Articles published in January, 2025
Leaving Bangalore behind I ride back down to the west coast.
To Mangalore at 10am. Road good and bad, but much traffic. Often 40 – 45 mph. But last section bad, and overall average 25 mph. In M’lore at 5.45. To see Mr. Srikant. Stiffening steering head worrying.
Thursday, November 4th
Regreased steering head with new balls. Noticed that front brakes might need relining. Renewed brake cable. Met Ramkrishna at Chinese restaurant. Persuaded me to stay at Moti Mahal for 25 rupees.
Excused myself from Srikant. Spent evening with Ram and Arwand, brothers. Not bad. Lots of respect and adulation for my ego. Noisy room. Indians love to shout in hotels at midnight, and no furnishings to absorb the noise. In the mornings, of course, it’s even worse. When they throw up, one after another, in the echoing bathrooms. Don’t know which is worse – the rantings or the retchings.
5th Friday
Leave Mangalore 7am. Easy road. 20 miles out a Bullet overtakes me. Obviously to play games. Two up, in khaki clothes, driver wears army helmet, straps flying. “Idiots,” I think. Then pillion turns to grin at me. It’s Ram and his younger brother, famous Bullet rider of M’lore. They’ve been waiting since 6 am for me to come past. That accounts for his strange call in the morning. When I did come by the garage, caught him with his trousers down. Took them 20 miles to make up 4 mins lead. We have breakfast. Again they pay. Their attitude to me reminiscent of Raoul & Mercedes in B.A. [Buenos Aires – a long time earlier]. I seem to be recovering my charisma.
Coastal road very attractive. Density of population is noticeably reducing. Inland hills. Occasional beaches. Coconut and paddy. Turn off to Jog Falls, comes nicely just as I think of it. Climb up is delightful. Paddy terraces, villages below road, so you look down on roofs. Usually one big house of sophisticated construction with great tiled roof. Others round it. Building material is slabs of stone-clay aggregate carved out of natural deposits where road cuts into hillsides. Women carrying slabs on heads.
On coast road passed people going to market, heads loaded with earthenware, forage and green stuffs, baskets, and women carrying heavy bundles of branches, moving in a half run, hips switching extravagantly from side to side to keep load at level height.
Jog Falls is almost dry. Three streams tip over the edge, bouncing down 960 ft. Meet in a horizontal band of prismatic light. In full flood, shapes and figures in motion dance on the rock face.
Stop on the way down to cook rice and coffee. Not a soul passes until last moment. Then two men descend. One leads a buffalo (rope tied round horns) and carrying a sick sheep in sacking slung over his shoulder. Seems like a heavy load. Man behind is walking free with some animals. Why don’t they share the load of the sheep between them.
My idea about people as monkeys recurs. Fiddling with ideas (like the monkey with coins) curious, intrigued, aware that something could be done with them, but never quite getting them to work.
Down to Karwar at twilight. Fishing town. So many buildings occupied by various branches of bureaucracy – Police, PWD, Dep. Director of Fisheries, Customs and Excise, Port Authorities, Internal Waterways, Family Planning, School, Hospital, Collector, etc, etc.
Assistant says, “Your native place? From?” I tell him.
“Goa going?”
“Yes.”
“Nice place. My from is Goa.”
Delicious fish. Hotel along the road, good standard but very noisy. Indians don’t have any idea about acoustics.
November 6th To Goa
[Ten years earlier I had been a magazine editor and knew most of the stars of that world but had never met Max Maxwell, a much-admired art editor. I knew he had retired to Goa, on Arjuna Beach. I went to find him there. He received me well and I stayed several days. This description was never intended for publication. PW was a journalist I’d known.]
M’s resemblance to Paul W. can’t be denied, so that has to be discounted. His mouth is even greedier and lunges out like an excavator. Like PW in manic-depressive phases, I think, but has had the good fortune to harness his energies to appropriate ends, and avoids complications like poison (which they are, to him). Interesting that he has no perspective on this and doesn’t realise that he is a particular type whose solutions must also be idiosyncratic. By pushing his solutions to the limit, he excludes the world yet craves what the world provides. Currants without the cake.
Leads him into wild contradictions. Plans to move to even more remote spots, while almost begging for more company.
[In fact he DID understand himself very well. He did move to ever more remote places, but plunged back into the mainstream regularly and much more successfully than I had imagined possible because he was able to command a high price for his services. From Goa I rode inland.]
November 9th, To Kolhapur
Pearl Hotel.
November 10th
[In the morning, I am seized by a businessman called Shetti who invites me to his house for breakfast.]
Shetti. Ironmonger and hardware. House. Fluffy white terrier. Wife. Little daughter with grimace. Half smile, half fear. Walls.
[The walls I see in Indian houses are bare and echoing. I wonder why? Meet others, a brother, an architect, and his wife who insists I must stay with them.]
“Kidnapping” by architect’s wife. His brother, the bank clerk. Bharat Opel. Breakfast.
[They want to show me around.]
Drive to village. Old fortifications. “King’s” house. Walk to fort.
Sadhu in cave. Long hair shot with gray. Saffron gown. Legs folded under cushion. Lies on upholstered bed, with garlands hung from frame. In front are mats. He has wide grin with one middle tooth missing. Shifts his legs about as though the strings were broken. Has vicious bitch to guard him. Shrine behind bars. Dog goes for boy. He retreats, crying. Two women on mat telling Sadhu their problems. His remarks about Californians who stayed two days. “We can learn from foreigners about going from one job to another quickly,” whatever that means.
[Strange to get lesson in economics from a Sadhu.]
Sugar cane. Jaggery making. Boilers, fires, groups of women in same-colour saris drawn up between legs. Man wearing Topi – (Nehru’s hat) Nomadic tribe. They cut the cane.
[Shetti needs some kind of bureaucratic permission from an official at a government rest-house, We drive there but he is “resting” and unavailable. Come back later.]
Back to rest house. The big shots are there. Stifling atmosphere of reverence. Endless waiting for lunch. N.Z versus India at Bombay [Cricket.]
Boy serving lime-soda with salt. Soda making machine.
[My new friends are all Jains. This is the first time I have met or even heard of the Jain religion – the fourth largest in India. They have things to show me.]
Long ride back. Shetti drives – abominably. To the Jainist temple and charity school.
[They are determined to show me as much as possible about Jains. We drive to Bhaubli.]
15 miles, growing dark. On right we pass a camp of nomads in bivouac tents., a sudden and surprising flurry of movement among closely packed tents in open space, animals, coloured turbans, women, utensils. Wish I’d stopped the car and taken a picture. Yellow sky and sun. To village. We stop to leave a message.
To temple and school. Religious Disneyland. Models of Jain sites all over India. (North?) The nephew is most earnest and fatuous in his observations and questions. Little models of modish couple and limousine. 24 gods. Here’s one of them – a single block of marble. Naked. Limbs wrapped in creepers. Also pictures of him engaged in various classic struggles. Indian wrestling. Wrestling in water. Some other kind of fighting. He loses and begs his protagonist to be satisfied. Opponent insists on pursuing the battle to the end. So the God inflates himself and is pictured with his opponent raised above his head, prior to being dashed to the ground. A violent picture of a God of non-violence.
The Jain temple. Shetti is in the middle, the architect behind him.
His simple story is told also in models. He is a prince about to be married in all splendour. As he passes on his howdah, he sees a pen of sheep and asks what they are there for (as if he didn’t know). They are to be slaughtered for the feast. He renounces the bride, position, everything, and goes to the forest. (to practice austerities? As the Mahabharata has it)
We go to see the school dormitory. 600 boys are boarded here, from poor families. Walls are yellow painted brick, belongings hung on wall, mats rolled up. Boys are shaven, in shirts and shorts. Then to the ‘mess.’ Long gloomy barn, smoke in rafters and all boys cross-legged on floor in 4 lines the length of the building, each with plate and gold anodised water cup. Other boys come down the line, spooning out food. 3 brick fires with glowing charcoal at other end, where chapatis are made, produce smoke and an infernal touch.
A teacher is there, mild looking, wavy hair brushed down, spectacles. “I was a student here so I am thoroughly familiar with the routine.” The mild words have a disturbing force. I’m overcome by the imagery and all its Victorian associations. Obviously I am feeling and seeing something entirely different to what my companions feel. I want to ask if the boys are free to leave, or whether they must complete the course. Several times the question is misunderstood. At last it gets through.
“If they want to run away we can’t stop them.” They laugh at my mention of parents. No, they aren’t all Jains. Other boys, if they’re particularly bright, can get in too. Their idea is that this is a brilliant opportunity for poor boys to make good. Old boys, they say, have become big men in Bombay and Calcutta.
[Shetti brings us back to Kholapur, and dinner, with just the men.]
“Nowadays our wives can eat with us but in fact they never seem to.”
Arun Patil (Contractor) 6th Lane, Rajarampuri, Kolhapur.
Indian dogs – treacherous. Shetti’s dog actually licked the sweet breakfast goo off my fingers – before biting one of them.
Indians can put up with the shrillest barking.
Simon’s Hypothesis: Every physical law has its Sociological Counterpart
Treating people as particles – under compression. Forming bonds, clusters, crystalline structures, polymers, generating heat.
Next week: Goa Going.
Keep well, and avoid as many climate catastrophes as you can. I blame Trump, of course.
[It’s November 1976 and I’m working my way slowly up the west coast of India. In Bangalore, Gopinath invited me to accompany him on a visit to a friend of his with a coffee plantation in Chikmagalur, which was also Indira Ghandi’s constituency. I only got to know the friend as Cyril.]
He’s a passionate man, and a very striking figure as he appeared on his verandah the night we arrived. He was wearing a silk robe over a long sarong and the effect exaggerated his height. He is very dark-skinned, with a coal dust blackness and his eyes are often bloodshot or rather misted with red. At first his natural authority masked his simplicity.
[We talked a lot about politics and Indira Ghandi’s Emergency.]
A discussion, with Cyril. Again, vehement opposition to E. More power has increased corruption at high levels. Confused examples of inefficiency of new credit policies for poor.
Cyril says money is borrowed for wrong reasons. Not bullocks but weddings. Only local moneylenders can assess risks and hope to recover. But I think he gets his interest rates wrong. Wife corrects him. Moneylender rates are 22% per month – not per year. He says government requires 50% of negotiated salary increases to be paid into Government accounts at 4%. After three years they release a fifth, + interest accruing to state on borrowed capital, lent out at 16% = 39% State makes 19% profit and keeps capital.
[Well, that’s what I wrote. Maybe you can make sense of it, because I can’t.]
Another discussion with Cyril, again about opposition to Emergency. More power has increased corruption at high levels. Confused examples of inefficiency of new credit policies for poor. Says money is borrowed for wrong reasons – not bullocks but weddings. Only local moneylender can assess risks and hope to recover. But I think he gets his interest rates wrong. Wife corrects him. Moneylender rates are 22% per month – not per year.
He says Government requires 50% of negotiated salary income to be paid into Government accounts – at 4%. After three years they release a fifth. Interest accruing to State at 16% = 39%. State makes 19% profit and keeps capital.
[I confess I don’t understand any of this now. I’m not sure I understood it then either.]
Both Cyril and CR make the point that Indira could have done all she is doing in the last eight years without Emergency. Say she’s getting black on her closest associates. I reply that she may have wanted to but was opposed by those same associates. Now she either controls them or goes. They say evidence is that she has clearly fallen to the temptations of power. That her head is turned, that she has no ‘head’ – “Indira, the mother of all springs,” and “Indira, the fountainhead of India.” And then there’s her son!
But again I say, what’s the alternative?
Cyril falls back on his own position. “I’ll do what I can in my own domain to improve things. I borrowed money to buy this place, but I borrowed more to build new lines [In India “lines” meant rows of dwellings for workers] to electrify. There’s a crèche, soon I hope to start an adult night school. One day I want a hospital here. And let the politicians go to hell.
A fuzzy Gopi on Cyril’s coffee estate in Chikmagalur
Not stupid – he picks up more than Gopi in political areas – but is impatient of complications. A man who has worked hard and prospered and can’t see why the same easy formula shouldn’t work all round. He has born his crosses also (psoriasis is one) and those regrets ………………. he can’t reconcile, he dissolves in drink. Not every night, perhaps, but quite often. Perhaps very often. Joyce drinks with him. Would she contradict him? No. Would he be ashamed to tell a lie in front of her, say, about giving up drink regularly for Lent? Yes, I think he would (though many Indians would not). But if it were a case of giving it up except for these occasions, however rare or frequent when obligation required him to join his guests, etc.?
Both mother and daughter stayed up with is until 2.30am. Both were certainly bored stiff. Whether they knew it or not. In support or in protest?
How many Indians call somebody else “Master.” Why is that better than an African calling somebody “Baas?”
Gopi is a terrible snoring machine. However bad I may be, he is surely in a different class. The one reason I’m glad to leave. It’s hard to keep respect for someone who keeps you awake at night, unless you can tell him. I’m afraid to tell Gopi – he seems vulnerable – but the secret diminishes us. However every once in a while, he overwhelms me with some lucid outburst about some foolish aspect of life and quite captures me. It’s so rare to hear a witty phrase – but so few speak English well enough.
Green (or grey) pigeon shooting. Off into the coffee bushes. Swarms of children following. Birds sit on highest branches but choose trees with light foliage, so their silhouettes are easily seen. Lovely plumage. Sad slaughter. Delicious pickings. Saw bee hives on tree. Great black objects hanging from branches.
The manager thought I didn’t know what honey was – he called it tree ghee, and sent me a bottle marked:
‘HONEY – sweet fluid gathered by bees from flowers’
Think he must have access to a dictionary.
At a spice market
Chikmagalur name of district – town. Kadur Club is old British presence. Remained exclusively white until 1967, when I believe Donald Graham [presumably the president] took down the Royal portraits against Cyril’s protests.
The story of the maintenance of the road. Should be joint. But others have Jeeps and don’t care. So Cyril does it all. Once when Cyril was away a tree fell across the road and had to be sawn up and moved.
The fellow down the road asked Joyce for ten men. She said they were all at work, although if he went to the lines and offered some money he might find some who would accept.
A nice example of a dilemma. Cyril takes this stuff in his stride. Joyce is the stickler. Which is right? To get people to do things they find uncongenial, or let people get away with it, and rely on their natural good will to make it up some other way. Neither system works well unaided. Indeed it’s the human interaction that succeeds, not the method.
Tuesday 2nd
Back to Bangalore. Tilluk came round to house. We went to club while Gopi did his business. Met two Indians who make wine. Tasted it – like Sanatogen. In fact that’s what it is. Acid grape corrected with sugar. They say it’s just (a matter of) fermentation temperature. I doubt it. “India is a great garden. You can grow anything here.”
Later to Peacock Restaurant. Air-con. Disco nights. White Russian woman with ophthalmic goitre. One twenty-six-year-long swan song. Ravaged face. Tilluk’s cool goodbye. Indians are so affected by parting that they can’t control – so they have to anaesthetize.
Wednesday 3rd
The last surprise. A whip-round [organised by Gopi] collected 350 rupees, stuffed in a window envelope, with the 100 rupee note showing through. Also, I see the round robin letter, which suggests similar treatment elsewhere. Very embarrassing. But lovely of them. Bless the B.M.F.C.
[The Bangalore Malayalee Family Club still exists today. Bear in mind that I could easily survive on 10-15 rupees a day.]
Sunday, October 24th, 1976
To Mysore. Help the Germans down the hill, holding their bike with my brakes and engine. [I wish I could remember how we did this.] Then in wildlife reserve my first wild elephant wanders across the road. In Mysore, at govt. guest house, meet three Indians and wives. We go to Brindavan Gardens, under the dam, 10 miles out. Very impressive, but too gaudy for perfection. Afterwards to hotel for dinner. Vegetarian, chapati (poroti?) Very good. Fascinating to see mother feed her baby with her fingers. How much significance there is in the handling of food.
A working elephant at Mysore Reserve
Went out to see a Hindu film. Two male stars playing out endless series of fantasy situations – sort of Indian version of “Help” Richard Lester-ish. Went home after interval.
Monday 25th, to Bangalore
Pleasant ride through flat land, along road shaded by vast trees. Karnataka most irrigated state in India. Nicely received by Jacob at Lucas’s. Then D.H Storey’s wife gets me put up by Persian students across the road.
Poverty is not as alarming as expected. Opinions of emergency fairly divided.
[The whole time I spent in India, President Indira Ghandi suspended the country’s normally functioning democracy with a Declaration of Emergency. It became a temporary dictatorship. There was talk of forced sterilisation of men. Government servants in a vast bureaucracy were made to come to work on time. There were obvious improvements, and some less obvious horrors.]
Sugar cane grower in Bangalore (says he) can’t get labour. They “don’t want to dirty their hands.” Yet labour groups work on roads. Women work in paddy fields everywhere. Old India Hands say there has been much improvement.
Slogans everywhere. [On billboards. Indira’s program was known as P.]
Let 20 point P be our charter
20 pt P is blueprint for success
Efficiency should be our watchword
Dicsipline (sic – or cis?) is the need of the hour
Consolidate 100 gains of E
Talk Less Work More
Nation’s prosperity is sum total of each citizen’s effort
I.Ghandi says: Foreign newspapers attack E because they don’t like to see India succeed against inflation where they fail.
Generally adverse criticism is put down to envy and sour grapes.
Bangalore. Since Mannar things have been getting steadily better. Gradually the last traces of backache have faded. Only in Primrose Road, when I considered PH’s letter, and wrote my replies, did I feel a sense of strain, and since then an occasional excitement at having taken an irrevocable stand.
[I went to the Lucas office in Bangalore who received me very generously. However, there was a letter from Peter Harland at the Sunday Times saying the paper didn’t want to support me any longer. I wrote back that I would continue with or without their help.]
I was impelled to clean the situation for myself. Probably the letter was unnecessarily acid, and in a business sense, unwise. But I am not in business, which is another way of saying that I don’t want to maintain transactions with society when they degenerate.
[In previous conversations with Harland (who was always sympathetic) I learned that there was a faction in the newspaper office that wanted to cut me off. Apparently, they had now succeeded.]
The situation in the Sunday Times office has for me the smell of corruption. Have I injured anyone? For all I said in the letter is talked about openly in PH’s office. But he will not be sure that I haven’t passed it on. Too bad. I shall be satisfied with any outcome.
Now I feel good, excellent, even wonderful. In this frame of mind I notice that I think of my future more in terms of the ranch option than the house. Yet Jo is closer than Carol now. I have opened a conflict in myself which seems to offer no prospect of resolution. How will it be resolved?
[At Lucas’s I was introduced to a car dealer called Gopinath, or Gopi for short – and he was short and pop-eyed to boot, but very entertaining and enthusiastic about my travels.]
Gopinath’s amusing account of Indian bathroom habits. The peasant is used to shitting away from the house in unsanitary conditions. He expresses his disgust by the violent retching noise and the mess he makes. For him, henceforth, bathrooms are dirty places to be treated with disrespect – a custom passed on from parent to child. Regardless of changing conditions (Father to son? How do women behave?).
He does not explain why it should have been disgusting in the first place – unless it’s because the night soil was removed by the lowest caste and the association therefore is untouchable. The left hand symbolises “shit.” How odd to carry with you at all times this reminder of your own excrement. Carried to its logical conclusion the left hand should be encased in a surgical glove or plunged into a pocketful of carbolic.
Discussion with Chief Reporter of Prajavani newspaper. He believes that E [The Emergency] is thoroughly bad: That press freedom is vital, but that electorate is blind and not influenced by press. Easily manipulated by corruption and demagoguery. Believes in unity (i.e. apparently opposed to devolution) but against uniformity. That Indira is seeking absolute power for its own sake. Can offer no alternative, only a return to pre-Emergency state. Talks of slums of Bangalore. First there was a rehousing scheme. Now abandoned because votes are more easily controlled in slums. What are these slums? 150 of them – say 150,000 people.
Tilluk [a new acquaintance] and I stroll around a ‘slum’ – a collection of village houses – maintained with pride and cleanliness – frequent cow-dunging. [Cow-dung is believed to have cleansing properties] Pathways lined with granite slabs. Roofs well tiled. Corporation has moved them. i.e. given land alongside and told to rebuild. But spokesmen say they got no help with money or materials. Forced to sell cows and other possessions. But new houses are being built. And labour is apparently in demand. Conditions in these communities are relatively good. As we stroll, I’m reminded of Iguatú [A village in the impoverished north of Brazil I had visited].
What’s the difference? I’d say things are better here.
Pictures from Iguatú
And now a Pontification:
Next week, it seems, we enter a new era, as Trump and Musk ascend to the presidency of the USA.
For some time now I have felt as though I were hanging on to the top of a wall by my finger tips.
Soon I shall have to let go, and I have no idea what’s below me – if anything.
Does that sound hysterical?
Especially if I add that nothing will particularly change for me personally.
There is no immediate threat to my comfort or survival.
So why this sense of doom?
It’s the same feeling, I imagine, that I share with people living in Glendale, California, who were going about their usual business this week, while their Hollywood neighbours were being burned out of house and home.
With luck the wind will turn and they’ll survive. But it’ll be a long time before they feel safe, if ever.
Americans – most of them –have delivered the world to a man who has promised to break all the rules, and drag us back into the nineteenth century, a time of great wealth for some, extreme poverty for many, when war was the way to settle differences. His promise to end the war in Ukraine will probably mean preparing the way for more European wars in the future. Meanwhile Musk is keen to see a civil war in Britain, and a neo-Fascist government in Germany. No doubt he will also be a friend to Marine Le Pen, our own neo-Fascist here in France.
There is a ray of hope. Trump is a liar. Well, that in itself is not exceptional. All politicians must, necessarily, lie in order to please a wide range of people with different expectations. But Trump’s lies are in a class of their own. In the first place he’s a bad liar, who gets caught out. And secondly, he lies to enrich himself, and that is where I see some hope – that he is lying now about what he plans to do, that his threats are just to soften up the opposition. After all this noise about changing the world, annexing Greenland, dumping Ukraine, firing his own bureaucracy, running trade wars, breaking up the European Union, maybe in the end he will be satisfied by feathering his own nest and rewarding his rich cronies. I could look forward to a day when he and JD, Clarence Thomas, Sam Alito et alia, sail away in a Super Dooper Yacht, with Nigel Farage as Chief Steward and Mitch McConnell doiing the laundry. While Musk, of course,will be on his way to Mars.
But the REALLY bad news is that, one way or another, we will lose four years to deal with the climate crisis, and even more than four years if his fossil-loving friends really “drill, baby, drill.”
The heat is coming. I may even live to feel it. I guess that’s what’s below me when I fall off the wall.
I’m back in India, and from Madurai I rode out of the state of Tamil Nadu into Kerala, and across the Cardamom Hills through Kodaicanal to the West coast at Cochin.
Colombian country. Neat agriculture. High coconuts, bananas. Last stretch to Cochin in dark, on wrong road. Wet. Potholes. Red buses. Corporation guest house. 7 rupees. Sea Face Hotel. Volga Rest. 5-rupee note.
[I met some Europeans who were devoted to India and the Beatles. They sang a lot.]
Astor, Lydia, Candissy, and ? . . .
“Thank you, Lord, thank you.
Love is the force
That will force the course
Of India. . . . . India.”
A scene at the old port of Cochin
Dutch church in Cochin. Tanker terminal. Junk rigged barges. Yeasty beer.
October 18th
[On my way to Ootacamund, known to British colonialists as Ooty, a hill station high enough to be cool in the summer.]
Hand-made highways of India. Gang of women in saris circling round roadbed with baskets of earth [on their heads] Man in dhoti and shirt, looking at watch.
Police line roads in villages. Police lieutenant waves me on, sourly. Cavalcade of old cars with state pennant on bonnets comes past other way. Who?
Bamboo clumps, very high. Village sewing machines. Change money in Palghat. Difficulty with signature. Through Coimbatore – busy commercial town. Then up into jagged ridge of Ooty. First through groves of very tall, thin, graceful palms, which are betel trees. Climb up is similar to Kodai but more population up there, first Coonor, then Ooty.
Meet Hans-Georg and Irmgaard [Bohle] on little Enfield struggling up hill. Introduce me to Indo-German unit. Herr Schultz (an effeminate anthropologist) and then Fritz Reich and his wife Elena and son Christian. Fritz is the last of the project which started 8 or 9 years ago with a large group looking for ways to help the potato growers – either by rescuing the potato harvests from blight and golden nematodes or finding better alternative crops. Problem: growers crop up to three times a year, no rotation. Alternative: cabbage. Best yield from Japanese variety – up to 40 lbs per head – but unsaleable.
[What can you do with a 40lb cabbage? This story remains my best example of what happens when well-meaning westerners try to help without knowledge of the circumstances. But they found a better alternative.]
Now a German Weisskohl, more practical (cf; Findhorn). But Indians expected too much from project, dissatisfied, and Germans, disappointed, are withdrawing. Set up one of the world’s finest soil laboratories – now in Indian hands.
[I kept in touch with Hans Bohle throughout his later life. He became an eminent professor at the University of Bonn. His speciality was food security. About twenty years ago I asked him when he and his colleagues had known the world faced a climate emergency. “Oh, fifteen, twenty years ago”, he said, “maybe more”. He died, too young, in 2014. There was an English entrepreneur in Ooty too.]
Nigel Stewart: Nottingham – Boots chemists. To Pakistan. Squeezed out. Returned to Notts with Parsee wife. No good. Went to Kashmir. Found work selling and promoting pesticides. War got in way. Was made Director for plant protection. Kashmiris connived to get rid of him. First blocked his pay. Then got him made Director of Mushroom Promotion. Then wiped out other appointment. But he got a mushroom industry going with help of a German expert. After two years couldn’t stand climate and atmosphere. Came to Nilgiris to start up alone. Starved of capital. After five years wife died. But plodded on. Still loses money – but makes it up on horticulture, etc. But mushroom plant is halfway to completion and capital is promised.
Mushrooms: Horse stable manure and straw. Gets his from Army stables. 3.5 tons at a time. Add 2 tons of water. Stack it in long mound. And turn it over every two days. Add urea, calcium, phosphate, sulphate, reaching 150 degrees F. Ammonia breaks down straw. Temperature kills unwanted organisms. After three weeks ammonia all gone (fatal to mushrooms} Stuff spread on sterile surface to cool, then packed in trays, or sacks. And a bottle of sorghum colonised by mycelium from cultures grown from a selected mushroom spread over each tray. Kept for three weeks as mycelium propagates, then covered with an inch of sterile soil. (In his case it’s the final compost product kept for a year after cropping). Another three weeks in special sheds , and mushrooms begin to come up. Up to five “flushes” at intervals of ten to 14 days.
He now sends 6 Kgs by air to Bombay daily. 30 rupees a kilo. Is looking for a mushroom expert from UK who may be able to feed in £100,000 more in time, to build a canning factory.
Strawberries for sale in Ooty
In evening, with Germans, we visit Mrs. Widemayer, to join her Deevali celebrations. She ios a Toda tribeswoman who got some sort of medical education and married a resident German. She has become leader and spokeswoman for her tribe and lives in a fancy house uphill. There were children of all ages, and various older dependents, and we had fireworks. Afterwards, the kids did songs and funny sketches. I drank Jägermeister. It was very cold outside.
Saturday. October 23rd
We went to breakfast in town. Forgot to mention yesterday’s breakfast on lawn outside Glyngarth House. Sun and flowers and a load of food. Lovely time.
Today went to silver shops and went mad. Bought at three shops. Little spaces, low ceilings, owners sit behind low counters of wood and glass with silver inside. Painted wooden furniture. First shop is pawnbroker. He has sweet betel smile. Shows a pair of lovely ankle chains. Wants 1.20 rupees per gram. Agree on 1.10. Weight 90 grams. 100 rupees. Next shop is bigger. Old man with cloth round head lounges back. Young man in Western clothes does selling. All 1 rupee per gram. Has heavy necklace of silver rope with ten amulets strung, and silver pendant on heavy chain. Also, waist rope four ft long, child’s heavy bracelet with clasp, another light open anklet, a silver and wool dolly to hang from belt. Altogether weighs 320 grams. Pay 310 rupees. Third shop much smarter, two young men, very businesslike, have heavier necklace and light one with silver pearls. 150 rupees. Buy last two lots and take booty back to house. So pleased I decide to go back in afternoon. Buy ankle chains and more bits (including clasps) from second shop. Another 80 rupees. 640 rupees all told. $US 71.
Take my winnings to Fritz’s house to show. Glyngarth House is a very roomy two-storey house with fancy tower, stairwell at one corner. Fine wooden floors, joss sticks burning. Toda embroidery on walls. Elena gives me tea. Likes the silver. Fritz returns. We talk about life, processes of enlightenment. He is 37, recently discovered the burden of anxieties under which he laboured and is trying to shed them. Came from East (Thuringen) where father had land and lost it. He is a nervous man with many propitiating habits – quick smiles, wry grins, snorts and hesitations, etc. Inclined to explain things in terms of Christianity – weight of guilt. We seem to arrive at a good understanding, but it may be wishful thinking in part. Later Hans-G and Irma arrive. Conversation continues through and after dinner. Discuss possibility that an attitude of mind we take for granted may be totally absent [in India]. It’s the same concept, basically, which I found short in Latin America. A willingness to combine with others in a practical, commercial way for the general good. Indeed the idea of ‘general good’ itself seems not to occur. The Nilgiri farmers do not help each other.
On the way up to Ooty I stopped and watched the monkeys. Had idea of comparing men with monkeys. Some people give us the impression of being as limited as monkeys in their approach to social problems. Seem to lack the vital concept that gives activity a higher meaning. Watched the monkey at Mannar playing with two coins. He rubbed them together, chewed them, struck the ironwork with them, moved them around – nothing happened. Ingenuity without purpose.
In the Indian family there is relatively less scope for individual discovery. Children are held close to parents all the time. Great care is taken that they do everything in the proper way. Small wonder if it later doesn’t occur to them to look for their own solutions, still less that they don’t combine to find solutions. It is easy to propose schemes that would open children’s minds, but they all depend on the powerful presence of ‘enlightened’ adults. Otherwise nothing short of a major disruption of the social fabric can produce the necessary condition – with such painful, wasteful results. Time, of course, and slow pressure might achieve better result, but is time now an impossible luxury?
Interesting to try to see ourselves in as revealing a perspective as we see others. We are monkeys too, struggling for elusive concepts. Must remember that the habits which block our vision are dear to us. They comfort us. We don’t want to lose them. Often they are what we live for. Love, bacon and eggs, Sunday by the telly, possession of our children.
Bath time for elephants
Happy New Year Everybody.
