Column

Last weekend, as Typhoon Neoguribore down on southern China, whipping up a storm of monstrous proportions, complete with howling winds and blinding rain, I went atop a hill and planted a tree.

I wasn’t looking to offset my carbon footprint or anything fancy like that: it was part of a neighbourhood initiative to green the hills on our island, and although the weather wasn’t exactly the most propitious for tree-planting, a handful of volunteers including me nevertheless went ahead with it.

Not being a “son of the soil”, so to speak, and with absolutely no prior experience of wielding a pickaxe or a shovel, I’m ashamed to admit that I made quite heavy weather of the tree-planting effort. It didn’t help either that my pickaxe kept slipping from my hands because of the rain, and that the hillside was more than ordinarily rocky.

After planting barely three saplings over an hour or so of back-breaking toil, by which time my hands were pretty blistered, I downed tools, to some sympathetic tut-tuting from my fellow volunteers. And by the next morning, I had, as writer Jacqueline Susann would have put it, developed muscles in places where earlier I didn’t know I had places!

The experience left me considerably chastened, but also gave me much to ponder over. Straightaway, my respect and admiration for farming communities worldwide, particularly in developing countries such as ours, who do this back-breaking job all year round, for little or no gain, went up several folds. Far too often, we city slickers have no idea of the effort that goes into producing a single strand of grain.

In fact, it might be a good idea to introduce a compulsory “back to the grassroots” campaign under which all university students are required to spend, say, a week working hands-on in agricultural communities. And when corporate executives plan elaborate “team-bonding” retreats, perhaps they could introduce a module where they’re required to plant five saplings each.

It’s not anything that hasn’t been tried before in other parts of the world, although the last time it was attempted on a grand scale, the man who masterminded it ensured through his idiocy that it would never ever be attempted. I refer, of course, to Mao Zedong’s campaign of forced “re-education through labour” during the Cultural Revolution.

His appalling mistake was, of course, that he used it to punish intellectuals who opposed his flawed policies, and quite naturally it had disastrous consequences.

It doesn’t help, either, that the last time India had a farmer for a Prime Minister, in the late 1990s, he didn’t exactly serve as a great brand ambassador for “sons of the soil”. During the brief spells when he wasn’t dozing off at Cabinet meetings, HD Deve Gowda was too busy cultivating his caste and farming constituencies to bother with affairs of the state. Politics aside, though, I think that we - as a nation and as individuals — stand to benefit immensely from a second Green Revolution. Only this time, we perhaps need to set our own hands to the plough...