Farmers in Punjab are saving the climate by bringing back millets

Low input, high output

“When I planted ragi, I did not do weeding. I did not water it. I did not even know people would want it for their consumption. I just put up some pictures and I had people asking for it,” says Sherpur Kalan’s Raspinder Singh practising his organic farming in Ludhiana district in Punjab. In 2017, he had six quintals of millets in a little more than half acre of his farmland. After preparing his field, he irrigated it once, did the transplantation and did not water it again.

This is vastly different from Punjab’s agrarian reality where rice is predominant. Punjab farmers are having to dig deeper and deeper for their submersibles to serve their water intensive crops. Methane emission from rice fields adds to climate warming, and the crop goes on depleting the groundwater because rice needs standing water. The government advises farmers to use water minimally but does not provide incentives for crops like millets that take little water and give high nutrition.

The state doesn't incentivise the growing of millets for farmers

Farmers like Raspinder are the exception but the sale of the millets they produce has proved that there is a market for them. Close to Punjab Agricultural University in Ludhiana is a mill where every day 80-90 kg of ragi or finger millet comes to be ground. Raspinder shares the reason: “CMC Hospital has recommended ragi to mothers; it has been suggested for bone issues as well as for obesity; patients who come for bypass surgery are learning that millets help fight blockage; diabetes patients are buying it.”

The planting of the seed

Raspinder studied engineering and taught the subject for a year. What did it take for him to develop an interest in millets? “I had an auto-immune disease and went to Kerala for my treatment. I was asked to have ragi and eventually I got cured. I went to a conference in Indian Institute of Millets Research, Hyderabad, and got to know of how millets are used in naturopathy. In Guru Nanak Dev University in Amritsar, Punjab, I heard Professor Hardeep Singh Gujral talk about how millets benefit us. The domestic worker at my place also knew about it.” To bring back the beneficial, rich millets that everyone seemed to know of at some point but had forgotten, Raspinder decided to start growing them himself. He also distributed free seeds to interested people.

Challenges and learnings on the journey

Ragi is not the only healthy millet. Bajra (pearl millet) is high on energy. Foxtail is easily digestible. Rotis made from browntop millet do not get spoilt for several days. They are all fibrous and keep intestines healthy. Since they are slow in releasing carbohydrates (wheat energises the body quickly), they ward off hunger for a long time without leading to obesity.

It is, however, not equally easy to grow all of these, as Raspinder discovered. Parrots feasted upon all the bajra he grew. Since farmers around him were not growing it, the birds only had this one farm to descend on to devour their favoured food. Apart from ragi, all other millets are also similarly vulnerable to attacks from different creatures.

The people who had taken seeds from Raspinder are now growing their own ragi. This means there is more ragi for consumers, which is a good thing. But it also means that a bigger market is needed for producers like Raspinder, who could sell all his output last year but not this year. In talks with someone who wants to buy ragi in bulk for making malt, he had a discussion with his fellow farmers. The consensual decision was that they should at least get as much as a paddy farmer gets.

Growing of ragi is labour intensive. The harvesting is primarily a manual process. On an average, these farmers are growing about eight quintals per acre and want to be paid a minimum of Rs 65 per kg. Raspinder says it is completely reasonable: “Two years back the price of non-organic ragi was Rs 80 per kg. It must have gone higher by now.”

Millets are not commonly grown in Punjab, not currently, at least, so there are no role models and it is all about experimenting and learning. The worker on his farm advised Raspinder to sow ragi in May. Later Raspinder saw that the yield was higher the year he had planted it around July. He then realised that since his worker is from Bihar, where monsoon arrives early, the right time for ragi in the two states would be different. He decided on the second half of June as a good time to start the plantation. Keeping a gap between the plants also gave them space to grow better and the production was higher.

The urgent need for state support and incentives

Apart from its low requirement of water, millets are also a kind of crop that provide the farmer with a rewarding yield, which chemical fertilisers and pesticides cannot improve further. So it is also not adding to the adverse effect of chemicals on Punjab on its water, soil and people’s bodies. Despite all its advantages, for millets to really take off and for Punjab to make a shift away from water-chemical intensive, climate unfriendly agriculture, incentives and awareness generation by the government is necessary. While the stated minimum support price for millets has been increased, like with any other crop, active procurement and distribution through government schemes is what would make the crop a popular choice for producers and consumers alike.

First published in Beyond Headlines, 30 Nov.

Mother’s illness led this man to organic, climate smart agriculture

When Ravdeep’s mother first heard that her son is going to take up farming, she was deeply disappointed. Standing in his farm in Punjab’s Pharwahi village in Barnala, Ravdeep remembers with a smile: “She said all the resources and efforts she had put into my education had been in vain.” But she also knew and took pride in the fact that her son could successfully meet the most difficult challenges. Ravdeep proved it was true when farming became his means of livelihood.

Ravdeep on his farm

Actually, it was because of his mother that Ravdeep had felt an urgent need to grow food organically. When his mother got cancer in 2009, Ravdeep started spending a lot of time at the hospital. The number of people he saw that had got diagnosed with the disease, and the fact that children were also patients, shook him up. He started questioning his entire way of living. “I always knew that chemicals are not good for us but my mother’s illness made me realise that we are poisoning everything . . . our air, water, food.”

Then a friend gave him agriculturist Subhash Palekar’s book on natural farming. Ravdeep also got in touch with Kheti Virasat Mission (KVM), a non-profit working for farmers’ rights and food security that regularly conducts organic farming trainings.

The paddy problem

Ravdeep finally started farming through organic methods in the year 2012. “I first stopped growing paddy. In organic agriculture, it takes longer to harvest. The crop also has to be completely dry or the mandi, the market, does not accept it. By the time this happens, the sowing of the wheat gets delayed. I was also unhappy when I noticed the eventual hardening of the soil due to puddling [when the land is tilled while flooded to make the soil soft for rice plantation].”

Punjab ranks third in rice production in the country with 2.97 million hectares of the land under rice cultivation. 2.5 percent of human induced climate change in the world is estimated to have been contributed by flooded paddy fields.

Ravdeep says, “Earlier at least we used to retain trees around our farms. Now with the overabundance of paddy and the use of tractors and combines, there is no place for trees.” Not only environment but human health has been affected by the overzealous production of paddy. Ravdeep, along with his family, is conscious of his food choices: “Traditionally we grew and ate a variety of crops. Now it’s either rice or wheat and then we struggle with gluten allergy.”

He also blames paddy growing for being the original cause of stubble burning in Punjab, leading to polluting and warming of the atmosphere: “In fact the Punjab Agricultural University, based in Ludhiana, which is now advising farmers against burning, is the one that started doing it years ago.” Farmers say they cannot use machines or labour to remove the stubble because of the expenditure involved. But Ravdeep has a different take. He feels the cost one pays for illnesses like asthma or when injured in an accident caused due to decreased visibility because of smoke is much higher. Farmers need to see economics in its full picture, he insists, and not just have a short term vision.

However, he admits that a good number of farmers cannot afford happy seeders or tractors or other big machines. Some villages have a few of these machines that are to be shared by the community through cooperatives but it is often not practical. Ravdeep explains, “One seeder covers one acre of land per day. Farmers have ten days and 3000 acres to sow. So they need twenty seeders at the same time in the sowing season and cannot afford to take turns individually.”

After all these issues, Punjab has had to face rejection of export consignments because of pesticide residue in the rice. “The farmers who grow this rice do not eat it themselves. It is bought by the Food Corporation of India for distribution. People in south India like their own varieties. So why are we still growing it,” laments Ravdeep.

Beauty, and balance, in diversity

Following farmer-philosopher Masanobu Fukuoka’s book The One-Straw Revolution, on Ravdeep's six-acre farm, he is growing multiple crops, vegetables and fruit and flowering trees. They are not water intensive, and growing them organically has brought back the birds and insects that are killed or driven away by chemicals. In awe of this rich biodiversity through which his farm is making itself climate resilient, Ravdeep confesses that before this he had seen this feature only in the fields of his predecessors. Stubble is “food” for his crops and so he even collects the straw from his neighbours’ fields, which the farmers are only too happy about.

Long lost insects and birds have returned to Ravdeep's farm

The market

Ravdeep, like many other organic farmers, end up selling some of his produce in the common market. Wheat and pulses get the rates deserving of organic produce. He says 5-10 percent of the customers are ready to buy organic food at the correct price, though all agree that chemicals are bad. But in this small percentage there is a mix of “rich, lower middle and middle classes”, explains Ravdeep, depending on how serious they are about their family’s health or whether there has been an illness in the family.

KVM, which Ravdeep is connected with, has a shop in the area but it is open only once a week. Private buyers who get to know of organic farmers also buy from them directly. But Ravdeep says he could not have pulled it off without his family’s support. His wife, who is a teacher, and his daughter help with processing some of the produce at home before it can go to customers. “If I had to go out for processing, the cost and logistics of it would not have worked out.” Therefore Ravdeep recognises that a farmer cannot make a sudden shift to organic farming, and underlines the need for government to incentivise organic agriculture, and to provide markets for those who are already doing it.


First published in Beyond Headlines, 30 Nov.

How these farmers in Punjab are using the practice of mulching to fight climate change

Increasing soil fertility, avoiding stubble burning

Upon reaching Anirudh Vashisht’s farm in Sunam in Sangrur district in Punjab, a couple of other people with a camera could be seen. They had come to document the work of farmers like Vashisht who are setting an example, at a time when Punjab’s farmers have had to bear the brunt of criticism from the capital for stubble burning and adding to air pollution. Vashisht is part of the minority in Punjab that does not burn crop residue.

The documentarians talking to him had primarily come to film instances of stubble burning. To avoid doing it himself, something which leads to pollution, causes accidents by reducing visibility and harms the soil, Vashisht has been practising mulching. In the process, the stubble is cut and collected, and the small pieces are spread over the soil. While explaining the process, Vashisht took a few handfuls of chopped straw and covered the onion and garlic patches with them: “When we burn stubble, we lose microbes healthy for the soil; friendly insects die. Birds and animals also get injured. But with mulching the number of useful microorganisms grows. The soil is protected from the direct sun, its health is preserved and since it is able to retain moisture the ground needs less water. That’s why this process is climate smart.” Chasing away a parrot that had come for the fruit of a tree on the farm, Anirudh gave the example of a forest where grass and leaves cover the soil and it remains fertile despite anyone watering it.

Some farmers who can afford the machine use a rotavator for mechanically spreading the stubble on to the soil but most land owners believe that doing it manually has better results. But isn’t the manual process of mulching labour intensive? “It is,” Vashisht agrees, “but it is a long term investment.” Mulching increases soil fertility and yield and therefore ultimately it would be profitable.

Seema Jolly in Karodan village, Mohali, also prefers to put in human labour in the process of mulching because she does not find the use of big machines consistent with her organic farming practices and principles.

In Barnala’s Pharwahi village, Ravdeep, who is also into organic farming, recalled that even when he was a regular farmer using chemical fertilisers he did not feel comfortable with burning and still used mulching.

For his farm near Kapurthala, Rahul Sharma bought straw from his neighbours to mulch: “Once the soil is covered with the straw, it becomes dark and damp, encouraging the growth of earthworms, which are healthy for soil. If wheat needs to irrigated thrice, then with mulching only two rounds are enough.”

There have come to light other uses for the stubble that comes after a paddy harvest, instead of burning it and adding to climate change. It is being used for power generation, by the paper and packaging industry and, possibly, for furniture.

Why hasn’t mulching become popular in the state yet?

Shamser Singh is a farmer in Sunam. Asked about why he is unable to adopt practices like mulching, he shares: “Machines like happy seeders [machines that cut the straw, sow the next crop and puts the cut stubble over the sown area] and rotavators that should be priced at thousands cost lakhs. How are we supposed to buy them? The 50 percent subsidy is not enough.”

Farmers complained that labour is scarce, especially since many have been absorbed by NREGA (National Rural Employment Guarantee Act) works, and turn out to be expensive for the farmers if employed in huge numbers.

Another farmer, Parpoor Singh, adds, “We also suffer from the effects if stubble burning, from breathing difficulties to burning in the eyes. But what are the options? Let the government subsidise the growing diesel prices so we can use machines to clear the fields of the stubble.”

Time is also a factor. To reduce water use, the government has shifted the rice sowing time further ahead. This means that as soon as farmers harvest paddy, they have to clear the field and sow wheat. In such a scenario, mulching seems time-taking compared to burning the straw. Some farmers also believe that mulching makes the soil uneven and prone to attacks by rodents. But the farmers implementing this practice, including Vashist, saw it more as a prejudice. Buying the straw for commercial use by private parties is not widespread yet.

A few of the residents living around farms said that the pollution around has decreased since the government started imposing a penalty on burning. But this measure could not stop the practice at a larger scale. It led to resentment in the agricultural community against what they see as government’s apathy to their problems.

Farmers across different districts reiterated that they would prefer not to burn the residual straw if the government helps them fight the factors above through cash incentives. Agriculture expert Devinder Sharma agreed, “You cannot remedy this through punitive action. Cash is what the farmers want in the form of an incentive and that is what should be given to them.”

Most farmers using mulching consistently are also those who are doing organic farming and therefore have an overall, larger vision of how agricultural practices should not adversely affect plant, human, animal or environmental health in general. But both organic farmers and experts admit that for the farmers relying heavily on chemicals and under the pressure to get high yields quickly for financial returns, the shift to organic farming, of which mulching is already a part, will also have to be incentivised by the government, especially in the transitional phase.

This article is being published as part of the GIZ-CMS fellowship. First published in DailyO, 30 Nov 2018.

The indigenous doctors and healers of Chhattisgarh

Mane Singh holding a leaf that is supposed to aid digestion

The indigenous tribes of the state of Chhattisgarh in central India have had their share of natural challenges when they lived largely self-sufficient lives, relying on forests for most of their needs. But they look at that period as one of peace and prosperity compared to the current set of manmade difficulties. These troubles first sprung up when the State and private companies were charmed by the rich mineral reserve in the area and started development projects like roads, railways and mines on a war footing. These interested parties then started having violent confrontations with Maoists, the rebel guerrillas in the forests whose stated aim is to fight the violent exploitation and forced displacement of tribals done by the government and the corporations. In all these, the tribes often get slotted as victims who need saving or Palaeolithic forest dwellers in need of civilizing. This piece recalls the knowledge, the respect for ecology and the learning from ancestors that has enabled the Indigenous Peoples of Chhattisgarh to practice medicine since the time when there were no health centres to the present day, when people still place immense faith in these homegrown systems.

The bone doctor

Sundar Singh

In Khamdongdi village situated in Kanker district, a well known spot is the house of the vaidyaraj, venerable for his patients as the bone-setting doctor. His clientele includes not just villagers but officials and city dwellers from the state capital Raipur and beyond. Sundays are the busiest at his clinic-house, I am informed, full of patients from morning till midnight. But even on a weekday, when I am visiting, there is news that a patient from Raipur is on his way.

Eighty-five-year old Sundar Singh Kavde, the village’s own orthopaedic, had stopped his practice after his son died, and patients had slowly started moving to other doctors. The son is spoken of as a legend. Bone surgeons from hospitals were said to visit him when he was alive, and to ask their own patients to come here if the case was complicated. I am shown a chart hung on the wall, naming the various bones in the human body. “The doctor would use this chart to explain to the doctors. The only difficulty came in fixing an injury to the spine, because you cannot bandage it properly, and the ointment doesn’t seep into the wound as well.” So how many people ended up getting cured? “The people who complained of not having recovered did not have restraint, and would have alcohol though they had been asked to abstain.” Within the campus of the house and the clinic, there is a half-constructed structure. The current doctor’s son had started building it so the patients and their relatives could stay there.

Sundar Singh applies medicine on the patient's injury

But one day Sundar Singh, the father, had a dream in which his ancestors advised him to resume his practice, and he did. In the hut that is his clinic, there are some roots and leaves brought from the jungle. He grinds the roots using a mortar and a pestle. With the advent of a mixer, he started putting the ground medicines into it so it could turn out as fine paste. A makeshift switchboard for the electric grinder is tied to one of the wooden poles that holds the thatched roof in place. A partition creates another room, which has an earthen choolha, so if a patient or their family needs to stay overnight they can cook their food.

After he has bandaged the patient’s leg, Sundar Singh comes to this other room and sits on a plastic chair, “My father, grandfather, everyone did this work. It is in our DNA. Earlier we were treating animals more frequently. Now with motors on the road, it’s people.” He gets herbs and roots from the mountains. I had heard that at some places, despite Forest Rights Act protecting the rights of indigenous people over forest produce, forest officials had been preventing villagers from accessing them. Singh hasn’t faced that problem so far: “People in the government come here to get treated. If they stop me, who will cure them?” Precious medicines do get lost, Singh adds, when there are forest fires due to people’s recklessness. Local reporter Tameshwar Sinha speaks with awe of a deputy forest ranger, quite an exception compared to corrupt government officials, according to Sinha, who had got burnt himself while trying to quell a forest fire.

After applying the ointment, the injured area is bandaged

Doctor Sundar Singh also reads books on Ayurveda to aid his learning. “At times our gods enter our dreams and guide us when we are not treating a problem in the required way.” He also gets some medicinal leaves, etc., from the market. “First we used to quickly get what we were looking for in the forests. Now we have to find them.” Since construction and militarisation on a big scale started in the state, it has lost a lot of its forest cover.

What about the fee? “We never ask for money. What people are required to get are some gauze (earlier leaves and bark were used) and some oil that we recommend. Besides that sometimes people come with an offering, say, a coconut. Even if they don’t have anything it’s fine.”

The vaidya nods when I ask if he ever has to visit a doctor. “Yes, we also get fever, typhoid . . . Then we have to go. But because they know me, often they come here and see me. But this one time I did not feel better even after injections. So I just went into the forest and got the medicinal plants I needed and they worked.”

When local doctors like Singh go to the forest, they take what they need for the time being and leave the rest, saving the rest for others and for the generations to come. They agree that people, including some of their own, have now been lured to sell for greed, which depletes the resources without replenishing them.

I ask Brijesh Sahu, the patient, why he came to the village all the way from the city of Raipur. He says, “Hospitals are expensive and there are no guarantees. Here one is almost completely sure of results if they also eat, drink and abstain as prescribed by the doctor.”

The vaidyaraj shrugs, “Sure, if someone has extra money, like thirty-forty thousand rupees, they can go for an operation. Here we have had some people come here even after they had surgeries but still could not recover completely.”

A farmer and a healer

Doctor-farmer Mane Singh looking up at the garud tree, whose leaves are an antidote to snakebites

The second visit I make is to Mane Singh Kavde’s farm in Kanker’s Bewarti village, another herbal doctor. Before we meet him, we are asked to wait outside a closed poultry shop. A while later we head to his farm, which has vegetables, fruits and trees growing. We find Kavde in the greenhouse and start talking to him but the heat pushes us out where we spread a gunny sack on the ground and begin the conversation.

Unravelling the story of how he became the accidental doctor, Kavde says that while DNA is definitely responsible for the transfer of medicinal knowledge within the family, it usually skips a generation. But in any case, he says, this way each village ends up having its own surgeon. “Apart from that knowledge and what is communicated by my ancestors in dreams, I started doing my own research. Our body is a part of nature and therefore when we take in something natural the body readily accepts it. Illness is nothing but a lack of natural elements.”

He talks of disease caused by eating what we like, not what we need. “We realize the extent of the damage only after it is done. Our resistance is going down and the size of the capsules we swallow is growing. Our ancestors ate naturally grown greens. But our government is interested in metals, not food.” He is referring to the growing number of mining sites in the state. He calls vikas, or development, a synonym of materialism, condemning the sort of food “development” sells to its buyers, “The kind of food we are putting into our body these days is like putting iron into a grinder that is made to crush pulses.”

Kavde was a trader running a profitable business, until he fell sick and had to find and prepare his own medicines for his recovery. “In modern medicine, they give you fifty medicines for one disease. Nature is such that one thing here can treat fifty ills.” The medicines he gives are supposed to do a speedy job of killing the virus, while the discomfort caused by the malady takes a few days to end.

To introduce us to some of the medicinal properties of the vegetation growing around him, he first offers us some tendu (Diospyros melanoxylon Roxb.) fruits, saying having them once is supposed to boost immunity for the next six months. He plucks a few leaves off the garud tree, named after the mythological bird, supposed to be an antidote to snakebites. “But the patient has to be brought within an hour. It becomes a challenge if the heart shuts down.” Talking of the tree’s potency, he states that if a snake rests under the tree for too long, it would die. Around another tree is a creeper called giloy, or Tinospora cardifalia (Wild.), used for tying the bandage in case of a bone injury. Mane Singh distinguishes trees by their sex and uses their products accordingly. “If a tree has a thick bark, it is male. Women’s hearts are full of kindness, and so the bark of female trees would be soft, and can be chewed.”

Tendu fruits

With government subsidies and his own knowledge and hard work, Kavde’s farming practice has been flourishing. It did receive a slight setback though at a time when he was inundated with requests for appointments from patients. He recalls an obese, ill young man who was too sick to walk. “I prayed to my ancestral pen (god) powers and gave him twenty millilitres of a plant juice. By the time his family took out a stretcher to take him back after the treatment, he was fit enough to walk.” Others sitting around, my young guides in the village, discuss the case of the two-year-old who had holes in her heart, and was getting better with Kavde’s treatment. “But then,” Kavde recollects regretfully, “the family discovered that I knew about their same gotra (clan) marriage, and were embarrassed to visit me any more, as such marriages are against the rules of our community. It was a pity that feeling uncomfortable about it they stopped the child’s treatment.”

The biggest challenge for the “natural” doctor came when he had his first HIV patient. The nurse who came to see him about it had to get over her sense of shame, because of societal stigma around the affliction, before she could tell the vaidya that she had been diagnosed as HIV positive. It was Kavde’s first case and he did not know much about it. The woman kept asking him if she would get well. “I prayed for guidance and the medicines I was able to give her transformed her. Her pale face looked radiant on the next visit.”

Mane Singh's farm

With his popularity growing, Kavde has had to allot fixed dates and time for his practice, which he sees as knowledge sharing and not a commercial enterprise. Then he was able to have time once again to devote to his crops. But as a farmer some of his concerns continue. “Farmers are forced to sell some crops to traders at rates even lower than the minimum support price. Subsidies are not there for everything. It was better earlier when we could barter goods amongst ourselves. Now it is more difficult to afford because to buy something our neighbour is producing we have to approach the trader and pay him a higher rate. That’s why the development song rings hollow. Let the delegates visiting from other countries come to the villages, not the big cities, to see the ground realities. We were more developed earlier because there was more prosperity amongst people. Now the only thing actually getting developed is capitalism.”

Sundar Singh and Mane Singh, both the doctors adhere to the pledge which says a doctor’s first duty is to treat and heal the patients. Today hospitals in bigger cities and the fraudulent work done by quacks have also made sections of the population suspicious about indigenous medicines. Yet when this knowledge is appropriated, patented and packaged by pharmaceuticals and sold at high prices, the public puts its trust in the drugs. While the healers I met were concerned about this development as it limits access and corrupts the natural composition of the herbs, personally they have no urge to be competitive because healing is not a commercial enterprise for them. “Here,” Mane Singh says, “we share our knowledge with the community. It has been transferred to us from our elders to benefit people, not for profit making.” Perhaps this is why youth groups like KBKS, Koya Bhoomkal Kranti Sena, receive higher education as well as local trainings, and attend inter-state tribal meets, to educate themselves and fellow tribals about their rights, so that they both preserve their own traditions and resist vested interest groups from taking advantage of their knowledge and resources.

First published in Intercontinetal Cry, 23 Apr 2018, supported by the Centre for World Indigenous Studies.

On being wonder-full

“My heart leaps up when I behold

A rainbow in the sky;”

That was about William Wordsworth’s heart, which leapt up in 1807. Remember the last time your heart leapt on seeing a rainbow? Or for that matter, even the rain (or the sun, depending on our geography)?

Earlier, as a child, a rainbow was to me a reincarnated fairy from the glossy storybooks my father got from faraway places, spreading out her eastman colour wings. (According to ancient Japanese beliefs, ancestors use the bridge of rainbows to descend on earth.0 But now, courtesy science, first to come to mind are terms like spectrum and vibgyor.

By giving us an insight into nature, science meant to better cement our relationship with nature, to make us an integral part of it. Sadly, though, we repeatedly fail to achieve this, ignoring the many trinkets nature has on display: a toddler’s hysterical giggle (unless offered to us via some viral videos network), an impudent bird on the window sill, a uniquely arched tree . . . We do not have to be Alices in Wonderland to discover all of this. We do need to peek out of our cubbyholes, spare a few moments each day to take in everything beauteous around us that we take for granted in our pursuit of a happiness that is always receding faster than the pace with which we gambol towards it.

Even if the speed of light is slowing down, and even if that might cast an effect on thermodynamics and quantum physics, isn’t it a relief to know that despite climate change the morning sun still softly filters down the hibiscus petals in the lone pot which we forgot to irrigate yesterday in our morning gallop? That moment of standing and staring will probably give us an added incentive to fight climate change, make the battle personal, and so on. Pausing to take in the various elements of nature around us betters concentration and increases our patience.

When life gets infested with the vagaries of this world, I turn to nature for reassurance. The very feeling that I am a part of something so enchanting and true leads to supersonic pain relief. That is why I added this PS when talking to my broker for a new accommodation: “Please see if there is a tree around.”

I look at a tree and think: It took years to grow this tall and now it just stands there, in quiet dignity as so many birds, humans, plants, insects benefit from its presence. Its years are etched as carvings in its bark, a proof of all it endured and embraced, of how it made its own everything that had come to meet it, whether to offer homage or hostility.

A Stanford study found that people who took walks in nature were less likely to be depressed. Ecotherapists recommend spending quality time with nature to fight maladies. If someone still does not have reason enough to turn more animstic, they can turn to Wordsworth again, who believed nature to be “a teacher whose wisdom we can learn, and without which any human life is vain and incomplete”.

First published in Deccan Herald, 28 May 2018.