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.

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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.