI recommended breathing exercises and fewer screens. The founder ignored both and continued eating. The irony was complete. A system powered by cloud computing, global capital, and predictive algorithms had concluded, after millions in funding, that roasted chickpeas were ideal for sustained energy and mental clarity.
This was not new knowledge. Roman soldiers had marched on it. Tamil farmers had lived on it. Sailors had crossed oceans with it. But now it had a dashboard, a graph, and a subscription model.
Later that evening, the same founder attended a panel discussion on sustainability. Someone in the audience asked about regenerative agriculture. The panellists responded confidently, invoking carbon credits, blockchain traceability, lab-grown proteins, and the future of food. No one mentioned legumes fixing nitrogen. No one mentioned soil. No one mentioned that the chickpeas quietly sitting in the founder’s lunch bowl had already done more for planetary health than the entire panel combined. The chickpeas, true to form, offered no comment, no keynote, and no thought leadership, only nourishment.
The chickpea’s journey eastward is no less intriguing. It reached China via the Silk Road, settling primarily in Xinjiang, where evidence of cultivation dates back around two thousand years. There, it became part of Uighur medicinal traditions, prescribed for ailments ranging from hypertension to itchy skin. During the Tang and Yuan dynasties, chickpeas gained prominence as a “cosmopolitan” food, sometimes referred to as the “Muslim bean”. Yet in central China, the chickpea struggled for a distinct identity, often conflated with the common pea even by Li Shizhen[1], the famed Ming dynasty herbalist. Not all travellers are recognised for who they are, some spend centuries being mistaken for someone else.
And yet, through all this travel, confusion, commodification, and conflict, the chickpea remained quietly regenerative. Unlike extractive crops, it forms a symbiotic relationship with Rhizobium bacteria in its roots, fixing nitrogen from the air and enriching the soil. It takes and gives simultaneously, leaving the land better than it found it. This is perhaps the most radical aspect of the chickpea’s philosophy, one that stands in stark contrast to modern economic models based on extraction and exhaustion.
Thiruvalluvar warns us gently but firmly:
“Harm done to others inevitably returns to oneself.” – Kural 319
A warning humans hear, nod at, and immediately ignore. The chickpea takes a cooler approach. It survives by being outrageously generous, throwing itself into curries, salads, and hummus without a trace of resentment. No revenge arc, no ego. Just pure edible goodwill. While we stress over karma and consequences, the chickpea lives its truth, give everything away, become indispensable, and achieve immortality in every lunch bowl.
Humanity today resembles the ancient chickpea, hard, resilient, perpetually defensive. We pride ourselves on toughness, bouncing off crises with admirable persistence, yet rarely ask what we leave behind. Climate change, trade wars, and political upheavals are the shrill winds of Homer’s winnowing floor, tossing us about. The question is not whether we survive the tossing, but whether we enrich the soil when we land. Progress, the chickpea suggests, is not about becoming larger, louder, or more profitable. It is about being regenerative, ordinary, and useful.
In an age obsessed with luxury, consumption, and curated lifestyles, the chickpea offers a quietly subversive model. It is not elite food, but it is the food of soldiers, monks, labourers, and families. It does not advertise, rebrand, or reinvent itself. It simply nourishes.
Thiruvalluvar captures this understated wisdom perfectly:
“From seeds come harvests, and from giving comes abundance.” -- Kural 1030
A line politicians quote solemnly before approving tax breaks for themselves. The chickpea, deeply unimpressed, just does the math. One seed becomes many, then redistributes itself aggressively into every cuisine on earth. No gatekeeping, no merit tests, no ‘personal responsibility’ lecture. While humans weaponise scarcity and call it policy, the chickpea runs a ruthless experiment in abundance and wins, by being cheap, shared, and impossible to cancel. The chickpea has lived this truth for millennia.
So perhaps the real lesson of globalisation does not lie in trade agreements or consumer choices but in a small legume that has travelled from ancient Turkey to modern Mexico, survived Roman marches and mythic wars, endured misnaming and trade barriers, and still ends up quietly nourishing someone’s meal.
Even now, after dashboards have glowed, algorithms have pontificated, and every opinion has been optimised into a performance, the answer remains stubbornly ancient, from Roman roads to Tamil fields. The chickpea does not care about your ideology, your portfolio, or your meticulously curated identity. It will grow, fix nitrogen, feed someone, and move on without a press release.
In a world addicted to spectacle, branding, and moral pontification, this calm, beige indifference feels almost obscene. Quiet competence and unfashionable, the chick pea, turns out to be the rarest, and most outrageously extravagant, luxury left.
The travelled chickpea. Photo Courtesy: Ravi Varmman K Kanniappan
[1] Li Shizen(1518-1593), Ming acupuncturist, herbalist, naturalist, pharmacologist, physician.
Ravi Varmman explores leadership, culture, and self-inquiry through a philosophical lens, weaving management insight with human experience to illuminate resilience, ethical living, and reflective growth in an ever shifting world today.
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Ramaswamy, N. (2004). Festivals of Tamil Nadu. New Delhi: Sterling Publishers.
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Pope, G. U. (1886). The Tirukkural. London: Oxford University Press.
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Smith, B. D. (2011). General patterns of niche construction and the management of ‘wild’ plant and animal resources. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 366(1566), 836–848.
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Unschuld, P. U. (1986). Medicine in China: A History of Ideas. Berkeley: University of California Press.
“Son,” Hridaya whispered again, this time with an edge that made him quiver. “Do you know why you’re here?”
“I don’t,” Leonie answered, still shaken by his visions.
“Then I’ll tell you: this is your last incarnation. Your chance to break free from the cycles of separation and denial that have kept you bound. Do you know what this means?”
“I don’t,” he admitted.
Hridaya took a moment to adjust his robe, then gripped Leonie’s forearm, his voice low. “It means your ancient soul chose to return to this plane one last time for the purpose of liberation. Divine destiny is with you, but you still have the will to reject it. If you turn away, the universe will keep sending the lessons you need to learn. Ignore them, and they’ll get harsher. Do you understand?”
Leonie shrugged in resignation. “What does it matter what I’ve come here to learn?” he murmured, his gaze falling to the ground. “I’m all alone, anyway.”
“Nonsense,” Hridaya countered, his grip on Leonie’s palm firming.
“You are no orphan, but a beloved child of the universe. Though you may feel displaced, your soul is anchored to the womb of the world; your hands inter-twined with the pulse of creation. It is only in the folly of ignorance that we choose to desert ourselves, becoming orphans to our very own souls.
“Look,” he said, squinting his blind eyes as if sensing Leonie’s pain, “I know life doesn’t always add up the way we want it to, but that doesn’t mean we should stop counting our blessings. You see, there is no good or bad luck, really, only wisdom to be gained from our unmendable human condition.
“Our personal stories shape us, but they do not limit or define us. In the end, who we truly are escapes all form and definition. It doesn’t matter, then, what star you were born under or which side of the river you drank from— obstacles will arise either way. You must not get discouraged, son. We are here to pave the way for each other, learning to see clearer so we can love better.
The fortuneteller paused, as though listening for a distant whisper only he could hear. Then, with his head tilted toward the sky, he continued: “At any point, we can give our life a hundred different names or simply call it grace. It all depends on how well we learn to see through things. Sometimes the greatest trials turn out to be our highest blessings. Other times, we are left with indelible wounds, marks that cannot be erased or repaired. But if we carry our hurt with grace, the scars stitched onto our skin become luminous constellations guiding our way home.
“Now happiness is the common road. But freedom? Here the road forks. The path of freedom is not the way of the masses, nor the aspiration of the tribe. Many of us meddle with freedom, but freedom has little to do with getting things our way, possessing what we desire, or feeling good about this or that.
“Before we’re born, freedom is woven into the fabric of our souls. As children, we understand this instinctively, but as we grow, this knowingness fades, leaving us nostalgic or in denial. Only a rare, disgruntled minority set off on a quest to reclaim what’s been lost. Some journey far, sometimes to the farthest edges of the earth. Don’t get me wrong. At times, the search is required. Yet what really matters is never the distance we travel, but how deep we are willing to dive to illuminate the shadows.”
“Son,” the fortuneteller leaned in, his voice dropping to a secretive whisper. “You’ll hear many promising you something better or more. It seems to me everyone hopes to hoard magic, but the pot of gold doesn’t just sit at the end of the rainbow. Treasures pepper the trail. Each day, the path unfolds, ever unwritten. Now tell me, what does your heart long to know more than anything so it may be made free again?”
Silence pervaded the forest once more. A gentle breeze brushed against Leonie’s face as he gazed out at the water, then back at the man. “The truth about my mother,” he uttered. “That is what I’d like to know most.”
Hridaya sighed deeply. “The truth, son, will set you free, but to do so, it must break open your heart first. Are you sure this is what you want to know more than anything?”
A tremor rippled through Leonie’s heart. He knew that the truth, whatever it was, would hit like a punch to his chest.
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Dearheart, perhaps you, too, have felt the sudden whack of truth—a force you have avoided, fearing it could shatter the world as you know it. Be honest: how often have you told a white lie to help someone save face or feel better? How many times has something inside you desperately wanted to live out the truth, and at the same time hoped it would never be revealed?
There’s no escaping it: the truth is seldom subtle. It’s a hurricane, exposing what you’ve kept covered. If we let the truth be destructive, it will wreak havoc. Yet honesty doesn’t have to be crushing; it can be as gentle as blushing. Gentle honesty is wise and discerning. It doesn’t weaken relationships; it deepens them. Speaking the truth is never about being rude, harsh, or unfiltered—it’s about upholding integrity in the centre of your heart. After all, honesty is a prickly rose. It must be handled with care, carried with grace, and delivered with unbending kindness. Even if it’s tough, lean into the hard conversations softly and speak your heart boldly. Stand for the truth—whatever the cost. Anything less is fickle, unreliable, and untrustworthy.
Dearheart, have you ever wondered about that tingle keeping you awake at night? Where does the fiery inspiration spark from? Why does your soul beckon you in? Consciousness is ever awake, whether you are asleep, stumbling, or taking the leap. It patiently waits for you to unlock the mysteries of your spirit and embrace the liberating journey that awaits.
About the Book
Leonie’s Leap tells of the adventures of a fifteen-year-old orphaned acrobat who escapes his dreary life to join the circus as a trapeze artist. Just as the daring acrobat takes the bold plunge into the unknown, your inner exploration reveals the hidden wonders within.
Your capacity to return to this wild inner landscape is the answer to your deepest longing, the home where every prayer settles. It doesn’t matter where you come from or what path you have chosen—every bit of YOU knows it: you were born to live vibrantly from your depths. The world needs you to dwell in your wildly liberated heart. It breathes through your sacred dreams. Your wings. Your feet.
Are you ready to leap?
About the Author
Marzia Pasini is a writer and life coach devoted to heart consciousness and the sacred return to self. With a background in Philosophy and a Master’s in Comparative Politics from the London School of Economics, she began her career in international development, working with the United Nations and the Office of Her Majesty Queen Rania of Jordan. Two life-altering health crises sparked a profound inner shift, inspiring her to help others reconnect with their inner freedom and truth. She has also authored a children’s book Satya and the Sun, which follows a young girl on a magical journey through her fear of the dark—offering an empowering reflection on change, trust, and the unknown.
Originally from Italy, Marzia has lived in six countries and now makes her home in India with her husband and two children.
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Title: Human Nature: A Walking History of the Himalayan Landscape
Author: Thomas Bell
Publisher: Penguin Random House
On the plane from Kathmandu I could see the thunderheads building over the eastern hills, after a month of drought. At the bus park, when I claimed my place in the front of the jeep, the soldier who’d already taken his said, ‘This is going to be awkward.’ He spent the first part of the journey asleep on my shoulder.
The road climbed through the clouds and tea gardens of Ilam. The neat little tea hedges were whorled around the round hills like the ridges on a fingerprint. The air was opaque with condensation, like every time I’ve been there. I was once told that this continually cloudy weather—‘the sun never shines, it’s so depressing!’—accounts for the fact that Ilam has the highest suicide rate in the country. But a woman from here, whom I met in Kathmandu, said, ‘No, it’s because the kids’ parents won’t let them be with whom they want to be; they’re lovesick, then their exams come, they come under even greater pressure, feeling their whole lives are at stake, and they drink poison or jump in a river.’
The music in the jeep was loud, and there wasn’t much conversation until we began descending into Phidim in declining light. Beyond the steamed-up glass we saw a blur of rain, cloud and forest, the lights of the town below, and white flashes of lightning. ‘Mother!’ squealed the young woman in the back, and the passengers began talking about deaths by lightning. In his home district they’re quite common, Rajendra said. ‘The victims are burnt black-black!’ The jeep dropped people off at various places, lastly me and Rajendra at a hotel. He carried most of the bags and fishing rods upstairs.
That evening in the hotel restaurant I was joined by an engineer, who was living there while he worked on a hydropower project. It was stormy outside. We drank whisky and talked about fishing, which he was interested in, and about walking routes. After we’d been talking for a while, and it seemed I knew enough to get around, he asked why I needed a guide, referring to Rajendra, who he’d seen carrying the rods upstairs.
‘I need someone to help me with my stuff,’ I said.
I was planning to walk down the Tamar River, do some fishing, and make our way back through the hills to Kathmandu in two or three weeks. ‘Start your walk from the village of Majhitar,’ the engineer said. ‘It’s on your way, and the fishing will be good where a stream flows into the Tamar.’
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In the morning a car from the engineer’s project took me and Rajendra and dropped us a few kilometres away, which was as far as the road stretched then. The map I had was only ten years old, but very out of date, because in a short time the hills have filled with roads. The footpath leading from Phidim towards the Tamar was in the process of becoming the Mid-Hill Highway, a major project that will coil over ridge after ridge across the whole country. We began tramping along the unfinished surface towards Majhitar.
Except for last night’s squalls, the weather had been dry throughout the hills. Forest fires were in the news. Here, the villagers were ploughing in preparation for more rain, whereupon they’d plant maize. Where the immense red slopes were too steep to farm they were thinly forested with sal trees, which had shed their leaves to endure the arid spring. The braided streams of the Tamar came into view beneath us. After last night the water was a dirty, concrete grey. The road descended to Majhitar.
The name of this village means that members of the fishermen’s caste—Majhi—are living on a flat piece of alluvial land called a tar. The first people we reached were rethatching their house ahead of the monsoon. Their nets were hanging in the rafters. Rajendra stopped to talk, and they fried some minnows for us. ‘There are fish in this river as big as ourselves,’ the Majhis said, ‘but there’s no chance of catching them in this black water.’ They showed us the thick lines and 2-inch hooks they use, baited with minnows, to catch the big ones. ‘Fish eat fish?’ Rajendra asked.
For the rest of the day we crossed the slopes high above the black waters of the Tamar. We climbed steeply through a burnt forest, the path levelled out among fragrant pines, then we walked all afternoon in grinding sunshine, through leafless jungle with little to drink. The brightness, heat and thirst, last night’s whisky, the weight of my bag, and the awkward load of fishing rods swinging around my body made the world contract. By the end of the day I’d withdrawn into determination only to reach the village where we’d stay. When we got there the villagers asked us, for some reason, ‘Are you from the land registry department?’ They were also Majhis.
Archaeologists have speculated that fishing villages were the first permanent settlements, because even before agriculture they had a source of food in one place. It seems plausible that a similar principle is relevant here. This village, which only consisted of half a dozen stone huts, was built on a naturally formed terrace about 20 yards above the river. Each hut was a single windowless room, with a wall-less sleeping platform above it under a pitched thatch roof. Drunks were asleep on steps and benches at the end of the afternoon. We put our stuff down and were shown which house would take us. Rajendra and I asked them to prepare daal and rice for us, but they said they had no daal.
‘Vegetables then?’ They had no vegetables.
‘Can I have a cup of tea?’ There was no tea.
‘Then give me a cigarette.’ There were no cigarettes. They rolled the tobacco they grew in strips of fibre from their maize cobs.
About the Book
n Human Nature, Thomas Bell embarks on four walks through the Himalaya, each in a different season, to explore the interplay between the land and the people who call it home. This evocative history entwines travelogue with folklore, literature, art and anthropology, offering a nuanced portrait of life over the centuries in one of the world’s most enigmatic regions.
Bell’s decades of living in Nepal give him an unusual perspective that bridges the gap between insider and outsider. The stories told to him touch on themes from religion to ecology and political economy, and from pre-history to the present day. He also deftly examines the impact of British imperialism and the growing external pressures on the environment.
Accompanied by striking photographs, Human Nature is a magnificently written account that spans big ideas and real lives. Erudite, intimate and evocative, this is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the relationship between communities and their environment.
About the Author
Thomas Bell was born in the north of England. After university, he moved to Nepal to cover the civil war there for the Daily Telegraph, The Economist and other publications. He was the Southeast Asia correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, before returning to Kathmandu where he was a political officer for the United Nations during the peace process. His earlier book, Kathmandu, is a history of Nepal’s capital.
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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Title:Let’s Be Best Friends Forever: Beautiful Stories of Friendship
Publisher: Talking Cub, Speaking Tiger Books
From ‘The Tunnel of Friendship’ by Ruskin Bond
I had already started writing my first book. It was called Nine Months, but had nothing to do with a pregnancy; it referred merely to the length of the school term, the beginning of March to the end of November, and it detailed my friendships and escapades at school and lampooned a few of our teachers. I had filled three slim exercise books with this premature literary project, and I allowed Azhar to go through them. He was my first reader and critic. ‘They’re very interesting. But you’ll get into trouble if someone finds them,’ was his verdict.
We returned to Shimla, having won our matches against Sanawar, and were school heroes for a couple of days. And then my housemaster discovered my literary opus and took it away and read it. I was given six of the best with a Malacca cane, and my manuscript was torn up. Azhar knew better than to say ‘I told you so’ when I showed him the purple welts on my bottom. Instead, he repeated the more outrageous bits he remembered from the notebooks and laughed, till I began to laugh too.
‘Will you go away when the British leave India?’ Azhar asked me one day.
‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘My stepfather is Indian. My mother’s family have lived here for generations.’
‘Everyone is saying they’re going to divide the country. I think I’ll have to go away.’
‘Oh, it won’t happen,’ I said glibly. ‘How can they cut up such a big country?’
‘Gandhi will stop them,’ he said.
But even as we dismissed the possibility, Jinnah, Nehru and Mountbatten and all those who mattered were preparing their instruments for major surgery.
Before their decision had any effect on our life, we found a little freedom of our own—in an underground tunnel that we discovered in a corner of the school grounds. It was really part of an old, disused drainage system, and when Azhar and I began exploring it, we had no idea just how far it extended. After crawling along on our bellies for some twenty feet, we found ourselves in complete darkness. It was a bit frightening, but moving backwards would have been quite impossible, so we continued writhing forward, until we saw a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. Dusty, a little bruised and very scruffy, we emerged at last on to a grassy knoll, a little way outside the school boundary. We’d found a way to escape school!
The tunnel became our beautiful secret. We would sit and chat in it, or crawl through it just for the thrill of stealing out of the school to walk in the wilderness. Or to lie on the grass, our heads touching, reading comics or watching the kites and eagles wheeling in the sky. In those quiet moments, I became aware of the beauty and solace of nature more keenly than I had been till then: the scent of pine needles, the soothing calls of the Himalayan bulbuls, the feel of grass on bare feet, and the low music of the cicadas.
World War II had just come to an end, the United Nations held out the promise of a world living in peace and harmony, and India, an equal partner with Britain, would be among the great nations…
But soon we learnt that Bengal and Punjab provinces, with their large Muslim populations, were to be bisected. Everyone was in a hurry: Jinnah and company were in a hurry to get a country of their own; Nehru, Patel and others were in a hurry to run a free, if truncated, India; and Britain was in a hurry to get out. Riots flared up across northern India.
At school, the common room radio and the occasional newspaper kept us abreast of events. But in our tunnel Azhar and I felt immune from all that was happening, worlds away from all the pillage, murder and revenge. Outside the tunnel, there was fresh untrodden grass, sprinkled with clover and daisies, the only sounds the hammering of a woodpecker, and the distant insistent call of the Himalayan barbet. Who could touch us there?
‘And when all wars are done,’ I said, ‘a butterfly will still be beautiful.’
‘Did you read that somewhere?’ Azhar asked.
‘No, it just came into my head.’
‘It’s good. Already you’re a writer.’
Though it felt good to hear him say that, I made light of it. ‘No, I want to play hockey for India or football for Arsenal. Only winning teams!’
‘You’ll lose sometimes, you know, even if you get into those teams,’ said wise old Azhar. ‘You can’t win forever. Better to be a writer.’
One morning after chapel, the headmaster announced that the Muslim boys—those who had their homes in what was now Pakistan—would have to be evacuated. They would be sent to their homes across the border with an armed convoy.
It was time for Azhar to leave, along with some fifty other boys from Lahore, Rawalpindi and Peshawar. The rest of us—Hindus, Christians, Buddhists, Sikhs and Parsis—helped them load their luggage into the waiting British Army trucks that would take them to Lahore. A couple of boys broke down and wept, including our departing school captain, a Pathan who had been known for his unemotional demeanour. Azhar waved to me and I waved back. We had vowed to meet again some day. We both kept our composure.
The headmaster announced a couple of days later that all the boys had reached Pakistan and were safe. On the morning of 15 August 1947, we were marched up to town to witness the Indian flag being raised for the first time. Shimla was still the summer capital of India, so it was quite an event. It was raining that morning. We were in our raincoats and gumboots, while a sea of umbrellas covered the Mall.
(Extracted from Let’s Be Best Friends Forever: Beautiful Stories of Friendship, with an introduction by Jerry Pinto. Published by Talking Cub, the children’s imprint of Speaking Tiger Books.)
ABOUT THE BOOK
An Afghan trader and a young Bengali girl form a touching connection that transcends cultural barriers in Rabindranath Tagore’s classic story ‘The Kabuliwala’. Jo March and Laurie from Little Women meet at a dull party and become companions for life. L. Frank Baum’s timeless characters Dorothy and Toto adventure around Oz forging magical bonds of friendship.
The brave queen of Jhansi and her ally Jhalkaribai come together to fight for freedom and dignity; Jesse Owens narrates an inspiring tale of sportsmanship and solidarity from his Olympic days; and twelve-year-old Kamala and her friends, Edward, Amir and Amma, endure the Partition riots together in Bulbul Sharma’s heart-warming story.
In these pages you will also meet Nimmi and her best pal, Kabir, whose school misadventures include spirited debates; Sunny, whose love for books leads to a new friendship on a trip to Darjeeling; Cyril and Neil, who face life’s challenges with inventive word games, and Siya, who discovers that true friends can come in the most unexpected forms—even as a cherished doll.
Animal lovers will delight in the escapades of Gillu, the charming squirrel, Harold, the handsome hornbill, Rikki-tikki-tavi, the loyal mongoose, Hira and Moti, the powerful oxen, and Bagheera, the brave panther who looks after the young boy Mowgli.
With stories from beloved and popular authors—Ruskin Bond, Rudyard Kipling, Mahadevi Varma, Jerry Pinto, Shabnam Minwalla, and many more—Let’s Be Best Friends Forever is an enchanting collection that celebrates the universal power and beauty of friendship.
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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
A brief overview of Rajat Chaudhuri’s Spellcasters, published by Niyogi Books, and a conversation with the author.
Spellcasters by Rajat Chaudhuri is a spellbinding fast paced adventure in a phantasmagorical world against the backdrop of climate change and environmental disasters. Chaudhuri, a proponent of solarpunk[1], has nine books under his belt, including the Butterfly Effect (2018) a few fellowships (like Charles Wallace), and a sense of fun as the characters hurtle through the book gripping the readers with their intensity.
In this novel, Chaudhuri’s universe is run by a council, based on Akbar’s Navratnas[2]. They seem to be people in charge of running a chaotic world. This group — though not drawn from Akbar’s court but from various parts of the world — are known as the ‘Nine Unknown Men’. They are said to host great people from the past in another dimension. As they “fold the dimensions and transform matter from one form to another”, manipulating and yet healing characters like Chanchal Mitra, his protagonist, putting the world to ‘rights’ by destroying villainous capitalists who sport shrunken heads of their enemies and indulge in creating drugs that can lead to annihilation of humankind, there is a fine vein of coherence which gives credibility to Chaudhuri’s imagined world.
The locales are all fictitious but highlight real world problems of climate change, unethical scientific research and uncontrolled economic growth that only pamper the pockets of the rich craving power. He weaves in episodes that had made headlines in Indian media, like Ganesha drinking milk, and Himalayan disasters, a result of interferences by human constructs like dam building and ‘development’. A sensuous mysterious woman with curly hair, Sujata, who sets Mitra back on track and is as good as a Marvel heroine when accosted with villains, adds to the appeal of the book.
He describes a barefoot tribe which seems more idyllic than real. But given that it is a phantasmagorical fantastical novel, one would just accept that as a part of the Spellcasters’ world. However, the import of the message the tribal leader conveys to the characters on the run is astute. “We take little from this land and try to return what it gives us. So did our forefathers and all those who walk this country with the animals. But the settlers in villages and cities never tire of drawing out the last drop of earth’s riches…” A similar take on nomadism and settler communities can be found in nonfiction in Anthony Sattin’s Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped our World, who talks of the spirit of brotherhood, or asabiyya, that bound the nomads together, a concept borne in the fourteenth century in the Middle East. One wonders if the Nine Unknown Men who cast spells are also bound by some such law as at the end the ‘Perfect Lovers’ disappear into another adventure in time… perhaps, to resurface in Chaudhuri’s next book?
Chaudhuri is poetic with words. He writes stunning descriptions of storms and climate events: “The rivers are boisterous and overflowing, the skies are being torn apart by forests of lightning. The great snow-capped peaks from where these rivers emerge have vanished behind walls of water tumbling down from the skies.”
The thing that makes his book truly unique is the way his characters seem to internalise or grow out of the miasma that encapsulates the world below the mountains. They seem like an extension of the chaotic external environment with strange happenings. Even in the council meeting held by the Nine Unknown Men, some of the crowd seem to be wisps of mists. Chanchal Mitra has to go above the hovering fog to start healing back to normal. The novel starts in a seemingly dystopian setting. The ending is more of a fantasy. There is a strain of Bengaliness in his wry humour, in small factual details, like we find Jagadish Chandra Bose seated in the council hall, though LJ drawn from RL Stevensons’ fictional pirate from Treasure Island (1883), Long John Silver, and Caligari from The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920), have larger and more crucial roles in the novel. Spellcasters is a thriller that entices with words, a gripping plot and suspense — set against a backdrop of strange climate events that are becoming a reality in today’s world, though the characters are more interesting than those drawn from real life.
The novel is written by an author who is compelled by perhaps more than a need to record his times. He has a vision… though not clearly laid out as a didactic message. But it hovers in the fog that is part of the book. One of the things that came across[3] was to create utopia, we need the chaos of dystopian existence…a theme that rebel poet Nazrul addresses in his poem, ‘Proloyullash’ (The Frenzy of destruction): “Why fear destruction? It’s the gateway to creation!”
Rajat Chaudhuri
In a past life, Chaudhuri had been a consumer rights activist, an economic and political affairs officer with a Japanese Mission and a climate change advocate at the United Nations, New York. Working in such capacities could have generated his vision, his worldview. Let us find out more about it by asking him directly:
What made you turn to writing from being an activist and climate change advocate? How long have you been writing fiction? What made you turn to fiction?
I am still involved with activism through my work with NGOs and my writing for popular media and other venues. However, I have gradually shifted my energies to creative fiction through which, nowadays, I try to engage with climate change and other planetary crises.
I have been writing fiction for nearly two decades now, my first novel, Amber Dusk was published seventeen years ago. As a full-time activist I have had the opportunity to interact and work with people from various strata of society right from the villages of India to international fora like the United Nations, where I have often noticed a tug-of-war of ideas between big business, sections of civil society, governments and other major groups like women, indigenous people and so on. While watching and participating in these, I had begun to realise how stories can open another flank in our efforts to communicate our ideas.
Today, you see, storytelling is everywhere. Stories are being recruited for issues big or small, important or completely worthless, even dangerous! In my case, I realised that stories can be an important vehicle for communicating issues surrounding planetary crises to my audience. Stories tend to be sticky — they remain with us for a long time and studies are now showing that well told stories can trigger changes in perceptions, beliefs and ideas. But it took me a long time to transform this realisation into book projects. Before that I had written other books – contemporary fiction, urban fantasy and so on.
What made you conceive Spellcasters? How long did it take you to write?
There are two or three strands that came together in the writing of Spellcasters. Most important among these is my interest in psychology and mental disorders and specifically in the fact that the ideas that dominate the world today, you can call them spells too, make us behave like we are affected by some kind of mental illness. Ideas and practices like limitless growth, conspicuous consumption and so on, make us behave as if we have lost our minds as we go on plundering the planet for energy and resources despite the fact that `nature’ is striking back at us with ever-increasing fury. So, our mental illness is causing planetary illness and at the centre of all this are these powerful, mesmerising, false beliefs, which right from the time of the Club of Rome have been known to be dangerous.
So, when I began to plan this novel, all these thoughts were in my mind partly driven by my activism. And at the same time, I had been reading Sudhir Kakar’s works about magic and mysticism in India and the parallels between Indian and western psychology so all of that came together. It took me about five years to complete Spellcasters not at one go, there was other stuff I have worked on in between.
What kind of research went into making the book?
To create the main character, the journalist Chanchal Mitra, I worked closely with my psychoanalyst friend Anurag Mishra who happens to be a student of Sudhir Kakar. And that research was really intense. We had long face-to-face and online sessions and I read a lot about the varieties and specificities of mental disorder.
Then there is of course that background layer of interest which oftenseeds ideas in your mind. This usually comes from your reading, and I had been interested in reading about the occult traditions of the East and the West for many years. Characters like Mme Alexandra David-Neel[4], the magic healers among indigenous peoples, the power of entheogenic substances like mushrooms have always fascinated me, and some of that came back while researching this book. Writing the climate layer of the story was comparatively easier because of my first-hand activist experience.
Do you have a vision or a message that you tried to address in this novel? I felt it moved from a dystopian setting to that of a fantasy — though not to utopia. Do you think a dystopian vision is necessary to evolve utopia?
The message is simple, and we all know it: Ideas of limitless growth have affected us mentally and so we behave and act in ways (resource extraction, carbon emission) that are making the planet sick. We are passing on our illness to the planet. The belief in limitless growth is a zoonotic disease that our species has transferred to the living planet. Still, we do not act because we are under the effect of these powerful ideas, these powerful spells, that’s where the novel gets its name. The message, if we can call it one, is to be aware of this and try to break out of these spells.
The path to utopia is not necessarily through dystopia. We can start hoping and acting today before things get really bad. Which is the locus of the whole solarpunk movement with which I am closely associated as an editor and creator. But `darkness’ can be redeeming too. Jem Bendell writes about this in detail. Grief and sorrow can indeed make us stronger; author Liz Jensen navigates grief and encounters hope in Your Wild and Precious Life, which is a must read for everyone asking these questions. But coming back to Spellcasters it is really neither dystopia or utopia if we are talking about the climate layer of the story, it’s very much set in the present. What might look dystopian are the gothic and magical elements and settings which serve as a counterpoint to the cold logic of the scientist character, Vincent.
Your novel has broken various barriers by mingling different constructs. So, tell us, how do you combine realism with fantasy, science with literature and create your own world?
It’s not difficult actually. Fantasy, magic and `unreason’ are woven around the borders of the familiar. We see them often without noticing it. Leaping a little higher or using a prescription eye-cleanser can do the trick!
To answer the other part of your question, science and literature or nature and culture were never apart in the first place. They were sundered because of the partitioning project of modernity which goes back to the work of Hobbes and Boyle and has its own history and protagonists. Science fiction as you know does not care much for this division. Climate fiction because of its scaffolding of science and reason needs to bring the two together. As a climate fiction writer, I try to keep the scientific complexities in the background, but they remain as building blocks of the story. In this book however we have a full chapter which is out of a scientist’s journal, and I did that for a change in flavour and in the spirit of experimentation.
Are your imaginary locales based on real cities? Please elaborate.
Often so. In Spellcasters the cities of Anantanagar and Aukatabadare modelled on Calcutta and Delhi respectively. A close reader can easily pick out the similarities but then I also enjoy changing some details especially when I am writing mixed-genre work like this one. So, there is no Chinese joint (like the one Chanchal hangs out at) in Calcutta where you can openly smoke weed but there are places quite similar to the one I described and there is indeed a real person with an eye of glass who used to hang out in one of these.
You have spoken of storms on the hills. Do you also see this as an impact of climate change? Do you think building roads, tunnels or hydel power stations on the hills can, over a period of time, have adverse effects on climate or humanity? Can you suggest an alternative to such ‘development’?
The avalanches, the unseasonal rains, especially the cloudbursts are all closely connected to climate change. Having said that, we also have to be careful to avoid climate reductionism. Often it is a concatenation of factors (including carbon emissions and climate change) and processes, their effects amplified by feedback loops, that precipitate disasters. This is very true if we study migration, for which climate change can be one of the driving forces but there could be other factors like economic opportunities, cultural patterns etc implicated in such flows.
Mindless development which does not take into account the fragility of nature and the interconnections between all beings big and small, microscopic or enormous, animate or inanimate, will set into motion processes that will precipitate crises like climate change. Yes, big dams are definitely a problem and small hydro is always a better option. We often hear that nature is self-healing or that there have been many previous extinctions, and that the planet has made and remade itself, but that’s like telling ourselves, please prepare for suicide while the super-rich and the cults of preppers, especially in the advanced industrialised nations, can escape to their doomsday bunkers.
The alternatives to the current development model is to be found in the ideas of Gandhi, of Schumacher, in solarpunk literature, in Vandana Shiva’s works among plenty of other places. The basic idea is to live in harmony with the planet, cut down on emissions, reduce resource extraction, try community based participatory solutions to problems instead of relying on economic, high-tech or market-based instruments, step back, go slow and let nature cloth and feed us so that we can live with dignity while forsaking greed.
In Spellcasters, you show climate change as an accepted way of life at the end. Do you think that can be a reality? Do you think climate change can be reversed?
A novel often presents itself as a bouquet of ideas without the author demonstrating any clear bias for one over the others. But as an activist-writer I usually drop clear hints as to what is more desirable without making it too obvious. There is always this ongoing duel between politics and aesthetics in a novel and the best among us balance the two quite well.
Climate change can of course be engaged with, controlled and reversed, if we can stick to the ambitious targets of the Paris climate agreement with the rich nations facilitating the process with more funds to poorer nations. Both producers and consumers have a role to play here, and we need serious lifestyle changes in the advanced industrial nations (or rather the global North) and a serious focus on climate justice for any meaningful change to occur. Only planting trees and carbon-trading won’t do.
Your language is very poetic. Do you have any intention of trying poetry as a genre?
Thank you. I haven’t ever thought of writing poetry because I am not gifted with the art of brevity which I think is essential there. But I have enjoyed translating poetry from Bengali to English, which was published as a book. I plan to do more of that.
What can we next expect from your pen?
I have been trying to finish a work of non-fiction about climate change and I hope to do this by the end of the year.
Let me also take this opportunity to thank you Mitali and your team at Borderless Journal for your service to literature. You are doing important work here and I am really grateful for your interest in my novel.
Thank you so much for giving us your time and sharing your wonderful book.
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[1]Solarpunk is a sci-fi subgenre and social movement that emerged in 2008. It visualizes collectivist, ecological utopias where nature and technology grow in harmony. Read more by clicking her
[2]Navratnas or the nine gems were a bunch of very gifted men in his court, like Birbal and Tansen.
[3]The author does not agree to this reading in the interview. He sees his novel evolve out of the solarpunk movement.
Title: Camel Karma: Twenty Years Among India’s Camel Nomads
Author: Ilse Kohler-Rollefson
Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books
Whenever we read about travel narratives by foreigners in India, especially Westerners, we assume it to be primarily superficial, skin-deep, and without much contact with ground reality. This non-fiction book, that can also be read as a sort of travelogue, busts that myth. It begins with a German veterinarian, Ilse Kohler-Rollefson’s arrival in Rajasthan in 1991 and almost twenty-five years of association with the same. On a field trip to Jordan in 1979, she first became fascinated by the relationship between pastoral peoples and the camels they shared their lives with. After a brief stint of camel field research in Sudan’s eastern desert, her choice to continue her research on camel husbandry led her naturally to India, the country with the third-largest camel population in the world, and she arrived at the National Research Centre on Camel (NRCC) in Bikaner, Rajasthan. Wanting to know more about the practical aspects of camel-keeping or its cultural foundation, she encountered the Rebaris, also called Raikas in Marwar, who are proper breeders of camels and whose whole lifestyle centred around it. She writes, “To me it seemed that the Raikas’ relationship with their animals was equally worthy of conservation as a uniquely human heritage.”
Historically, the Raika of Rajasthan have had a unique and enduring relationship with camels. They offer a compassionate alternative by keeping farm animals as part of nature, allowing them to move and do so in herds. Farm animals can thus extend their potential as humanity’s greatest asset. Their entire existence revolves around looking after the needs of these animals which, in turn, provide them with sustenance, wealth and companionship. Ilse is immediately enthralled by Raika’s intimate relationship with their animals, but she is also confronted with their existential problems.
For her, her research among them gave her not just a glimpse of the history and culture of Rajasthan, but also a way forward in her personal journey. Denying all kinds of creature comforts, the hope of saving both the camel and the Raika way of life took her and her spirited ally, Hanwant Singh Rathore, from vet labs in the city, to Raika settlements in the remotest corners of the Thar Desert, and everywhere in between. The intractable dilemmas— both bureaucratic and cultural—they were often confronted with required creative solutions. As they adapted to their circumstances, they found their orthodox Raika friends adapting with them. Kohler-Rollefson’s is a journey that is often exasperating, sometimes funny, but keeps revealing unexpected layers of rural Rajasthani mores and diverse cultures that make it such a fascinating place.
Spending her own research grants on a shoe-string budget, Kohler-Rollefson set up a base office in Sadri, close to the Kumbhalgarh Wildlife Sanctuary at the foothills of the Aravalli mountains, where she employs several Indians as research assistants (none of whom stay for long), veterinarians who help in administering the teeka, the vaccines to eradicate common camel diseases. With her trusted driver cum translator, her ally, she interacts with several nomadic tribes who rear camels, but whose caste and culture are radically different from one another as chalk and cheese. The narrative also gives details about her interactions with the local people — some of whom had earlier eyed her with suspicion of being an outsider, but later accepted her whole-heartedly.
She describes the sign-language with which she interacts with the womenfolk in the Raika households, her regular visits to the annual animal fair at Puskar, where she even bought a young female camel and named her Mira, leaving her to grow up and breed with the other camels of the Raika. Kohler-Rollefson learned that the Raika did not sell camel milk or eat camel meat. They used other camel by-products, but clearly the economic returns from a camel did not seem optimal. Mostly, they bred female camels to give birth to male camels that could be sold to other caste for work. She was surprised to find that “these camels resembled family members and were treated almost as intimately; nobody was afraid of them.”
Despite repeated setbacks, both from government apathy as well as social taboos, Kohler-Rollefson’s dedication to the cause was so sincere that she was able to found many organisations like the Lokhit Pashu-Palak Sansthan (LPPS), including the Camel Husbandry Improvement Project (CHIP), promote the study and documentation of ethno-veterinarian practices (the melding of traditional and modern approaches to treating camel diseases), highlighting the Raika’s grazing needs at the World Parks Conference (2003), and along with Rathore and a Raika team, even embarking on an arduous 800 km long yatra on camelback throughout Rajasthan to raise awareness and draw attention to the dwindling camel numbers.
She successfully organised a meeting where apart from the traditional Raika constituency, she could include members from a range of castes spanning the whole social spectrum of Rajasthan – Rajputs from Jaisalmer, Bishnois from Barmer, Jats from Bikaner, Gujjars from Nagaur and Sindhi Muslims from deep in the Thar. She even escorted a group of Raika, including a colourful Bhopa (a wandering minstrel who sings and narrates the story of various episodes of the mythical Pabuji’s life through unfolding of cloth scrolls) to Germany and then to Interlaken, Switzerland for an FAO (Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations) conference. She set up the League for Pastoral Peoples and Endogeneous Livestock Development (LPP) in Germany. In other words, Kohler-Rollefson has been successful in drawing attention to the problems of camels rearing at an international level.
The first edition of this book came out in 2014. Since then, they have had a daunting roller-coaster ride, shuttling back and forth between the depths of despair where they thought all was lost to exhilarating heights from which they fleetingly espied camel nirvana: a scenario where camels, people, and the environment live together in harmony and mutually support each other. Interestingly, the second revised edition of Camel Karma was published in 2023 and the other good news is that 2024 has been declared the International Year of Camelids by the United Nations General Assembly, with the stated goal of raising awareness of the contribution of camelids to livelihoods, food security and nutrition. It also aims at encouraging all stakeholders, including national governments, to work towards recognising and valuing the economic, social, and cultural importance of camelids in the lives of communities, especially those that are highly vulnerable to extreme poverty.
In combination with the India government’s recent discovery and appreciation of the country’s pastoralist cultures, this may be just the constellation that successfully revives India’s camel sector. In a scenario where companies and countries are competing for shares in the globalised market, the unique selling point of Rajasthan’s camel milk is the Raika’s heritage of producing milk humanely and with compassion. The biodiverse diet of the state’s camels is composed of ayurvedic plants that add another unique quality.
Thus, it seems appropriate that we all read Camel Karma now and let the world know about the unique Raika heritage and to serve as a baseline to look back on ten or twenty years from now. Despite the rapid technological development in all spheres of life, the author sees a future, and even an urgent need, for both the camel and for the Raika and other nomadic livestock keepers. She is optimistic for several reasons as everything in India is cyclical. The camel is a versatile and multipurpose animal that can fulfil many basic needs of humans. Its role as transport and farm animal is certainly on the retreat, so long as oil is available and affordable. Yet its potential as a dairy animal remains huge. Apart from that, there is a range of other eco-friendly products that can be made from happy living camels and that may just satisfy that budding urge of urbanites – in India and abroad – to re-connect with nature.
Apart from wholeheartedly praising the endeavour of Kohler-Rollefson in spending twenty years of her life among India’s camel nomads, in sacrificing her personal and family life for the welfare of the camels, and in drawing the attention to their problems in various fora in the international context, Camel Karma is a must read for everyone who is interested in learning about the socio-economic lifestyle of several castes and tribes of rural people in Rajasthan. We are looking forward to reading the sequel to this book which the author is planning to write, and which she tentatively calls “Camel Dharma” – a book about finding the right way of living with camels!
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Somdatta Mandal, critic, and translator, is former Professor of English at Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, India
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Poem by Quazi Johirul Islam, translated from Bengali by Professor Fakrul Alam
Perhaps you never ever noticed me
Reading this book day after day,
Or seen me looking from cover to cover
For other books in it, single-mindedly.
Tick tock the body clock kept beating.
Day would end and evening descend,
Time after time to the old page I’d return,
And yet I could never ever finish reading;
I had dipped in a river with no water at all,
I’d keep going down and down and still feel
I’d lost all sense of where I was—east or west;
This drying river would swallow me up whole!
A little later, all traces of the evening will disappear.
A shock will paralyse this desert-like land,
But the book will get stuck in the midst of the sand,
Perhaps, only for someone to lift it with his hand!
If you manage to take the book up in your hand,
No letter of the alphabet anywhere in it you’d see,
For this book full of white pages you took from the sand
Was the favourite reading matter of poet Jalal Uddin Rumi!
Quazi Johirul Islam has been writing for over 3 decades. He has published more than 90 books, 39 of them are collections of poetry. His travelogues are very popular. He has been with United Nations, has traveled all over the world, worked in conflict zones, his bag is full of colourful experiences. In 2023, Quazi was awarded Peace Run Torch Bearer Award by Sri Chinmoy Centre, New York. He has also received many awards and honours in Bangladesh, India and abroad.
Poetry by Quazi Johirul Islam, translated from Bengali by Fakrul Alam
The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo(1475-1564), Sistine Chapel. Courtesy: Creative Commons
One day I too burst into protest like marginal people do
Clamouring for longevity.
Despite evolving for millions of years
How could us civilised, highly intelligent creatures
have such short life spans?
This should never have happened!
When a man succeeds to stand tall on his own merit
Comes the call: “Exit from this world….”
How ridiculous! No way one should accept such a summon!
A man with a life span of only 60, 70 or 80?
Maximum 90, or—with an exception or two—a century—
Does this make any sense?
Humans should live as long as they want to.
Like a ruler of any impoverished nation,
God has seemingly dictated even our retirement age!
Look at the developed countries of the world, O God,
No retirement age there! One retires when one wants to
And no one is forced into retirement.
Humans should live or die as long as they want to.
I want the freedom to choose death
I called out to all at the top of my voice—
“Let us all die only when we want to!”
To my protests the Compassionate Almighty paid heed
And came down to our protest meet.
Putting a hand on my shoulder, he said,
“How long would you like to live?”
I could have asked Him then to give me
Four or five hundreds, or even a thousand years of life,
But I didn’t, not being the kind of opportunistic leader
Who’ll slow down a movement by accepting bribes!
I had confronted the Almighty face to face
And told him: “Till the time you can ensure the right
To die, only when a human being wants to die,
Our movement for this cause will go on and on!
A smile on his face, God said: “Haven’t you realised yet
It’s up to every human being to decide his or her fate!
I’ve shark bone hangers holding up millions of fleshy dresses
All kinds of fleshy dresses sway in the breeze,
But what makes you think such dresses equate life?”
“Life, for sure, is strewn across the ways of the world
Marked by the footsteps of your kind
Every day you fidget and frown
And draw images one way or the other
Serve those who are in distress or need help
Embrace trees and burst into tears
Such going-on typify your lives.
“Clothes wear and tear
There comes a day when they have to be thrown away
Do you want eternal life for your attire?
“You’ll live by the footsteps you etch on earth
Didn’t your predecessors themselves decide on how long they would live?
Didn’t Moses, Christ, Mohammed, Buddha, Socrates, Rabindranath and Einstein
Decide in their own ways how long they would be living?
“Decide on your own how long you want to live
Stop worrying about how long your clothes will last!”
Quazi Johirul Islam has been writing for over 3 decades. He has published more than 90 books, 39 of them are collections of poetry. His travelogues are very popular. He has been with United Nations, has traveled all over the world, worked in conflict zones, his bag is full of colourful experiences. In 2023, Quazi was awarded Peace Run Torch Bearer Award by Sri Chinmoy Centre, New York. He has also received many awards and honours in Bangladesh, India and abroad.
Going up from East River to all heated up 46 Street,
Crossing quite a few avenues one after another,
Just where 5th Avenue comes into view jarringly,
One comes across America’s biggest bookstore, Barnes and Nobles,
Poised at this point of the city like an ancient philosopher.
And when I say “biggest”, I mean one store of a really big bookshop chain.
There may perhaps be a bigger shop than this one somewhere else,
Or perhaps there may be none comparable in size!
On weekdays I stand there for some time around ten
Perhaps because of its proximity to Diamond District,
The morning sunlight here—an amalgam of diamond and gold—
Streams onto the 5th Avenue pavement.
Perhaps to pick them up,
Causal and loosely clad, white-skinned women flood the street.
Usually, I buy a glass of smoothie from the Mohican youth
Making energy drinks on his machine,
Savouring afterwards a glass of the diamond-gold drink.
I can take many roads to come to F train station,
But I always use this particular crossing point.
On evenings, while returning from the UN building,
Unthinkingly, I enter Barnes and Noble’s cavernous stomach
Two concrete monsters cover the orange-coloured cloud.
What can a man possibly need in a bookshop?
It is quite one thing if it is a bar or a meat shop!
Of course, Americans crowd vegan shops nowadays,
Who knows if one day vegans will alter the American language?
From some aisle of the shop, on any given day, I’ll pick up any one.
The other day it was that old man from the Vermont Hills, Frost.
As soon as I picked him up, he wanted to make me wise in my ways.
“Try and fathom out the music of verse—that is it essence!”
What rubbish! The guy is still stuck in the 1960s!
The world of poetry has marched forward a lot,
And has been crossing all sorts of holes and pits nowadays,
And prose’s highs and lows.
The old man is such an ignoramus!
Holding a milk-honey concoction on her lap sat the Punjabi girl, Rupi Kaur.
Seeing me, she sprang into my lap.
India seemed to tremble as fingers touched soft dark skin.
Though someone who was still in her teens only yesterday,
She couldn’t resist dishing out advice. She said:
“Forge a knife on your own dear poet; hold the weapon in your hand,
The time has come to slice things with one stroke after another!”
The day I banged against Rae Armantrout, was the day I learnt about her verse,
About how in their silences became representative of language movement poetry.
I saw many others in their welcoming aisle as well!
I saw Ezra Pound trying to suppress a smile when I entered,
For sure I did not dare go near him out of fear
But let me whisper this into your ears:
I sure did mangle his poetry in trying to translate it!
I saw Amiri Baraka’s unruly beard fly in the air conditioner’s wind.
Nude Ginsberg was walking up the stairs leading to the second floor,
Shouting as he did so, “They don’t understand people’s sufferings
So obsessed are they with “development”!
John Ashberry was looking at the Hudson with one eye,
His tears stonily registering some hidden pain there
The other eye was all ablaze
All of a sudden, like a scene in some animation film,
The man’s eye’s fire made Manhattan burn.
I fled the fire that was burning so
Thinking as I did then—
How could Barnes and Nobles accommodate such hostile pronouncements,
such wrath!
Holliswood, New York
24 June, 2022
Quazi Johirul Islam has been writing for over 3 decades. He has published more than 90 books, 39 of them are collections of poetry. His travelogues are very popular. He has been with United Nations, has traveled all over the world, worked in conflict zones, his bag is full of colourful experiences. In 2023, Quazi was awarded Peace Run Torch Bearer Award by Sri Chinmoy Centre, New York. He has also received many awards and honours in Bangladesh, India and abroad.
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