Aruna Rodrigues, the Supreme Court of India, The Government, and GMO

Ms. Aruna Rodrigues describes herself as an ordinary citizen of India. And yet, she has taken on an extraordinary endeavour. She has, through a writ petition in the supreme court of India, challenged the Government of India, no less, in its reckless promotion of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO). She hopes to have the court to put a stop to bringing in all GMO, and set up completely independent regulatory body that can be influenced neither by the politicians nor by the biotech industry, to conduct safety tests on these GMO against possible risk to humans as well as natural biodiversity of the nation.

Aruna Rodrigues

Aruna Rodrigues

She started on that case about ten years ago, and it took her two years to gather sufficient data to file the case, in 2005. The famous case is now drawing to a close, and many feel that she has an even chance, and some claim it is better than an even chance, that she might succeed.

At stake here might be the very future of India’s food security and food sovereignty. There has been many in recent years that claim that India’s science and commercial institutions are being used to solve American problems, often at the disadvantage of India’s own interests. Some claim that this agenda comes high up from the Govt, and that it may be a sell-off of national interest for the purpose of assisting foreign commercial goals.

Of relevance here ia a special clause in the Indian constitution, in article 32, which might be unique to India and absent in other democracies, which gives the power to an ordinary citizen of India, to challenge the Government in the Supreme Court, if the citizen’s basic and fundamental rights, as guaranteed in the constitution, are infringed upon by the Government.

Also of relevance is the Cartagena Convention on Biological Diversity, often called the Cartagena Protocol, which came into force in 2003 and to which India is a signatory. This protocol seeks to protect the biological diversity of individual nations, against possible threat by introduced Living Modified Organisms (LMO) created by the Biotech industry, and which might be imported through trade negotiations. This protocol in fact became the binding international agreement on Biosafety. The Protocol stipulates, among other things, that parties shall consult the public in decision-making processes and place important decisions in this regard in the public domain. India, in spite of having signed it, may not have followed the protocol in the manner in which it promoted GMO.

And so, I had requested Aruna for a telephone talk on record, for the purpose of creating a public awareness podcast on this important issue, which affects not just India, but literally half the world. The famous court case is drawing to a close. There are many that hope, myself included, that she might actually win the case, and force the Government of India in doing what is right for the people of India, and stop this reckless introduction of untested and possibly unsafe GMO products to promote interests of foreign biotech corporations.

The under 19 minute podcast can be listened to by clicking the play button at the bottom of this page. Alternately, folks can also subscribe to my podcast from iTunes, and have it downloaded for listening at leisure through their iPhone or iPod etc.

My thanks go to Ms Aruna Rodrigues for allowing me to speak to her on a short notice.
I shall be happy to receive your feedback – at tony.mitra@gmail.com

Relevant Reference:
  1. Order of the Supreme Court in 2012, about formation of expert committee : http://indiankanoon.org/doc/126946252/
  2. PDF copy of the original interim report from the Expert Committee, as submitted to the Supreme Court of India in 2012, essentially recommending that field trials of GMO be stopped till instruments are put in place and independent safety assessment study can be done effectively : http://indiagminfo.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/SC-TEC-interim-report-oct17th-2012-GMO-PIL.pdf
  3. A report from Hindu, in 2012, about the first (interim) report of the expert committee to the Supreme court, essentially recommending a 10 year ban on all field trials of GMO : http://indiankanoon.org/doc/126946252/
  4. A report from David Andow (one of the scientist whose report was presented to the Indian supreme court) on Bt.Brinjal : https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/science_acj/Xu3sTURqQk
  5. Article from Raw Earth Living on Bt. Brinjal : http://rawearthliving.wordpress.com/2010/02/25/legal-cases-laid-ground-for-gmo-bt-brinjal-ban-india/
  6. Cartagena Protocol : http://bch.cbd.int/protocol/text/
  7. List of Signatories to the Cartagena Protocol (note USA and Canada are almost the only countries missing) : http://bch.cbd.int/protocol/parties/

Dave Goulson on Neonicotinoid insecticide affecting wellbeing of bees

There is a marked difference to the attitude of people across the atlantic, when it comes to acceptance of industrial chemicals into our food system, and Europe is providing to be more cautious than North America. The case of neonicotinoids insecticide is an example. The EU have imposed temporary ban on a few of these chemical, whereas there is no similar movement in the North American continent that I know of. This ban was based on a few high end research done on the effect of these insect nerve agents. There are many news articles from Europe that cover this story, as exampled here in the screen shot on the British news outlet – The Guardian. You can click on the image and go to the source.

One of the important scientific reports that was pivotal in EU reaching a decision to ban some neonicotinoids was done by Prof. Dave Goulson, currently with the University of Sussex in the UK. He was gracious enough to speak with me on phone for the purpose of this podcast.

Prof. Goulson studied Biology at Oxford University, and did a PhD on butterfly ecology at Oxford Brookes University. THen he served as a lecturer at University of Southampton for 11 years, where he specialized in bumblebee ecology and conservation. In 2006 he became Professor of Biology and Stirling University and in 2006, founded the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, a charity devoted to reversing bumblebee declines. In 2013 he moved to Sussex University.

Dave Goulson

Dave Goulson

Dr. Goulson has published over 200 scientific articles on the ecology of bees and other insects, and am author of “Bumblebees; their behaviour, ecology and conservation (2010, Oxford University Press)” and “A Sting in the Tale (2013, Jonathan Cape)”, a popular science book about bumblebees.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In 2010 I was BBSRC “Social Innovator of the Year” and in 2013 I won the Marsh Award for Conservation Biology from the Zoological Society of London. The conversation is presented here is just under 40 minutes long.

The most recent book that he wrote – A Sting in the Tale” (not tail), is available in north America as an e-book for Amazon kindle or Apple iPad as well as in hardcover. I have downloaded the first few pages of the book in my iPad as a sample, and intend to buy the full book, from what I read already. The book promises to be a good science book on the bees but with a humorous tone that attempts to keep the uninitiated reader glued to the tale, and an essential read for those concerned about ecology and sustainability the natural plant world around us and its intimate and complicated relationship with insects, and other small organisms.

 

The 40 minute conversation is converted here as a podcast. You can listen to it directly by clicking the play button at the bottom this page.

Contact Tony Mitra.

Among the living dead

Tonu had a notebook where he wrote about ideas on his writing. It was bigger than a pocket notebook, but not quite the size of an exercise book. Also, it had hard cover and was kept shut by a built in elastic band.
On the first page, he had written in long hand a description of the content – ‘Notes of My Writings’.

Today, at lunch, he decided to make fresh entries there. He had two major observation to add. He wrote:
‘Tonu wonders about the crisis:
facing Niel & his story,
b) facing mankind.
On the next like he wrote ‘Tonu’s dilemma’.

He was facing a dilemma. It was more than just a dilemma. It was a crisis. An existential crisis, to be precise. One might wonder, whose existence was threatened.
Tonu believed that the endangered group was none other than the mass of homo sapiens at one end of the spectrum. On the other end were the entire higher order of living creatures. In short, the planet itself was in peril.

And that was not all. Even the virtual world of Tonu’s creation, involving the immigrant Niel in his adopted country of Canada, was similarly threatened. Why? Because Tonu had created Niel after his own image, and was unable to keep Niel out of the crisis. Tonu was playing God here, even as he did not believe in God as the creator of the real universe. Tonu’s dissatisfaction with the state of affairs, and his unflattering view of mankind, was rubbing off on the lives of Niel and his newly acquired Canadian girl friend Mabel.

Tonu was unable to steer the story of Niel away from the depressing realization of mankind’s tendency of desecrating on the planet till everyone and everything is contaminated, or gone extinct. He knew that the story, if it was to be consumed by a non-plussed readership that did not care about the future of the living planet, needed to stay away from negativity. It needed an upbeat view of our cultural, economic and environmental degradation. It needed to concentrate on the elements of human drama.

Tonu had mused on possible scenarios. Niel should find Mabel to be sleeping with another man. Or he should get arrested on false charges of attempted rape of Mabels friend Stephanie. Or Niel’s uncle should suddenly arrive from nowhere and start living with him, greatly complicating his romance with Mabel. Or perhaps a sudden turn of events force Niel to face possible deportation back to India, for the crime of protesting against construction of a nuclear power plant in the middle of some pristine land. Or a sudden ailment might paralyze Mabel from hip down, albeit temporarily. Or another woman claiming to be the mother of Niel’s baby, appears suddenly in Mexico.

Things like those would add drama to the story. And a story needed drama.
But, somehow, Tonu did not find all this virtual drama to be interesting. To him, art is supposed to imitate life. And therefore, the character of Niel was supposed to be imitating the observations of Tonu, about life itself.
Sure, he could pen a scenario where they receive a call from Veracruz, from one senorita Elva Hernandez, addressing Niel as querido Neeeel, and informing him that their lovely child Esmeralda was growing up and asking who her father was. So the mother and child were planning to come to Canada to be with him, and if he would please pay for their transportation cost and arrange for their immigration.

However, it was doubtful that this would happen soon. Niel had some breathing time before such unforeseen catastrophe befell him, especially since he had never been to Mexico. Could it be that they knew each other from Miami? Anyhow Tonu was not in a frame of mind to write such details, like the two of them sitting in the sands of the Florida beaches, or lazing around on a boat among the mangroves well past sunset, as Alligators caught fish around them, while they rocked the boat, making babies.

Besides, this kind of human drama, with suddenly sprouting love triangles, unknown Spanish speaking babies, Florida Alligators sniffing around their lovemaking, and jealous Cuban lovers chasing Niel in and out of Miami night clubs might be the domain of the mystery romance writers. Tonu found such plots not to be his cup of tea. Imagine, Niel and the jealous Cuban emigre named Eduardo suddenly bumping against one another in a crowded corner of miracle mile. They mumble “que pasa” to each other before recognizing who they bumped into, before Niel starts his sprint afresh, zigzagging through the crowd, and Eduardo falls flat on the pavement, in his hurry to fish out that jack knife from his hip pocket, while avoiding a Guatemalan roadside Romeo singing with a guitar in hand, and a collection box at his feet.

No, Niel was not required after all to go back in time in Florida, or to Toronto to receive a suddenly arriving and suspicious uncle that all his life had a difficult relationship with his cousin sister, which was Niel’s mother. He was not facing deportation, because he was not really protesting the nuclear power plant, but merely wanted to speak with someone there about the possibility of using Thorium instead of Uranium on a future date, because Thorium nuclear fuel intrigued Niel. Unfortunately, the police that arrested him had never heard of Thorium, and mistakenly thought that Niel had some nefarious plans for some non-existing Canadian official named Mr. Thorium.

Mainstream readers were not that keen to know about Thorium either, irrespective of Canadian police mixing up a rare heavy metal with a fictitious Canadian official. Thorium, for Canadians, could turn out to be no better than Borium, or boring.
He could even add some timely spice, by bringing in a spice girl, a devastatingly sexy long legged Russian spy that also had a PhD in nuclear physics. She would appear to want to trap Niel in a web of sexual intrigue, mistaking him for a visiting Indian scientist. The real visiting Indian meanwhile turns out not to be a scientist at all, but a player of the Indian drum instrument known as the Tabla, who was to accompany a noted classical vocalist from India  who in turn was invited to perform in a local Indian cultural show.
All kinds of confusions could have ensued from that series of events. But, in the end, none of that happened, because Tonu did not write about it.

Main stream readers might or might not be interested in frivolous goings on in the life of Niel. In any case, Tonu did not find it interesting enough to write about such issues, sexy Russian spy and Tabla playing non-scientist notwithstanding.

And so, Tonu could not spend time creating drama in the life of Niel because of this foreboding sense of an impending crisis. Without trying to sound like a defeatist, Tonu had taken to contemplating these issues in his mind for many years, as well as reading up on as many good books he could get hold of, and listening to as many folks on the internet as possible. He would then put all that through the an internal review process in his mind, to filter out and process the information.

The crisis had many facets. In fact, the sheer magnitude was numbing. And the repetitiveness of the telltale signs had begun to dull the senses of the public. This in itself was a sorry turn of events. Folks were no more scandalized when one more corporate banker or financier or CEO or even a politician is found to be blatantly dishonest in his dealings. Folks were even used to seeing men of cloth, like Priests, being exposed for practicing sodomy on children. Nothing shocked the people any more. This was perhaps the biggest tragedy of all. Mankind had been rendered incapable of recognizing a crisis, and therefore unprepared to deal properly with any national or international disaster.

But, Niel represented the next generation – the innocent generation that is supposed to inherit the earth. Niel, the character Tonu created, was supposed to be  aware and opinionated, but not a defeatist. He should bring with him a degree of optimism and a willingness to try and change the world, not single handed, but collectively. He was supposed to do his little bit to make a change. And Mabel was there with him. Perhaps that would be the direction they should take – trying to make sense out of this senseless world that man had created, and repaying the debt his forefathers had drawn on this planet.

But how? Could Niel consciously help bring his own and the neighborhood’s per capita greenhouse gas footprint down near zero? Could he convince anybody, even a single person, to look for a lifestyle based on permanent zero growth ? Would folks not take him for a lunatic?

Tonu watched a picture he had clicked just a few months ago, on an ice covered landscape inside the Yellowstone National Park in the US. The plumes of hot steam rising out of a frigid ice covered landscape had prompted him to call the place the land of fire and ice. It also reminded him of a book by Jarred Diamond that he had read – The Third Chimpanzee. It was one of the books that explained the mega extinction of the K-T boundary, 65 million years ago, when a 10 Km wide asteroid struck the shallow oceans at the gulf of Mexico at around 40,000 kn per hour. The impact had vaporized the asteroid but tossed up molted crust 14 km deep and has left its tell tale crater miles under the crust in Mixico today. The impact had catapulted impact debris that probably travelled half way to the moon before falling back on earth again, super hot and starting instant fires every where it fell, all around the planet, leaving a tell tale sign of the event on the corresponding sediment layer around the globe. The surface temperature of the air may have risen to four or five hundred degree C, enough to cause instant combustion of forests. To compare with the impact of man made nuclear bombs, that impact had the power of a hundred million megatons, or same as six thousand million Hiroshima bombs. That was of course just one incidence. There have been many more – some from natural causes, while others were man made or made by other creatures.

Yellowstone in winter – land of fire and ice

The lesson from all these events, for Tonu, was that nothing should be taken for granted as permanent. It was stupid to assume that things will somehow work out. In fact, it never did work out perennially, ever. Nothing was ever permanent, and everything had always changed in the past, were changing right now, and will change in future. Every year, the earth was struck by smaller meteors or Asteroids, the only major difference being the size. It is is small, its called a meteor. Small ones often burn up in the air due to frictional heat. Large ones of a meter or more usually reach the earth surface, but much slowed down and shrunk in size due to material loss in the friction. Larger ones, of a KM or more in diameter, are progressively more dangerous.
The K-T impact may have put so much carbon dioxide in the air, that it could have caused a serious global heating up that lasted a thousand years.

But, the issue in Tonu’s mind was not the possibility of another small asteroid that might actually fall in his bedroom tomorrow. His worry was the man-made catastrophe that man was unwilling to acknowledge the existence of, and therefore unwilling to take responsibility for. The catastrophe was not just of a single item such as greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, although that was bad enough. It included a combination of factors that mostly had to do with too many people demanding too many things from this planet.

And the only way Tonu could see the future to be less harmful than the present, was some sort of a civilization altering cataclysm for mankind. This cataclysm did not have to be a natural disaster like an asteroid striking the earth at forty thousand kilometers per hour. It did not even have to be a nuclear holocaust. It could well be the mother of all economic bust. Whatever it is, Tonu just could not envisage a soft landing for mankind.

With that kind of a backdrop to the stage, Tonu found it rather hard to insulate Niel, keeping him ignorant of issues going around him, happily oblivious to it all, while cooing sweet nothings to a fresh faced Canadian girl equally ignorant of things, like Nero  playing the flute as Rome burned.

That is not what Tonu could write, and that is not the kind of character he envisaged Niel to be.

What a mess, he thought to himself. Here he was, a man without a plot, because the strongest plot on the horizon was of a pessimistic tragedy. The Last Days of Pompeii was written after the volcanic eruption had already destroyed the city. And here he was, trying to write something before the tragedy hit us.

But, hang on.  Had tragedy not struck man already ? A vast majority of the animals known to man just a couple of centuries ago were either extinct or living dead. The situation with Global Warming was so bad with the greenhouse gas, that even if every living human were to drop dead right now, and stop emitting any more stuff in the atmosphere, the planet would still continue to get hotter for several decades, just to catch up with what we have already put up in the air. The oceans were facing a future without fish, and the land rivers were likely to run dry in many places on the planet. The rise of sea water level was going to make hundreds of millions of people homeless. Arctic ice was going to be gone. The Antarctic continent was going to soon be warmed up and the sea ice around it vanished, along with the Penguins.
The world would have room and food for a lot less people, and wild life as we know it, would be mostly history.

And Tonu had no one to talk to about these issues. That was his personal tragedy, and it was showing up in his writings. Niel was just unfortunate to have arrived at the middle of such an event.

He could not even discuss these issues with his colleagues. One of his colleagues had once mentioned about some place north of Canada that had proven gold reserves, but there was a resistance to the effort of opening up a mine there, because the land housed a rare bird which might go extinct. His colleague found it ironical that a mere small bird would be so important as to delay or postpone the starting of a gold mine.
He had tried to impress upon his colleague about the link between the environment, the flora and fauna, the future ability of this planet to support a varied and large biomass, and the dangers of this insatiable thirst for material demand. But he had given up. He had resigned himself to the realization that their differences in perception were too great to be bridged by rational conversation. And all the while Tonu knew that his colleague was a typical person, reasonably smart and educated. The world had a few billion people like him. And they all perhaps thought the same way.

Then there was also this pseudo awareness pep talk of going green. Some had joined this  bandwagon, changed their body paint and had gone ‘green’. A whole lot of people were busy selling bogus packages as ‘green solutions’ and many organizations were busy buying into those marketable proposals to ‘look green’.

Even Canada had several catch words, programs and advertisements, to ride the green ticket. There were web sites that claims to be helping Canada to work better in an environmentally friendly way.
But he did not see bold letter declaration of the per capita carbon foot print of Canada in the past and Canada now. There was no national debate about the per capita carbon footprint of Alberta, and Saskatchewan, clocked at over seventy tons per man. Seventy tons of Carbon Dioxide emitted into the world per year, per man in those two provinces, while the national average hovered between 16 and 22, depending on who was counting.
More importantly, it was over 70 in those provinces, while the world average was only 4.

These issues rarely get the attention of the public or the media, and the enormity of the damage wrought on the planet by this species of talking apes. Folks are made to think that planting a tree in their front lawn, if they have a front lawn, would save the world, and the Maldives islands or half of Bangladesh might be saved from sinking under the ocean.
Someone should provide with a simple arithmetic, of how many trees needed to be planted right now, to prevent the sea from rising another inch, or for the average global temperature from rising another degree. Perhaps we can then learn that no matter how many trees are planted on how many front lawns, the climate change train has already left the station, and cannot be brought back.
Anyhow, the arithmetic is missing from the debate.

Most institutions were in danger of turning rogue, and shielding facts from the public. And this included, as far as Tonu could see, all institutionalized religions and almost all Governments and most industries and almost all economists and business school graduates and bankers and fund managers, religious gurus or movie actors.

What was Niel to do? This was the basic dilemma. A young mother in Veracruz claiming to have his baby might be juicy for a novel, but that kind of a plot Tonu disliked reading, and also found distasteful to to write about.
So what was he to do?

Tonu felt lonely. Just a few days ago, he was writing about his grandfather Kalimohan Ghosh, and mused how lonely he might have been in a house full of people. Very few actually understood him, or tried to enter his world and converse with him on issues that drove the man to so much of hard work and an early death through heart attack. Tonu was taking blood pressure medication, and was expected to live longer than his grandfather. But he too, was so lonely.

It came upon him to think about the topic of how lonely the living dead might be. How did the last living Tasmanian Wolf feel, or the last Indian Cheetah? Or the last Dodo?
Nobody really cared. People were busy watching false sportsmanship on the TV. Indians could not get enough of their IPL cricket, while Canadians were busy cheering their teams for the Stanley cup hockey tournament.
And he knew a whole lot of new immigrants from India into Canada, that were busy supporting the local ice-hockey teams, sitting with a beer on the couch, and learning to be “Canadian”.

Tonu felt that being Canadian should mean a great deal more than supporting the local hockey team that pushes around a puck on manicured ice inside domed stadiums. That was the least of Canadian specialties, in Tonu’s book. But then, what did he know? He was just a visitor that stayed back for ten years.

Meanwhile the entire world of finance and commerce had turned rogue. And the middle class was largely responsible for letting it happen in their watch.

And that was his dilemma. He did not know which way to turn, to find that elusive silver lining. Wherever he looked, he saw the living dead. The crisis was civilization altering, and yet, the civilized society was more preoccupied with trivia. More the western civilization progressed through time, less connected the middle class appeared to be conscious of its civic responsibility.

Population and per capita consumption, and creation of mountains of junk along with destruction of all habitats of all creatures everywhere, were some of the hallmarks of this civilization. It bothered Tonu that he was a part of it and did not know how to get out.
His creation, Niel, was naturally affected to this all encompassing malady.

Tonu had contemplated the world of art, to seek an answer to his dilemma, without success. They say – art imitates life. The art that passes by Tonu’s vision however, rarely depicts reality, let alone a future of any meaningful way.
He had art objects strewn around him, created by a plethora of people. There were many art objects, theaters, plays, sculptors, art shows, artists and experts. There were so many movies, talk shows, and novels. But it was no use. Even the authors were segmented and often showed an inability to climb out of their respective boxes.

Naomi Wolf wrote mostly about the loss of liberty for the great American Republic, a republic that was gradually beginning to act like a fascist regime. But she did not describe the whole in tonu’s analysis. Wolf appeared to claim that the public in the US were acting just as complacent and accommodating to their Government as the Germans were after they voted the Nazi party into power in 1933.
She did not address the possibility that at a global level, the only solution might be a severely recessive economic stagnation. She did not address the issue that American public might no more be capable of  taking the hardship that was bound to come from a radically different and non-growing economic model.

More books Tonu read, more he was disappointed that the authors always seem to get one or two points right, and yet miss a dozen more of them.
Tonu had but one good thing as a silver lining – the possibility of forming a Vancouver chapter for Association for India’s Development, or AID. It started over twenty years ago in one university town in the east coast of USA, and spread around the country and beyond in the ensuring years. Now Canada seemed to be getting ready to get on board.

Its not that they had a hundred strong volunteer group for the organization. For now. They had only three. Imagine, he had been looking to get a few good volunteers to try and spend some spare time within their capacity, helping out grass root organizations in India. And after two years of search, they could only find just three humans willing to form a chapter of volunteers. Just three ! There were tens of thousands of Indians around, many of them wealthy, well educated and with a lot of spare time and disposable income. And yet, after a two year search, he could only find three volunteers, of which he himself was one.

No matter. For Tonu, even that number three was as good as trinity. He even ended up writing a poem about it.

Now, all he had to do was think about a suitable plot for Niel. Without it, he stays in doldrums, much like the Greek economy within the Euro zone, or possibly fade out and become the living dead, like the North Atlantic Right Whale, who, after being decimated by the whalers in the past centuries, was hovering at the brink of extinction, their very slow birth rate not improving their numbers even after several decades of protection from hunting.

Regarding Greece, the Euro Zone and about the American future, Tonu had listened to Mr. Martin Wolf of the Financial Times of London recently. He spoke at the Carnegie Council for ethics in International Affairs, which was available as an audio podcast. So Tonu had listened to the podcast, covering Martin Wolf’s presentation and question answer session, while driving to work.

To Tonu, the subject covered by Wolf was both expansive and yet fell short in crucial areas. Based on conventional wisdom, his analysis of the United States in the coming decades appeared to be spot on and very clear sighted. But it did display, at least for Tonu, a yet another example of folks unable to step outside of their proverbial boxes. Wolf was good, but he assumed the economy would follow age old and proven methods of growth. His model for the future was business as usual – if not here, then someplace else, but still following the same formula. In that, Tonu was certain that Wolf was wrong. Ohh, but Wolf did make some astute and commendable predictions.

The US economy, which had been the worlds largest for just over a century, was going to be overtaken by the Chinese within the next ten years or so, according to wolf. Tonu was largely in agreement on that count.
Wolf further predicted that the Chinese currency was not going to replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. In that too, Tonu found himself in agreement.

The US had inoramus influence on the world culture. It still enjoyed large following on the basic tenets of the American system – democracy, free press, rule of law, market driven economy, secularism etc. In this, Wolf accurately guessed that there was a real danger that all these pillars of a free world might be in danger of losing their shine or falling off within the US state itself, mainly due to inner decay of the state itself. In that too, Tonu found himself to be in agreement.

Wolf identified America’s ability to form important strategic alliances as one of the key factors in its favor, and that the US would continue to be able to do so, better than any other, even in the coming decades. He acknowledged the profound effect the US-Europe alliance of the past century left on the world. Wolf proceeded to predict that the most important alliance the US may form and cement in this 21st century, based on shared values, would no more be with Europe, but be between the US and India. Tonu was in agreement on this count too.

Wolf made another penetrating observation – that the US state itself was entering into a long drawn out internal civil war, which may continue for decades, and destroy part of the American fabric, due to increasingly great differences of wealth between the top one percent and the rest, resulting in a long drawn out energy sapping low lever class struggle that spans for several generations. How the US would address that, was in the hands of the Americans, Wolf commented. He drew appreciative applause from the audience for this.

But in this, Tonu could not find himself to be totally in agreement. Things were not going to be entirely in Americans hands in the manner that Wolf described it. In fact, in most of those observations, Wolf assumed a business and usual model, not counting the resource depletion, destruction of habitat, limitations of the planet to continue to offer an unending resource base for mankind to pillage in the name of perpetual growth, and other factors. Tonu was convinced that, even if America did everything right, things would still not be possible for the US, or China or India or anyone else for that matter, to assume a business as usual model successfully through this century.

In that respect, almost everyone appeared to want to remain in his or her own comfort zone and seemed incapable to looking at the globe in entirety. He mentioned the income disparity, which was very real, but could no see beyond that, on the possibility that even with no disparity or little disparity, USA was still facing the uncomfortable prospect of national poverty down the line. And that things were not going to be much better for China or others either.

There were a whole lot of issues that Wolf did not touch.
And that, at the end of the day, had left Tonu dissatisfied. But he was by then used to being dissatisfied.

Anyhow, there were now some interesting things to do too. There was the Civil Society folks to meet up in Vancouver. There were the folks fighting for a living wage. There were the contribution to the food bank, for the homeless.
Somehow, it all had to work its way into a few meaningful hours a week for Tonu. With that, it might leave a silver lining into his introspective thoughts.
Perhaps, just perhaps, that would also work its way into the life and times of Niel and Mabel. They surely deserved it, as the next generation of people that will be left holding the basket.

Tonu was not ready, to sing for the living dead. Not yet.

Remembering Kalimohan

Writing about a grandfather I have never seen, should be unusual. Further, writing about him before I write about any other relative including my parents and siblings, should be stranger. And yet, here I am.
What prompted the thought process that helped me start writing about my grandfather is more introspective. I guess I have always been engaged in introspection. Some even considered me to be a dreamer. I used to day dream as a child. But those dreams were perhaps different than others. I used to get lost in thoughts relating to the past, the present and the future, and almost never in fantasy, religions, magic, or whatever else kids normally day dream about.
Those introspection did not always produce believable or satisfactory answers. Therefore I would often take my questions to my elders. The elders that had the misfortune of being the recipient of my incessant questions, used to joke about it. They even named me “Keno babu”, or “Mr. Why”, because of my constant barrage of a standard question – Why things happen the way they do. If someone made a simple comment such as “Look, the moon is emerging over the horizon”, this would have resulted in a question from me, asking why the moon emerges that way. If someone tried to wriggle out of the question with simplistic statements such as “because the moon always rises about once a day”, this in turn would normally result in a further question from me asking why the moon does that daily. Telling me that the reason was that the moon was actually circling the earth, and that the earth was spinning around itself, would have generated further follow up questions – why, why, why. So, the elders had genuine reason to be rather wary of me, the “keno babu”.

Keno babu, 2 year old, with elder sister Ankhi.

But was that a reason for me to now write about Kalimohan Ghosh, the late father of my late mother?

Not directly. I am not sure if Kalimohan Ghosh was an introspective person. From what I gathered, he was a hard working man often away from home, and was engaged with rural people that his children did not really associate themselves with too much in their young lives. Nobody among his family understood him much. A lot of folks benefited from his generosity. He supported not just his own children, seven of which reached adulthood – six sons and a daughter. A number of other relatives including youngsters grew up in his house and got education in Santiniketan, because they were less fortunate than him. Those days, his salary as set by Rabidnranath Tagore, was five rupees per month. I do not know the exchange rate between Indian and American money back in the first half of last century. In today’s money, it would amount to about ten cents.

The foundation of the house was unlike foundations made these days. Earth was removed many feet deep. Then special tight pack clay was brought by bullock carts, along with water. Santhal men and women laborers were engaged in packing that earth manually, beating them with heavy steel weights. For almost a month, the Santhal women would come early in the morning, and work through the day, singing in tune with the beating of the steel weights, packing the earth into a semi-stone consistency. That it took almost a month to pack the foundation slab, was information I got from my grandmother, who outlived her husband for many decades and who was fond of speaking with me about the early days of Santiniketan. It is from her that I learned so many facts, such as that one of my uncles, Montu mama, once got a score of 12 out of a hundred in mathematics in school. He was a naughty boy and did not like to study, and the score was low enough to generate some follow up exchanges involving a note going to his father, my grandfather. The issue was different enough to get embedded in my grand mother’s memory.

My grandmother vividly remembered the unending stream of people that often ended up at their house to meet with “Kali babu”. Kali babu was the short name given by the villagers, to Kalimohan Ghosh. He was to be the recipient of all their complaints, difficulties, expectations, sorrows and joys. This included the Hindu, the Muslim and the tribal villagers surrounding Santiniketan. Just like the foundation for his new house in Santiniketan, Ghosh was the worker laying the foundation of a future society, following the master concept of Tagore, fine tuned and systematized in some of its facets into an evolving master plan by Leonard Elmhirst.

Anyhow, going back to the house – once the foundation for the house was firm – the rest of the construction would be erected over it. Houses did not have pillars. The strength came from the walls. And since brick houses were more costly and bricks were not so common, and since they did not support the local industry, the house was build by mud packed walls re-inforced with bamboo framing. The walls are almost a yard wide. Each material was treated with local knowledge and according to local practice, to prevent rot. The roof was supported with an unusual kind of wood – Palm tree trunk sliced lengthwise into four pieces.

That house, a hundred year old, still stands, and does not suffer from insects eating into the walls. It is a model of sustainability of a kind that has very few parallels within the University compound. However, sustainability, supporting the local industry, low ecological footprint, and living simple – are not mantras for Santiniketan these days. It prefers to imitate others. Not having a socio-economic or cultural compass anymore, and neither any roadmap or a clear destination, it cannot set its own course.

What a tragedy!
Kalimohan’s family had 12 cows, which were kept within the property. His wife maintained them, though she had some helping hands. Milk came from the cows. Extra milk was converted into durable milk products and stored for future use. They had a small paddy field behind their home, which was cultivated for rice. That provided about half the annual consumption of rice. Rice was also used initially for converting to puffed rice, as well as roasting and mixing with jaggery, to prepare rice candies what could also be stored, but preferably in air tight containers, to keep the insects at bay, and that too for a short while.
Life was very different, as little as eighty years ago in Santiniketan. There may have been fifteen to twenty people living in that house which essentially had just two main rooms in the center of the house, and four smaller rooms, barely big enough to fit a bed, at four corners. It had four small varandas facing all four sides.
The roof was originally thatched, but later converted to corrugated iron sheets that were coated with bituminous tar, poured hot and brushed across the surface, both sealing it and disinfecting it. One of the side effects of it was that it would absorb heat from the sun and turn the house into an oven in the warmer months. Erection of an internal false ceiling improved the thermal balance to an extent. But no matter what you did, it would never be as good as the original thatched roof when it came to climate control.

People kept their windows and doors open to let the breeze through, and often slept in the Varandah in the summer months.

Mango trees were planted within the compound to provide shade and also fruits. The mangos turned out to be not too many or sweet, but good enough for extracting mango pulp and with addition of sugar, drying them out as patties that were known as “amsatta”. I remember seeing my grandmother do that before she got too old, and the trees stopped producing too many mango’s, likely from lack of care.

Decay, was creeping into that house even when the children were alive and doing well. NO major trees were planted on the property after the demise of Kalimohan. I remember at least four great trees of different kinds that had been planted by Kalimohan, and that eventually toppled in storms in my childhood years, never to be replaced.

The mud wall, corrugated roof house that Kalimohan built in Santiniketan a hundred years ago.

But all this does not explain what prompts me to think about my Grandfather. Folks have been telling me to write about my grandfather. But the reason given to me is different from my own. My grandfather’s work towards rural reconstruction effort of Rabindranath Tagore was important, and has remained more of less out of the mainstream research or documentation of the academia. But, this effort, conceptualized by Tagore, was a key item in Tagore’s view on life, at the local and global level. The Bengal academia has been more or less remained blinded by the more exotic and glittering side of Tagore – his literary achievements. Therefore, there were some that feel, perhaps justifiably, that I should be writing about my grandfather.

I know my grandfather was not averse to writing, although it was a lot more complicated those days to write anything and to ensure that those writings would survive. He was, for the lifestyle he followed out in the villages around Santiniketan, a remarkably productive writer, both in his essays, his journals and his continuous exchanges with so many people. He was well connected not just with the villagers, most of whom did not and could not write, but also with a large number of people among the educated class in India and abroad. His association with Elmhirst alone spanned much longer than the actual tenure of Elmhirst in Sritiketan, and only ended with the death of my grandfather, in 1940. For a man that was a generation younger than Tagore, he passed away a year earlier. I know Ka;imohan lived mostly alone, and died alone. Very few people were home when it had a massive stroke. I remember my uncles discussing that incidence many years later. From that I gathered that, other than Samir Ghosh, the third son, nobody else was home when he had the stroke, and there was nothing anybody knew what to do. Kalimohan passed away quickly and did not linger on paralyzed or incapacitated.

I did not feel the need, and still do not, about writing a book about his work towards fulfilling a social task that Tagore figured Indians aught to undertake. I was no scholar. I did not see anybody really interested to know about Tagore’s efforts with improving the socio-cultural fabric of India. Folks wrote about him only when the author is paid for his/her labor, or when invited to present a lecture somewhere, or see an article about it published somewhere. The effort must benefit the writer in his/her personal career, more than it would further the effort initiated by Tagore, to serve as an example of a duty for future generations. We are the future generation, and we do not believe in any duty other than lining our own pockets. So, who does one write a book for? To me, a book is not just what it is about, but also who it is for.

There has been a serious deterioration of the moral fabric of the middle class – I often felt. Or perhaps the middle class never really had a moral fabric, and that I only stumbled upon it lately.

Either way, I was not too keen to be “Me-too” in the long chain of folks that write non-fiction books on things that only a handful of academics were interested in, and the subject was to remain within the academia and the libraries.
Tagore mistrusted the bead counting, chanting masses and their disinfected temples, libraries and castles, and the professional pundits. These so called pundits possessed knowledge that were mere barren copies of old chants and past practices and theories. There was often no effort at creating new knowledge, nor ideas being tested and tempered by real endeavors in life. Tagore questioned the belief that spiritual enlightenment could come from sanctified pages of books alone. For him, salvation came from identifying with the sweat of toil of the common man, and with nature. Some of that had rubbed off on me too, although I have never seen Tagore either. Both my Grandfather, and Tagore, passed away a decade before I was born. I knew a lot of it rubbed off on my grandfather.

Kalimohan’s interaction with the Brahmo Samaj religious movement was a case in point that helps me identify a similarity in our cognitive behavior, which I like to attribute to our genetic relationship. And for that reason, I broach this issue in my journal here.

Kalimohan had gotten interested in the Brahmo Samaj movement, when he was sent by Tagore to Giridi, even before Rabindranath dug his root in Santiniketan. From his family estates in Bangladesh, he had sent a young and ailing Kalimohan to Giridi. Overwork, undernourishment, and a hot and humid environment had combined to enfeeble young Kalimohan, who had succumbed to pleurisy, a form of tuberculoses. Alarmed about Kalimohan’s chance of survival, Tagore had called for an English doctor to visit from a nearby town. The doctor recommended that Kalimohan be transferred for cooler to a drier place. And thus, Rabindranath sent Kalimohan to Giridi. Kalimohan met up with a lot of progressive people of the Brahmo samaj movement there.

What happened after that, is a good example that helps define Kalimohan. He got influenced by the movement because of its main theme – that all humans were equal. This resonated with Kalimohan’s own beliefs which had already been molded by a close association with Tagore in his East Bengal estates. Then, as Rabindranath was released from his duty of overseeing the family estates in East Bengal, he asked and got permission from his own father, Devendranath Tagore, to use the premises in Santiniketan, to form a school. It was then that Rabindranath called Kalimohan over to Santiniketan, and engaged him with the budding rural reconstruction efforts there.

Kalimohan left Giridi for Santiniketan, but carried with him a fondness for the basic premises of the Brahmo Samaj movement.

Kalimohan did not engage in idol worship. This part of his belief was shaped by Tagore when Kalimohan was still in his late teens. Subsequently, no image of any God or Goddess adorned the walls of his mud-walled home in Santiniketan. But other than that, he did not impose any religious do and do not within his home, except for one thing – nobody and nothing, was untouchable. Tribals as well as low caste Hindu, and Muslims and people with any other kind of faith system was not only allowed to visit, they would eat using the same utensils that the rest of the family used, eat the same food, sitting side by side with the family and would use the same water, soap, towel and everything else. All a person required, to find equal treatment in Kalimohan’s home, was to be a human.

This was strictly adhered to. This was not just proving a point, for Kalimohan. This was what he believed in, and he needed to set an example by living it in his own home, before he could go and preach it to others in the rural community around Santiniketan.  Lastly, these people, if tired at the end of a long travel, could also sleep over at Kali babu’s place. Again, no segregation on caste, tribe or religion. Women were segregated from men. That was about it.

And he got enlightened to this faith system based on universalism of humanity, directly from Rabindranath Tagore – first hand. This was at a level higher than Hinduism, Brahmo Samaj movement, Islam, Christianity or the pagan faith system used by the Santhals. This is what Tagore meant by faith systems in his book “Religion of Man” although he did not use the words I used here. It is my belief that Kalimohan was likely his first, and perhaps last, convert on this religion. Rabindranaath had a lot of followers and hangers on, but only one true disciple.

Meanwhile, not having idols on his walls was an area where one could identify perhaps an influence of Brahmo Samaj. I have seen comments as well as writings, claiming that Kalimohan had secretly converted to Brahmo Samaj. I dispute it. Kalimohan was not the type of person to change his faith system in secrecy.  Besides, Rabindranath’s influence was very strong in Kalimohan’s life. And Rabindranath had long since realized that converting from one religion to another did not solve anything. It only alienated a person from his old social network. There is enough mention by Tagore in his letters to third parties, that he was a bit worried at times, about Kalimohan getting “too” influenced by this or that religious types. This in itself should be a good indication of what Tagore thought of religious zealots. In short, there is a lot more to Kalimohan’s bare walls devoid of deities, than a simplistic answer that he secretly had converted to Brahmo Samaj.

Kalimohan was influenced by Tagore’s humanism first and in a fundamental way, and Brahmo Samaj later, and as a milder interest. None of the erstwhile Brahmo samaj practitioners in Santiniketan or elsewhere went as far as Kalimohan went, in accepting all humans as equal in his own home. That should explain part of Kalimohan’s mid set, and set him apart from the rest even in Santiniketan, barring of course Rabindranath Tagore himself.

So, revisiting the issue of Kalimohan’s attachment to the  progressive people in the Brahmo samaj movement in Giridi, he was naturally attracted because their core beliefs tallied with Kalimohan’s own – the most important of them being that all humans were equal. This belief he had absorbed from Rabindranath, and not from Brahmo Samaj. Rabindranath Tagore was very careful in not rubbing any particular brand of his spiritual belief on to others. But Rabiindranath’s own life practices were great examples for Kalimohan. Kalimohan, following his mentor Rabindranath, did not allow his eating or living habits restricted within a  narrow religious and caste  corridor that made it impossible for people of other faith systems or other castes to exchange views freely. Tagore did not keep a fence between himself and other humans. Kalimohan had dismantled that fence around himself very early in is life, thanks to Rabindranath.

Getting back to Brahmo Samaj, he started visiting Kolkata to attend every annual Brahmo Samaj meeting in January. This is a practice he started when he was brought to Santiniketan by Rabindranath. But, after a few years, Kalimohan stopped going there, and entered a suitable comment in his diary. He was tired of listening to theoretical topics and arguments on finer points of the correct interpretation and definition of God, or the right way of conducting social or religious ceremonies, and other symbolisms and protocols. He was tired of hearing about differences between various fractions of the movement. But most importantly, he only found arguments about methods, theories, definitions and symbols, but did not find discussions about man. The exchanges involved too much description of god and not enough of understanding of man. The universal man of Tagore was missing from the arguments going on in those meetings.

Service for humans and for humanism was the prime religion Kalimohan had learned from Tagore. He did not find it among the Brahmo Samaj people in Kolkata. And therefore, he stopped going there. Did he find that in any other religious groups? I doubt it. He followed a personalized religion that he had inherited from Tagore, and had fine tuned to suit his own perspective on life.

And it is here that I find I share genes with him.

What he found about the Brahmo Samaj, can be multiplied across all the organized faith systems across the world, and I came to a similar conclusion in my own life, about institutionalized religion in general. They were not for me.

But this habit of analyzing what he saw around him, and judging if the practice was meaningful or not – this questioning mind – is an aspect of Kalimohan that I can immediately relate to. I have the same bug that he had. And for that reason alone, this topic of Kalimohan‘s visit to GIridi and his exposure to the Brahmo Samaj movement deserves a mention in my post here.

So, coming back to the issue of writing about my grandfather’s work with rural reconstruction, giving shape to the efforts on the field that Tagore more or less invented in the Indian subcontinent in modern times – nobody really cared to know it.

For that matter, main stream does not care about re-analyzing the socio-cultural situation anywhere, India included. Main stream does not cater to middle class any more. The middle class is not socially conscious any more.
There is however, a growing number of minorities in the western societies that were beginning to realize that our civilization is lopsided and unsustainable. But Tagore’s name had not yet entered into that sphere. Nobody identifies Tagore with socio-economics or sustainability, or environmentalism, or rural reconstruction, or much anything other than writing a few songs. Gandhi’s name was was more readily associated with these things, because of the image he projected through national politics of freedom. Gandhi ran an ashram those days, and did try to address the cast system. But his involvement did not go as deep as Tagore’s had those days, with focus on finding pathways to address the economic disconnect between the rural and urban India, and to also address its class distinction and segregation, apart from all other kinds of walls man was erecting around himself. Gandhi, on the other hand, is a much more salable name today. The ruling families of Indian post independence political world, though hardly Gandhian in philosophy, do find that owning that name provides a convenient billboard for political mileage, and therefore has seen to it that the name endures.

Out of a thousand persons I knew, both from India and the world, I could count the number of people that really cared about sustainability in our civilization, and social justice, or true humanism, or preservation of the environment, in the fingers of my right hand, and still have room left for more.

So, I was not interested to write a book to join the Book writer’s club. I had, in short, become quite cynical about those that write books on Tagore, and those who read them.

Then why do I think about writing anything on the man? The reason, I guess has to do with introspection about myself, and where some of the oddities of my character might have come from.

That I was a bit different from my cousins. The difference came from two factors, I thought. One of them was that our family was the only one of our generation among our relatives, that stayed back in Santiniketan and did our schooling there, excepting for Kukul. Being partial to ourselves, I tend to think this might be about the last generation that could have absorbed a bit of something, about Tagore’s universalism, or his internationalism, or his views on sociology and culture. But I do not feel that confident any more. Anyhow, that was one reason – our growing up in Santiniketan.

The second one was my introspection. And in this, I was mostly alone. I had tried to engage others into discussion on issues that bothered me. I could not see, for example, how India could solve its poverty and illiteracy while still maintaining a healthy population growth, without going into a super-expansion mode which would likely exhaust earth’c capacity to supply material. There was a need to re-think the concept of development. But, no one else shared my views among my old friends from the Santiniketan days. I had to search further, and wider, to find compatible thinking.

I thought, even as a school child, that the world would even run short of fuel, paper, slate, pencil, eraser, and a host of other items before India would catch up with the rest. But no matter how many people I presented this questions to, I never could find one that seemed interested, or bothered about the implication. Many thought it laughable that I should worry about limits to producing paper, or ink, or pencil, or slate, or chalk, or even money to build so many hundreds of new schools every day for ever, just to keep up with the population growth. I was a mere school kid, but these things bothered me, and I found nobody that could give an answer. I could not even find a book that attempted to answer it.That these things bothered me, but did not bother much anybody else, was an indication that I might be a bit odd, compared to the rest.

Recently I have gotten my mitochondrial and Y-chromosome genes analyzed and have been studying the results as well as the subject of genetic analysis itself. I understand a bit more about inherited traits and self developed ones.

Then it occurred to me that I was not the only one given to introspection of this nature. My father did too. More importantly, my mother did this, and very frequently in her later years. Also, she was given to write her thoughts in her diary, including poems. So, it seemed logical that I must have inherited this from both of my parents, but primarily from my mother, since the channels of her thoughts often were very similar to my own. They often related to socio-economic issues, knowingly or unknowingly, and to ponder the meaning of existence and so on.

And where could she have inherited these traits from ? Were they mere mutations that manifested only in her and on me? Or were they prevalent in my Grand father too, and also perhaps go back further into the past. I knew a few things that applied to all three of us. These where :

1)  An inclination towards deep introspection – mostly relating to making sense of the life and time around us.
2)  A deep rooted realization that Tagore should not be remembered primarily as a poet, even if he was a poet par excellence. He was a humanist first and not divorced from reality. His reality, however, was deeper and not superficial.
3)  All three were not too strongly attached to institutionalized religion, and believed, in our own ways, that the best path for humans is to find an equitable and balanced way to live without degrading his neighbourhood.

All of them were essentially lonely, and not very well understood by those close to them.
From these, I had suspected that there is something in our genes, that perhaps my mother got from him, and passed some of it to me. It did not come from mitochondria, because he did not pass that on to his kids. It could not be a direct copy of the Y-chromosome because he did not pass that either, to his daughter. And yet, I have inherited, I feel certain, in some fashion, a bundle of genes somewhere, from my grandfather. Perhaps it is partially mixed with that of my father. But somewhere, in some chromosome, I have a bit of a protein or an amino acid, that somehow prompts special sets of neurons to fire in my brain at odd times, and turns me into an oddity among my relatives.
And I do no even have a good picture of my grand father.

Kalimohan, around 22 year old, England, around year 1911-12

The above is one where he was sent to England when he was a mere twenty year old young man. The reason he was sent is in itself a bit strange. Tagore has written here and there about Kalimohan. But one of the reasons had to do with the British India Police. My grandfather, before he came to know Tagore, was engaged as a teenager in some freedom movement, giving lectures here and there about the need to organize and strive to get the British to leave India. Somewhere there, his name got into the police records. Meanwhile, having met Tagore, he had already realized that pushing out the British was the least of the problems facing India. The root cause was a weakness of the social foundation that made it possible for British or others to rule India. This foundation was rotten and falling apart, and needed to be re-strengthened from the ground up. That was a very difficult task, and there is no good roadmap available. One would have to find ways and improvise and solve problems that came up. It was going to take many lifetimes of work, and it would be a thankless task. But that was what was needed, for improving the real lot for India.
My grandfather was the first of Tagore’s converts. He remained the most dedicated to it, till his death.
Tagore sent him to England to throw the police off his scent. Whoever went to England to study anything, always returned as an Anglicized babu that was fully converted to believe in the British system and its suitability for India. These people never became freedom fighters. And so, the Police would leave them alone. This was the policy being followed that time.
History would eventually prove this policy wrong. Tagore himself had studied in England, as had Gandhi, and Subhash Bose. None of them wanted perpetual rule of Pax Britannica. But that was in the future. The British Police did not know about Gandhi at the time, who was many years away from entering Indian politics. Subhash Bose was a mere toddler at the time.
And so, my grandfather, wearing a most unusual dress for him, in suit and wearing a bow tie, got himself photographed somewhere, and a copy of it ended up with me.
But I am not ready for Kalimohan yet. I am still not through with my introspection about my character traits and its failings.
I had always had two sides of myself. One one side, I liked hanging out out with people. This was the more prevalent trait in my youth. Perhaps I even dominated conversations with friends to some extent, while also being the source of generating fun and a lot of entertainment for everyone. I do not know where I got it from, but I can trace parts of it in my father as well as some of my maternal uncles. But, even in my youth, I displayed a separate trait that set me aside from my friends and relatives – about introspection.
That side of me was pensive, analytical and often wished to go deep rather than stay at the surface. A lack of clarity into the depths and a shortage of information or people that liked to engage in such topics was a source of both frustration, and disappointment for me.
This pensive side wished to put everything I saw or felt, into a process of analysis, study and examination. There was also a creative side, that might express itself in writings or sketches or even a poem or two, in Bengali or in English. This side required me to spend time by myself. This side also made me into an avid book reader. I was fortunate enough to be self sufficient at an early age, and could afford to buy an unending stream of books throughout my adult life. I do not have a clar tally, but must have bought more than a thousand books that had no direct bearing to my profession. There was almost no subject that I was not interested in. I read all the major religious books around before deciding that I was not very religious. I read Karl Marx’s Das Kapital as well as Mao’s book, before concluding that communism as practiced was not for me. It took me many years and absorbing many more books, podcasts, essays, papers, and TV interviews as well as constant introspection and watching the world with my eyes, and thinking things over, before it dawned on me that the western civilization was bankrupt and unsustainable, not only because it was consuming faster than the planet could provide, but also because the philosophy itself was on weak foundation. In other words, there was no civilization that I knew of, of historical times, from any part of the globe, that could provide the answer of running a perpetual machine.
I often ended up on introspection on how I might have engaged Tagore on some of the issues that was clearly close to his mind. One of them was what he wrote at the end of this life, as the world entered its second world war. He stated that he had lost faith on every human institution, but never lost faith in man. He believed that man would emerge victorious, and would eradicate the maladies and distortions that the human institutions impose on each other.
I would have liked to challenge Tagore, had I been his contemporary, on this notion. I know it is absurd. If I was born in his times, I would not have had the privilege of seeing what the western civilization was capable of doing. I would not have had the time to introspect on the two sides of the expanding Indian diaspora around the globe. This overseas Indians represented a success story on one side of the coin. The Indians themselves are so full of it that it is beginning to inflate their brain, I suspect. The other side of the coin is their extreme apathy and inability to understand even the basics of justice and equity. Talking to some of these “success stories” is like talking to an imaginary Martian.
Anyhow, I would have argued with Tagore even on his own comment. How could he lose faith in human institutions and not on man, since men created all those institutions and men operated them. I know he would likely have mentioned that, for him, the “man” was not among the exalted class. He was not from the political, or social or economic, or academic elite. Man, was to emerge from the masses. In those sentiments, Tagore was a Marxist in some ways. And I would have argued him to the end of the day about this conception. I did not think anybody coming from the masses was any less selfish than others. I could rattle off a long series of bad men that came from the ranks and went berserk once they got entry into the corridors of power.
I would have argued with him, historical era by era starting with the first time man invented fire, to the first time he invented agriculture, produced metals, manufactured paper, to when he found coal, invented electricity, all the way to the present. Tagore died four years before Hiroshima. He had no idea what man was capable of doing, all of which negative in a way.
Anyhow, that is just a day-dream. Tagore is not here, and I was not there. I doubt I would have had the personality to engage Tagore into any serious discussion where I disagreed with him. I know Tagore was very bitter about human civilization, and about the Indian middle class by the time he was in the last year of his life. I became bitter about human civilization while I was middle aged. And I got access to reading material far in excess of what was possible in Tagore’s times. I have taken full advantage of it, and do believe have read more books on more topics than even existed in his days.
But he had a very great advantage over me. He had personally met, and discussed with, almost the entire worlds intelligentsia, from the east, to the west, north and south. There were so many famous people he had met and exchanged views with, that it might be a fair statement that there was just nobody, in the west or in the east, that could boast of that kind of a wide circle of acquaintance. Mine in comparison is – so insignificant that it could not compare at all.
But the results have been largely same. He was disappointed in human civilization because he had pinned high hopes on them and they came up short.
I too was disappointed. I could see every civilization at the end of the day suffering from an identical malady – inability to see what is obvious to an outsider – that their system is bankrupt and heading towards a collapse.
I could also see that the procession of civilizations was not perpetually cyclical like the dance of the Hindu God Nataraja. There would be a point where a civilization would go, and another would not replace it. I could clearly see, that we had reached that point. There was not going to be another civilization greater than this one. And this one was doomed.
I would have tried my damndest to make Tagore see my point of view.
But, the issue here is not Tagore, but my grandfather.
I have no idea where his thoughts roamed. But I could see that he was a lonely man. His close relatives did not speak with him except for mundane family issues. My own mother was in her early teens, and not yet an adult.
Tagore was a generation older and busy with so many other things. Kalimohan often spent time smoking his hookah and contemplating by himself, writing his diary and meeting people. He exchanged some of his views more freely with people that were not close to him – such as villagers and folks that came to see him.
In this, he shares a common trait with both my mother and myself. My mother had remained lonely throughout her life. Those close to her did not understand her well. She was not even very easy to get along with. And she introspected on topics others did not even think about. She had a very strong sense of right and wrong, and very low tolerance of dishonesty.
I have inherited some of those traits too but with some moderation. I do not go berserk if I see a dishonest person. That is because I have been exposed to so much of it, thanks to an advanced lifestyle than my mothers simple one. She had the advantage of not having to deal with too many crooks.
Both Kalimohan and my mother knew loads and loads of people – many of them very important. And yet, both of them were very lonely in their personal life, in spite of having so many relatives.
And I am subject to the same set of conditions.
I do not believe this is an accident, or an act of God. Besides, I do not really believe in God anyway. The reason for this must be my own behavior or character. Likewise, my mother was mostly lonely because of her oddity, or her individuality. Same, I suspect, was the case with Kalimohan.
More I thought about it, more I came to conclude that, without knowing which sequence of the gene it might be, I have inherited some of my grand father’s traits, through my mother. In that, I can now feel a bond with the man.
I have never been involved with anything where any police should want to keep a tab on me. But that does not mean I am a better person. It just means that I was born in a politically independent India and did not have to push the British out.
I did not go to England for easy studies, although I did end up there later for a few months for some study, and found it rather easy to pass those exams compared to the standard in india on those topics.
There were other differences in the life of each of us. But in general, we were so very similar.
This side of me was not properly understood by my friends and relatives, and went largely unnoticed.
I was likely heading for the same realization that my grand father had – being bitter about the mean and petty minded ness of his contemporaries in Santiniketan. He was so fed up with it that he tendered his resignation to Tagore, which Tagore tore up and refused to accept. I had seen Tagore’s written response to Kalimohan on this issue.
I had read my own mothers posts and had heard her speaking with me about her disappointment about life and about people around her, in Santiniketan, in the local and national Government and elsewhere.
And then I have myself.

Thinking about it all, it came upon me that, I might have some insight into Kalimohan the man, even if I had never met him, even if I was born a decade after his passed away.
And here, you have the first installment of that effort, written off the cuff and more as an introspection in itself.