Broken Bangles: Travel, Stories, Thoughts

You are a farmer with a tract of land where you cultivate your crops. You spend a lot of money buying fertilisers. The farm is full of weeds, but the labour required to remove them is above your means. Here is an alternate path for you to enrich your soil with nutrients and have the weeds removed free of cost.  Invite a poultry, goat, or dairy farmer to graze his animals inside your farm after you harvest your crop. These animals spend their lives on your farm f or a month or two . The animals eat the weeds, solving a problem you will have in the next cultivation. Their excreta falls upon your farmland and provides it with free fertiliser. Once they leave, you can start ploughing your land. The manure is mixed with the soil homogeneously. And now, you can plant a new crop.  One simple plan like the above represents the term circular economy or circularity in an eye-opening way. Circularity is not limited to this modest example. Its implications are huge. It is a virtuous circ...

  photo source: susted.com On an ordinary day. On the sidewalk of an empty highway. Zora stood thinking of her home in a remote village in Africa.  Compared to the city she was in, her village and her home were crowded; richly, she thought.  Her family had cows, sheep, chickens, dogs, and cats.  The mornings like these were never silent there. The cacophony of meows, coos, clucks, bow-wows and moos; thinking of which, a smile appeared on her face. Ah, the smell of those mornings! She mused. She tried to picture in her mind, her favourite dog, Abiba, chasing a chicken. In the car that passed Zora on the highway, was a girl, Chunhua, from China, a medical student, who sat thinking of her forthcoming vacation in Africa.  She closed her eyes and saw a dog chasing a chicken and a girl running after the dog, calling out loud, ‘Abiba, Abiba!”  She was surprised, "I never used to have such strange yet specific thoughts before. Something odd is happening to me."...

photo source: flickr.com “Please, come back. We will take good care of you. We always have..,” I am pleading to the sprawling Mahogany tree that had walked away from our plot. Now, it is standing about 5 kilometres from our place.  Wait; did I forget to tell you I live on a planet where trees walk? Yes, that is true.  The Mahogany tree is not listening to me. He just stands there waving his branches in defiance. It is quite understandable that he is angry. One of his strong branches was cut off and taken away by a thief in the night and now he thinks we did not take good care of him.  “You are not supposed to be illogical like us, humans,” I try to reason with him, “we had this fence built around our farm more to protect you people than us.” I think he understands. His leaves, which were perking up till then, drooped a little.   Of course, you might have understood by now that they do not speak. Yet I am sure they can understand our language. They just seem hard...