SEVA WEEK 5 (4-10 Apr 2011)
r e f l e c t i o n : ON 21st CENTURY SLAVERY...
Farmers toil year after year, generation after generation, to bring us rice and agricultural produce. But they are invisible to most of us. Because they are nowhere to be found in supermarkets. Even for a country like India, which has 80% of its people as farmers, the other 20% who are the more affluent, more connected and more visible population actually know very little about their 80% fellow countrymen.
We learnt that most farmers remain poor because they have poor financial literacy. They simply cannot make much sense of financial equation like Revenue - Expense = Profit, complicated concept such as Loan and Interest. With little or no education, they possess poor literacy and knowledge of how money is being moved around. As such, they become easy prey for unscrupulous and greedy predators. Those who are in power see advantage in keeping this unfairness going. As time goes, the imbalance becomes a norm. The farmers' suffering also becomes a norm. The world moves on, the farmers get left farther and farther behind. The divide between the rich and poor, the have's and have-not's, widens.
It's natural for parents to want a better life for their children. So many farmers send their children to the city hoping for better job opportunities. But how are the poor and lowly educated rural youth able to get good jobs and career opportunities in the city. Many end up jobless or under-employed. With little or no money, these rural youth get squeezed into a corner in the city. Such a corner is called a Slum.
As more rural people flock to the city, more slums sprout around the city like mushrooms. Kolkata alone has over 5300 slums. If society is a body, then slums must be like tumors. The sign of a disease is obvious, but who or what is playing the role of a mind with an awareness to act to recover from this disease? Is it the government or the civil society?
A government is a select body of people from the larger society. If it is clean and morally upright, with effective leadership and efficient operation, then it is the rightly man-made organ of the society to prevent and recover from societal illnesses. But if the government is corrupted with office-holders having a self-serving mentality, then it becomes the biggest brain tumor that will gradually kill the society at large. The final stage of such 'societal terminal disease' usually happens through implosion, like the sad drama in Egypt and Libya.
Nature shows us the way and law of self-correction. Whenever an imbalance is created, harmony is disturbed, and a force is birthed to restore the inequality. Such is the way for the world at large, a nation as a whole, a community, a family and our individual body. I believe paying attention to the signs, being sensitive to the larger equilibrium beyond our own self/community/country and taking appropriate action in alignment to Nature's self-correcting force, is living life with wisdom.
So how do you reckon you can exercise your choices and decision to help uplift the lives of the poor farmers who toil in the field to bring you the food you eat everyday? You can make a difference, even remaining invisible to them and them to you. What do you think? |
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3-Week Stay at Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Bangalore
| 21 Mar - 9 Apr 2011 - Our 3-week stay at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in JP Nagar was most serene and also economical (Rs. 500/night). The ashram is clean and quiet, has about 20 rooms and a canteen that serves vegetarian meals. People there are friendly and helpful. There's a meditation hall open to anyone, a bookstore that stocks many excellent Aurobindo books, a gym and a new age primary school. |
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Every morning, we enjoyed a routine of yoga, pranayama, sudarshan kriya and meditation, and a sun exercise for our eyes, taught through a little booklet from the Aurobindo bookstore. |
Robyn's fav breakfast remained bread and honey... |
Coffee and tea are excellent in India... |
 Robyn doing robo-laundry duty. "Up, down, up, down, scrub, scrub, scrub, up, down." |
 Anvita is a student at the Mirambika School for the New Age in Sri Aurobindo Ashram. After school she will study on the kitchen floor where her parents are working as cooks in the Ashram. Robyn and Anvita became good friends and played card games, hide-&-seek and sneeking into the school playground by climbing the fence. |
Anvita, a superb natural dancer, just shaved her hair. Local culture requires a child to shave their hair at least once after birth. |
A nice portrait shot of Anvita taken by Robyn at the corridor outside our room. |
The Divine Karnataka Project: Website Architecture & Rural Farm Development
Our last week in Bangalore was a productive one. I hammered out 2 Appeal Letters for Nagaraj-ji - one to appeal for donation to fund the bridge construction at Chikmagalur, another to corporate CEO to invite them to hear out our "WHY DKP in 20min".
| 5 Apr 2011 - The key corporate presenter for 'WHY DKP' would be Muraliji. Heading the global youth programs (Art Excel and YES), Muraliji graduated from IIT and left his wine and spirit business to do full time seva with Art of Living, which is also in the "business of spirit". On 5 Apr, we met at Muraliji's office with Nagaraj-ji, Pathikji and Baleji to go through our suggestion on the fund raising strategy and the "WHY DKP in 20min" presentation. With Muraliji in the lead, I'm sure the DKP Presenter Team would go out and pull in much needed funds to support all the good work done by the DKP Yuvacharyas and volunteers. |
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 9 Apr 2011 - Our final task was the DKP website architecture. Vivekananda and Chethan were still struggling with how best to organize the humongous amount of info for the new DKP website and how to lay out the navigation. It was like back to my Lycos days so I decided to create a mock-up DKP website to demonstrate my ideas and launched it online for the web design meeting on 9 Apr morning, our last day at the DKP office. |
Website design meeting in DKP office.
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Alvin and Vivekananda
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Alvin and Pathikji
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Alvin and Nagaraj-ji |
iPhone Artists Robyn and Ravindra
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Yezdiji, Alvin, Robyn and Jin.
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Ragini, Robyn and Jin. |
Farewell lunch with DKP Team at Maiya's Restaurant. |
Uplifting Rural Farmers
The northern Karnataka is dry with few lakes or mountain water sources. Irrigation is dependent on rainfall and underground water. The rural farmers here are very poor and most are suffering now from not only dryness but more critically from 'unhealthy land' due to years of using chemicals. Like their counterparts in Thailand and The Philippines, Indian farmers had been sold on using chemicals by western companies and corrupted government agencies over the past 2-3 decades. They departed from their traditional organic farming method of using cow dung mixture as fertilizer which is natural and free. Instead, they mistakenly chose to spend lots of money on chemicals to squeeze up yields over the initial years but gradually destroyed the natural occurring nutrients in their land, making it fatigue and dead. Farmers then become dependent on the continual use of chemicals and the kind of seeds provided by these companies. They borrow money to buy the chemicals and seeds, and sell their crops to middlemen at unfairly low prices. The farmers are unable to do the sum to make profits. We learnt that many farmers committed suicide when their loans mounted especially if an unfavorable weather season befall them.
The DKP Rural Development Team, headed by Baleji, is determined to turn the tide for these rural farmers. Guruji says that India is 80% agriculture and therefore for India to progress, we must help uplift the lives of these 80% rural farming people. The world's next big thing is in agriculture, in producing more and quality, poison-free food for mankind. DKP has chosen Gadag as its rural development HQ.
As we didn't visit any rural farming community over the past month, the spotlight on that aspect of DKP was rather dim in the WHY DKP presentation. So, before we head off to Hyderabad, Baleji and Nagaraj-ji arranged for us to squeeze in one last round of visit to Gadag and Koppal in northern Karnataka, 350km from Bangalore on Sunday, 10 Apr, and we would then go to Hyderabad from there.
At 10pm on 9 Apr, we boarded our first overnight train from Bangalore to Gadag, where we would meet with Deepak and Baleji for a full day of visit to rural farming initiatives in Gadag and Koppal. Thanks to Praveen, we managed to get onboard in the nick of time before the train got moving. We enjoyed a good night sleep...
Thanks to Ragini of VVKI for booking all our train tickets. This 11-hour train overnight ride was pretty comfortable.
We rolled northward into farm country. Looking out of the window, I wonder how Gandhi might have felt when he travelled around this vast country by train to better understand his people and their living conditions.
Sight of curious kids from the train.
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Farm country scene from the train. |
A girl slapping cow dung onto the wall of her house to be dried for use as fuel. |
Suresh, Mallappa and Robyn |
 Deepak picked us up at the Gadag train station and we went for a quick breakfast of poori. Our program for the day was a packed one so we zoomed off in a small car packed to the brim with our 3 big luggage to visit an organic farmer and meet Suresh, the DKP organic farm trainer.
With over 2 decades of organic farming experience, Suresh is passionate to share his knowledge with all farmers and encourage them to switch back to budget-free, chemical-free, organic farming.
We visited Mallappa's organic farm at Lakkundi. Suresh pointed out the richness in bio-diversity in Mallappa's 5-acre organic farm compared to the sparseness in neighbouring farms that relied on chemicals. The bio-diversity creates a self-sustaining eco-system in which different types of plant support one another to grow healthily. When we walked into his organic farm, we immediately feel the lushness and coolness created by the micro-climate within. This morning was Organic Farming 101. |
Suresh, Deepak, Robyn and Jin |
Organic guava |
Organic lime |
Organic papaya |
 Mallappa shifted to organic farming 15 years ago. We asked him what difference has it made? He happily answered, "There's no cost in organic farming so I'm loan-free and stress-free. Since then, I've been able to own another 5 acres of land and 3 more houses."
Organic farming is zero-budget because the soils is naturally enriched through the bio-diversity and fertilizers are made using cow dung mixed with cow urine and jaggery. Yield is higher, fruits and vegetables are fresher and tastier, and more importantly, poison-free. For instance, conventionally a banana tree is cut after 3 crops but Mallappa's organic banana tree is still giving high yield after 11 crops!
Mallappa sells only to regular customers who come to buy directly from his 5-acre organic farm. He's proud of his healthy, organic produce, and happy with higher yield and better earnings. |
Organic cucumber |
Organic chiku |
Organic jasmine |
A wooden case in the middle of the farm serves as the home to thousands of honey bees that naturally pollinate the plants. |
So why are there so few organic farmers? Because it takes about 3-5 years to gradually convert a chemical-contaminated land and create the self-sustaining eco-system. And most farmers are simply so poor and desperate, living year by year, that they are not willing to work and wait for such delayed gratification. So they choose to continue with the suffering and face a bleak and dimming future. What a familiar flavour? There are plenty back home in Singapore with the same mindset too. While the professions may be different, the same stubbornness to stick to an inferior way of doing things with an unwillingness to change, is causing so many unnecessary prolonged suffering.
 Next organic farmer we visited was Channabasappa, who serves as the Chairman of the Sri Sri Organic Farmers Producers Association. He is a leader of the local farmers and is passionate about DKP Rural Development Project to help his fellow farmers to shift to organic farming for a better future.
DKP is encouraging local farmers to join the Sri Sri Organic Farmers Producers Association to shift to organic farming, and to work together to offer poison-free healthy produce under the Sri Sri brand and sell directly to consumers. This way, the farmers would be able to set their own price and bypass the middleman, and therefore secure a better income.
Currently, rural farmers are paid only Rs.670 for 100kg of rice by rice traders. After a few more rounds of middlemen, consumers pay Rs.3200 for the same 100kg of rice. Along the line, all the traders enjoy good margin of profit except the poor farmers who slave the entire year for little or no profit.
In DKP's social non-profit Sri Sri Organic Farmers Producers Association model, the member farmers would sell directly to the members of the Sri Sri Organic Farm Produce Consumer Association in the city. Beautiful! |
Channabasappa planted a whole field of organic onions for producing local onion seeds. The seeds come from rubbing the flowers. These seeds will be sold to other farmers so as to not be dependent on imparted seeds.
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We were honored to be invited to Channabasappa's home for a homecook lunch. He also showed us around his village and we visited a few homes to better understand the livelihood of rural farmers. |
Above: rural home made of stones.
Right: There's no water tap in home. Everyone pumps underground water from common bore well.
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At 5.30pm, Deepak took us to link up with Baleji in Koppal, a district to the east of Gadag. Baleji shared his vision in rural development with us. He has been a communist leader fighting for the rights of farmers since 25 years ago. In 2010, he got to know about DKP and Art of Living, and joined DKP on full time seva to direct the development work for the rural farmers.
Baleji's daughter is an architect and she helped to design the Rishi Krishi (traditional organic farming) Institute that DKP is working hard to raise fund to construct. |
Baleji directs the DKP rural development effort |
Robyn chatting with Deepak and the Yuvacharyas. |
"What is this Singapore family doing here...?" |
At 7.30pm, we were taken to attend a meeting of local farmers organized by DKP yuvacharyas in Koppal. The meeting was held at the village temple.
Baleji spoke to these farmers about how DKP and the Sri Sri Farmers Producers Association are here to assist them with organic farming training and encouraged them to come together to support one another.
I was invited to say a few words. Deepak helped to translate my encouragement and confidence in DKP to the farming audience.
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While some farmers may remain skeptical, I'm confident that some would step forward to prove the worthiness of DKP program by becoming happier and wealthier organic farmers in the days ahead. Like Channabasappa and Suresh, they would then take on leadership role to help uplift the lives of even more farmers. This is what seva, and life, is all about. |
> Week 6: Hyderabad and Bhubaneswar...
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