Our Nagaland Story

We arrived in Dimapur early on the morning of 28^th November. How early? Well, it was 5 when we stepped out of Dimapur station and were hounded by cabbies who wanted to ferry us to Kohima right away. We had spoken to a member of the Rotaract Club of Dimapur but we were supposed to call another number at ten in the morning. What would we do for five hours? And what if we still didn’t have a host after that phone call?

We checked into Hotel Maple, something we had found the night before, online. They gave us a single room with a single bed, promising to upgrade as soon as there was more space. After an uncomfortable sleep (read Anthony’s wheezing and my snoring and a few million power cuts) we decided to step out of the depressing room and go out.

So in Nagaland, the sun wakes up early and by ten it feels like 2 pm in Mumbai, bright and sunny. We ambled slowly through the market area, looking at shops, reading signboards and trying not to stare at the very pretty Naga women (Statement: Naga women are very pretty!). I have been craving to have some south Indian breakfast for a long time now and my tongue fell on the ground when I saw a board that said Dosa Plaza. I almost dragged Anthony along to find this place when we accidentally saw Café 77.

It looked like a good breakfast place with a graffiti name plate and all. So I killed the dosa dream right there and walked into the café only to be welcomed by the smell of amazing coffee. A little part of the South Indian in me got satiated there.

As we order breakfast, we see a stand that props up a magazine called GreenCache. I pick it up. It’s good and it’s only their first volume! Crisp pictures, amazing sequential stories and illustrations. I learnt a lot from that one magazine than a lot of Biology lectures in college. I quickly wrote a mail to the magazine, introducing ourselves and telling them how we liked their magazine. Next, I called a number that was on the panel.

Sentinaro Alley, who picked up the phone patiently listened to everything I had to say. Then, she introduced herself as the publisher and promised to meet us at Café 77 in another hour.

What happened next is straight out of a dream. Sentinaro came, we spoke, she rang up a few numbers and three hours later, we were in a cab to Kohima with five pine saplings that she sponsored!

We are now in Kohima, where Richard Belho is hosting us in one the many bamboo houses he has. Richard is an architect. He’s also one of the many forces behind the Kohima Komets – a football team. His dream is to see Nagaland’s Under 19 football team kick the posterior of India’s national team. He believes this will make the authorities comprehend the immense potential in the youth in the state.

Richard, along with help from a lot of people like Bazo Kire and all of his colleagues, is now setting up a football academy which will serve as the home ground for the Kohima Komets. Project 35 Trees planted ten trees in Meriema Village, where the academy will soon come up. We wish the Kohima Komets and the forces behind them all the best! We can’t wait to see them in action!

Anthony loves the food here. Yesterday, he had one of those green piggies from Angry Birds. Today he devoured a distant relative of Donald Duck. As for me, I am glad I’ve started eating eggs and that my hosts generously make me an omlette for lunch and dinner.

We just heard news that there’s a bandh in Imphal. If that’s true, it means we will still be in Kohima when the Hornbill Festival begins!

Of prayers and blessings

21 November 2012

We are on our way to our 16^th location as I write this. We are aboard a very dirty and unkempt Puri – Guwahati Express. Our previous seat-holders have left their peanut-shells on the floor for us to admire. They have also clogged the washbasin with a certain brown coloured liquid. We hope it is nothing but pan spittle. There is an electric panel on top that does not have a lid. We have pictures to prove all of this if anyone is interested in suing the railways.

Apart from this, we have absolutely nothing to complain of. We left Mumbai on the tenth of last month and have since successfully planted – 

 a) Saplings in schools in 15 locations. 

 b)  Ideas in the minds of over 1510 students.

In fact, we’ve got the last two remaining seats on the train from Agra to Patna. We’ve found complete strangers helping us, giving us lifts, sharing their food with us. We have people being nice to us everywhere.

Maybe it is because of what we are doing. It could also be because people remember us in their prayers.

We know our friends in Pune do. Our parents do. The principal of the school we visited in Manali prayed for us in the school assembly, with attachments from over 250 of their students.

When young Nepalis meet their elders, they do a mini bow such that the top of their head is right in front of the elder. The elder then taps lightly on the head as a form of blessing. The entire sight is amusing to an outsider but most of them follow this tradition with respectful camaraderie.

We had just finished planting in the school in Gangtok. As is routine, I cleaned Matters (our digging tool) and was wrapping it when our hostess (who is also the English teacher in the school) Mrs. Pradhan quietly walked up to the two saplings and tapped them on their topmost branches, silently saying, “Grow well, grow well.”

I’m sure those kids will do well in class. 

Age No Bar

We had the good fortune of meeting a 65-year old young man recently.

Call him ‘retired’ and he’ll dunk you head down in one of his many vermicompost pits. Mukul Varma believes he’s making headway in his new career and he is, we saw. Having seen all of the corporate world’s rigmarole of structures and processes and having grown to Managing Director position, he has a dream.

He sensed lack of employment as a huge problem and wanted to fix it. His objective – to help a few villages find their economic feet and become self-sustainable.

Chachaji (as he is fondly known by everyone there in Mohammadpur – one of his villages fifty kilometres from Patna) has a family house there which had been long neglected. He nursed it back from its dilapidated condition to a lovely village house, retaining its true structure but adding amenities such as a modern bathroom and curtains on the windows and so on.

Simultaneously, Chachaji started developing the family property they had. With the help of a few locals, he began cultivating radish that wholeheartedly grows in the rich soil there. Along with that, he’s growing potatoes, brinjal, turmeric and coriander.

What he is really banking upon, though, is a polyhouse full of Gerbera flowers. He hopes to get business orders from the three major flower markets – Delhi, Kolkata and Benaras.

There is a dairy farm in the offing. He’s experimenting with more vegetables like bottle gourd. There is a successful vermicompost unit that not only makes enough organic manure for the entire farm but also sells it to nearby farms.

All these ventures provide labour to the people of the village. Students studying in nearby junior colleges and living in the village are being encouraged to take care of the Gerberas and other crops and taught how to manage the water-efficient drip irrigation system. Chachaji has roped in two girls who are studying Chemistry in college to take care of the chemical additives. He hopes it will help them gain confidence and inspire more girls to join these two. He has planted teak trees along his vegetable plantations.

Sometimes, Chachaji stays in his house in the village. Sometimes he only visits. With every visit, he watches his crops grow, he sees the leaves of the teaks grow bigger and bigger. He won’t admit it but he’s proud of what he has managed to accomplish in two years that included deciphering complex government schemes and working around babus who do not lift a finger to help.

Chachaji also understands that he is far from attaining his dream. While the villagers have only just started warming up to his efforts, the first crop of Gerbera flowers in the polyhouse are almost ready to bloom and there might be a purchase order around the corner. He hopes people will see value in this work once they see the financial benefits.

Chachaji is living every urban man’s dream – to have a house in the village and grow vegetables.

For me, I seem to have found another personal hero. If at the age of sixty five, this naughty man can pull off everything we saw in his village called Mohammadpur, imagine what I can get done!

Maybe I can’t wake up at six every morning like Chachaji but that is only a small war and I know I’ll win it and many more big ones.

______

This story is part of an epic journey across India called Project 35 Trees. Know more about it here - http://www.facebook.com/35trees

Catch them Young

School uniforms have always made for amazing pictures. I remember staring at hours at my dad’s yellowing class picture. Photographs from childhood wearing uniforms will always be cherished no matter how embarrassing or stupid they look.

This particular one will remain my favourite uniform picture. The picture of two sweatered hands patting tight the mud around a Texus sapling. The bark of this tree is found to be a rich source of Texol, a chemical used in cancer chemotherapy.

I will plant trees all my life. That has been decided. But I can only plant a certain number of trees in my entire life span. Let’s call it X. Now if I tell 200 people why it is important to plant trees, 150 will laugh it off but I’ll still have 50 who understand. If these 50 plants trees too, the number of trees becomes 50X! For this vision, I have only Anish K Menon to thank.

CATCH THEM YOUNG | Let them plant a tree near their school. Tell them that it is now their duty to take care of it, water it and to see that no harm comes anywhere near it. They will watch it grow and maybe (this is the BIG maybe we bank upon) they will want to plant more of them.

Project 35 Trees attempts to do exactly this. In the last one month, we met and planted trees with students from schools in Daman, Silvassa, Baroda, Indore, Jaipur, Delhi, Gurgaon, Amritsar, Jammu, Chandigarh and Manali. As I write this, I must be preparing for the session here in Dehradoon.

It will be difficult to measure the effectiveness of what Project 35 Trees has done. It is easy to assume that students will click pictures and send them to us but I would rather have them watering the saplings.