Life, a wise man said, is a continuous process of disillusionment. Time peels away layers of security that we knit around ourselves, sturdy accretions of confidence that we have stacked up in ourselves and our place in the world. At some point, for better or worse, we face ourselves and our place in the world. Either way, it’s illuminating, if a tad scary.

In this decade, our sense of the normal has been fracked. All of us, to a degree, have suffered a grievous blow. Parents might have gone, friends too; loved ones with whom we could be ourselves, giving us intimations of our own mortality. Words are inadequate vessels to carry the loss of the sense of normalcy, of its anomalous nature.

Nowhere is it more evident than in our relationship with the elements. The climate crisis is upon us and getting worse by the day. The decade was punctuated by a who’s who of catastrophes: highest temperatures, worst heat waves, warming oceans, extreme rainfall, floods, wildfires, dwindling stocks, rising seas, coral reefs gasping, biodiversity crisis, habitat destruction, and climate-related extinction of the Bramble Cay melomys, a rat surviving on an island in the Torres Strait in the Great Barrier Reef, finally undone by a severe storm and rising sea. This is the first mammal, Australian scientists reported in 2016, to have gone extinct due to human-driven climate change.

Carbon dioxide emissions have hit the fan. Atmospheric carbon dioxide, as of November 2019, is at 410.27 parts per million (ppm), according to data from the Mauna Loa Observatory, Hawaii. It crossed the largely symbolic, psychologically comforting barrier of 400 ppm in 2015. Scientists say that at that previous level of concentration, the planet was warmer and people didn’t exist.

Temperatures have crashed through the ceiling. Seven of the ten hottest years ever recorded have been since 2010, according to Climate Central. Global average temperature (January to October) in 2019 was about 1.1C above pre-industrial levels, according to the World Meteorological Organization’s provisional statement on the state of the global climate. The warmest five-year period ever is 2015-2019, the statement adds.

Arctic sea ice is down to its lowest ever levels. Scientists say summers there will be entirely devoid of ice. Despite the doom foretold, the latest climate talks in Madrid failed to achieve global emission cuts. Instead, it deliberated on the rules for implementing the 2015 Paris Agreement.

Closer home, rivers are polluted; ground water levels declined, putting us maybe on course to becoming Cape Town. Glaciers are melting fast. Eyewitness accounts say they haven’t seen much ice.

Street protests have risen all over the world. Their range and scope is so great that this could be referred to as the decade of the streets. Ever since Mohamed Bouazizi, the 26-year-old street vendor in Tunisia set himself on fire on December 17, 2010, there has been the Occupy movement in the US, yellow-vest protests in France, Extinction Rebellion in the UK, Hong Kong protests, Greta Thunberg pleading for the care of our planet, and many more.

At home, we had protests against rape, lynching, corruption, and those by farmers. Protests are raging against the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). In addition, economists say, the state of the economy and rural unemployment is worsening. The need of the hour is public spending on infrastructure, education, and boosting the rural economy.

Whatever the change, however powerful technology has become in our lives, the life of a tenant farmer like K.V. Krishna Rao remains down in the pits, scraping by. He asks, “Just consider how many people and industries live off or depend on the farmer, directly or indirectly. Maybe more than 20. Count them: agriculture workers, millers and workers in rice mills, bag industry, thread industry, tractor industry and their factory workers, lorry industry and their workers, fertiliser industry and their workers, pesticide industry and their workers, agricultural universities and their staff and students, government departments like agriculture, irrigation and so on. When farmer supports so many lives, apart from growing food, who thinks of the farmer? Nobody.”

The farmer is to India what a keystone species is to an ecosystem. Keystone species support the survival of vast variety of other species. The sense Krishna Rao exudes may not be particularly personal to you but you feel his sense of despair.

These facts cannot be wished away. When propaganda becomes fact, all we are left with are stories—that we tell ourselves and our friends, preferably around a campfire under a starry sky.

In the following pages Fountain Ink presents a minuscule slice of life stories by people from different stations with varied experience, of what time has wrought, how each relates to time and goings-on, of what gnaws at them even if their own individual lives are on an even keel and what inspires them.

***









SWAMI ACHINTYANANDA

Sadhu, Rishikesh





In my life, all the days move in the same way. So it’s hard to recognise what’s the best thing that happened. I have learnt that reading spiritual books and shastras gives us insight and inner strength. As time goes, the reading slowly motivates, and propels us towards practice.

And the same reading, if we do that with shraddha and bhakti, the scriptures open lots of secrets in our heart, which we can feel. Accordingly, when we contemplate or meditate, it helps us to keep our heart balanced and takes us inward.

When in society something good takes place, sadhus rejoice and thank God. But when something takes place which is harmful to people sadhus do everything that they can for amelioration. If they find they can’t do anything, they pray to God and try to send some positive thoughts. But they take it as Divine Will.

***













KARTIK SHANKER

50, Researcher at the Centre for Ecological Science, Indian Institute of Science

and founder trustee of Dakshin Foundation





A good decade for wildlife

T

he decade starts with a sombre realisation. At 40, I can no longer beat my long-time adversary in our one-on-one basketball games. Well, he is 10 years younger, but still. It’s an interesting time. You’re no longer young, and you’re stressed by having to achieve something in the prime of your career.

After two Republican terms, the US elected its first black President. Charismatic, liberal, down to earth, Barack Obama was a beacon of hope for the entire liberal world. Irrelevant (or maybe not), he was pretty good at basketball, too. In India, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was leading the government for the second consecutive term. Despite setbacks, the world seemed to be moving inexorably towards greater democracy, more liberal outlooks and greater rationality. We were so wrong.

Life in science goes on. We described many new species, in fact new genera, of frogs (including a wonderful starry frog called Astrobatrachus kurichiyana), lizards and snakes. We developed new theories about mixed species groups of animals. We track leatherbacks all the way to Western Australia in one direction, and to Madagascar and Mozambique in the other. I learned to scuba dive, and decided to adopt marine biology to fuel the addiction.

Over the course of the decade the world, having feinted left, swung right. Trump in the US, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Johnson in the UK, Modi in India. Not to mention Turkey, Hungary, Poland, Israel, the Philippines. Consequently, there has been a surge in anti-immigration policies, discrimination, increasing inequity, threatening the social and economic fabric of many societies. From climate change denial to rabidly pro-industry policies, these governments pose an equal or greater threat to the environment in general. But as liberals we messed up too, believing that rational argument alone was sufficient to change the world. All conversations simply become more polarised, no dialogue seems possible anymore.

In the late 2000s, we start several exciting initiatives. Current Conservation, a magazine that aims to bring conservation science to laypersons, becomes a platform for art and science. Its distinctive artwork and design begins to draw attention around the world. We start Dakshin Foundation to work on natural resource management and conservation in coastal and marine ecosystems. We manage the Andaman and Nicobar Environment Team, the islands’ leading NGO and platform for research.

Oddly enough, in the middle of a global identity crisis, most wildlife has flourished, including in India. Perhaps because of the measures put in place since the 1960s. Elephants, tigers, bears, boar, you name it, they’re doing better. There are more leopards in the country than at any time in decades. And not just in forests, but in towns, in sugarcane fields, even in the suburbs of Mumbai. There is a gaur in every garden in the Nilgiris. Climate change, habitat loss and other threats loom, but many wild populations are increasing. And with it, conflict.

In the 2000s, we feared the imminent decline of Olive Ridley turtles and continued campaigns for their conservation. Ten years of monitoring later, we believe they are stable or increasing (despite unnecessary fishery-related deaths) with several hundred thousand nesting at mass nesting events in Odisha. So many sea turtle populations around the world have increased that some conservationists have started to ask, “How much is enough?”.

I write some books. From Soup to Superstar is an account of the history of sea turtle conservation in India. It traces our interactions with these animals from the time we treated them as resources to their transformation into global icons of conservation. I conduct interviews with many pioneers of conservation, and learn much about the inside stories and politics of the early days of conservation in India. I join a revolution in children’s writing in India with my first novel, Lori’s Magical Mystery, with a small primate and a clever bird as its protagonists. Last but not least, Moonlight and the Sea, a picture book about a little girl in the Lakshadweep, is published.

At the same time, perhaps in keeping with the politics of our time, and at complete odds with the evidence, extreme movements in conservation have taken hold. One is called compassionate conservation, and opposes killing of wild animals for any reason whatsoever. Even when those animals are abundant and could provide protein for the poor, even when those animals are destroying crops or killing people. Anything but compassionate, this flies in the face of sustainability, scientific evidence, cultural pluralism and humanity itself. How can something that purports to have a noble goal be so misconceived? But then, there is religion.

The decade ends well for me. I return from my administrative job as director of a large environmental NGO to my academic position. I am described as annoyingly happy. At 50, I feel as carefree as the graduate students, but I have no worries about exams or career or job. I can see how that might be annoying. I’ve started to play basketball again; I am no pushover, but I care less that the kids are running circles around me. I worry about the world becoming less liberal and somehow less literate despite education, but as Dylan Thomas said, we must rage against the dying of the light. In the meantime, there is joy to be found in science, in music, in sports. That will keep us going.

***

BHARAT KARNAD

71, Research Professor in National Security Studies at the Centre for Policy Research, Delhi and a national security expert.





India: A middling power





As a think-tanker, I have tried my damndest to influence Indian foreign and military policies specifically and the national security policy generally, with my contrarian hard power-realpolitik views. This I have attempted to do over the last 35-odd years via appointments in government and constitutional bodies (as member of the 1st National Security Advisory Board, and as adviser, defence expenditure, to the 10th Finance Commission), through books and writings, consultations with political leaders and with armed services’ chiefs and their senior advisers, and through lectures at the National War College, Army War College, Naval War College, College of Air Warfare, College of Military Engineering, College of Defence Management, and other senior military training forums, by participating in seminars and conferences, and by reaching directly to the people via public lectures, videographed talks on the net, and the less frequent TV news shows and newspaper op-eds.

Despite the severe flux in global power politics and the international correlation of forces the essential inertness of the Indian government›s thinking and policies (through the decade) was simply astonishing.

India’s inert foreign policy is the bane of this country and prevents it from exercising its prerogatives and becoming a great power. Consider that Indian policy switched from leaning on the Soviet Union during the Cold War decades to tilting in the new millennium towards America. It started with the Narasimha Rao regime and continued unaltered in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Manmohan Singh and now Narendra Modi governments, notwithstanding the ideological differences between the left-of-centre Congress party and the right-of-centre BJP.

The trouble is whatever their rhetoric, no leader or political party seems convinced about India›s big power bona fides, but seems united in seeing the country as a secondary, subservient, power that can only rise without giving offence to rivals (China) and on the backs of friendly great powers. Whence India’s “creeper vine” foreign policy, which is geared to winding India around some big power as support in order to rise like the creeper vine that needs a pole, a tree, or a lattice to climb.

It is a tragedy starkly illustrated by the persistent scandal of importing arms, making foreign defence industries wealthy and the affording supplier states diplomatic leverage, rather than trusting in indigenous talent and capabilities, which are abundant and of high worth and readily available especially in the private sector. So, as far as I am concerned, it has all been lose, lose, for India, ensuring the country remains in the new century what it has been for long—a middling power of little real consequence.

It has been frustrating to see piddling states like North Korea and even Pakistan display the guts and gumption to be disruptive—which is what I have long argued India should be to earn the world’s respect, instead of what it has been doing—acting “responsible”, pleading to join clubs (UNSC) and cartels (MTCR, NSG) on their terms, treated with disdain, and getting sidelined and kicked in the shins for its troubles.

I have become more impatient, not less, with age, impatient for India to amount to something in my lifetime which, sadly, won’t happen.

On the personal level, it is pleasing to see my many books and views that have consistently advocated ways to make India a great power by pursuing this status the old fashioned way—by unwillingness to compromise on expansively defined national interests, by the wise use of national resources and, in Bismarck’s famous phrase, by blood and steel, being appreciated in policy establishments and strategic enclaves at home and abroad.

Unfortunately, starting with Nehru our leaders have sought great power the easy way—as entitlement, by popular international acclaim, and by pushing abstract goals, like India becoming a vishwa guru (whatever that means)!

In purely family terms they have been fulfilling years—a wonderful, high achiever wife and two kids growing up to be fine adults, doing well in their careers, finding their own mates, and settling down. The downside has been the loss of my parents, which for the first time brought me intimations of my own mortality. The vibe I get from the decade is of little meaningful change in India’s national security policies and plans. India seems to be steadfastly marching in place and getting nowhere fast. As the Queen said to Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland, if you don’t know where you are going, any path will get you there.

As an Edmund Burkean conservative, the hopes and expectations I had for a diminished role of government in national life and in the lives of the people (that Narendra Modi promised) have not panned out. As a realist strategist, I am appalled at how diligently our leaders and the government have frittered national resources and squandered opportunities to raise India’s stock as an independent nodal power and China’s premier rival in Asia and the world.

Despite just about everything going wrong and the country stagnating, I still have absolute conviction that India will make good, become a great power in spite of the government, not because of it. In fact, the political class and the government are, I have come to believe, the biggest liability for the nation, a millstone round the country’s neck, relentlessly dragging it down.

***





PROF SRIRAM RAMASWAMY

62, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru





Mechanics of the living state





(Prof. Ramaswamy helped found the emerging field of active matter.

The term denotes systems whose individual, discrete parts take up energy

and move. It is the physicist’s way of thinking about the mechanics of the living state. Systems to which this approach has been applied include the cell interior, driven by motor proteins, collections of cells in a tissue, and collectively moving groups of organisms.)





I

n the last ten years, three singular developments for me have been: the dramatic changes in India’s political landscape, the no longer ignorable reality of climate change and, on the basic science front, the direct observation of gravitational waves.

I don’t like growing old. However, I think I have otherwise become more accepting of some inevitable realities. Over the years, my fundamental beliefs haven’t changed. Some would say this is because I’m not exactly a wide-eyed optimist. The vibe I get from the decade is uncertainty.

On a personal level, my kids grew up into fine young men. I lost my father, some uncles and a close colleague.

I’ve had some pleasant surprises, when simple but novel theoretical ideas by my colleagues and me have been confirmed in experiment. But I’ve also learned that I don’t enjoy the fast lane. I like working at my own pace on problems that amuse me, but the success of the little area in physics that I helped start has made that leisurely approach hard to sustain.

We are a very close family; we hold ourselves and each other together.

For the future, I have definite thoughts on what I might do other than physics, but I’m not ready to talk about them yet.

ASHOK KUMAR SINGHVI

69, Honorary Scientist, Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmadabad;

Indian National Science Academy, Vice-president.





Monsoon is the key





I

work on earth surface processes with links to climate change, tectonics and human history. I develop methods to provide a chronology of sediments from modern times to up to a million years and some of our work has found societal relevance.

I moved from a pure laboratory scientist to being involved with policy issues and bringing to awareness the social responsibility of scientists and academies. It was a normal life, some recognition came my way. My kids, my wife and family did reasonably well.

The key to India’s climate is the monsoon. I feel the onset, duration and style show some changes. These need to be modelled and addressed. We are a country that lacks strategic thinking and hence our actions are reactions to disaster. This is true in all spheres and our governments, like us are no different.

Extreme events will happen. Earth sciences will play a major role in preparedness. Unfortunately, we do not have a long-term plan. We need to understand the need for solid scientific evidence for future planning and real effort to quantify changes and then predict their impacts. We need to learn to use science in all domains for the betterment of society. I advocate that every paper should state its scientific, societal and policy relevance.

The decade has made me worried about the future, challenges that the country will face to survive in the knowledge space. We are in a state of slavery in this respect. Think of our economics, defence, railways, airlines and health care, governance, research and whatever, if China refuses to supply computers. We as a society have not yet comprehended our challenges and are not preparing for them. It could be that we lack a faculty of strategic planning and thinking and then we marvel on Jugad.

In addition, we have increasing levels of intolerance, increasingly use and/or abuse social media for trivial issues, have a large youth population losing hope and lack a connection between those with and those without resources. We, as a society are missing out on our social responsibilities.

We need to spend more on education and research to be able to create a competent future in a knowledge century. Universities should be funded better and the whole paradigm of education and research needs a revisit. The focus should be on teachers, their motivation and well-being We need skilled manpower to absorb changes in technology and develop a hunger for innovation. Much is being done but much more is needed. I am satisfied (as I did my best without compromising on my core values) and dissatisfied (possibly could have done more had things been more conducive). But no regrets.

***





VVSS SARMA

50, Senior Principal Scientist (Regional Centre, Visakhapatnam),

National Institute of Oceanography





The Sea and the society





I

work on elemental cycling in the aquatic environment mainly to understand how oceans are changing due to human interference, extreme climatic events and climate change. The ultimate aim is to develop a predictive model to forecast the modification of living and non-living resources in seas around India.

I returned to India about 12 years ago, after about eight years in Japan and three in France. I have found significant change in the structure of Indian research, funding opportunities, and life due to the economic boom. In the past 10 years, we took up several projects related to trace gases, fluxes in the atmosphere and fertiliser release into international waters, quality of living resources, mainly Hilsa fish, and to improve predictions on potential fishing zones to direct fishermen where to go to fish. I am personally satisfied with the work we are doing.

But things are going in a different way due to recent changes in the economy; cuts to funding are hindering our capacity to venture into bigger tasks. My thinking on science and its link to society has changed significantly. Initially I felt it was important to understand what is happening in the ocean, interactions with other “spheres” and links among physical, chemical and biological interactions, and so on.

With time, I have realised that all the modifications in the oceans are either by society or to society. For example, we inject pollutants into rivers or coasts that may have devastating impacts on coastal resources. However, the impact is nullified by heavy monsoon rainfall which dilutes pollutants and their impact on ecosystem. There are several examples of how nature is solving problems created by humans. Then I added the human dimension to understand how such equilibration is possible and whether we are going in that direction.

I have worked closely with students for more than 25 years and I notice patience levels are decreasing. They want things very fast and research will not happen in the time-scale they expect. Encouragement from parents to see their kids opt for research is weak as they want them to start earning soon after their degree. Researchers are not made this way.

Ocean acidification is a serious problem both in the Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal. More than 400 million people dwell close to the coast. The impact is on changes in coastal water quality and acidification. In addition to pollutants entering coastal waters, atmospheric pollutants also influence ocean acidification through deposition over time.

The Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal are unique in their geographical settings as both basins are closed in the north by land-masses whereas the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans can flow up to the polar regions. In addition, massive numbers of people live close to these basins and their influence is significant. Processes such as the formation of de-oxygenation zones, coastal pollution and acidification may be due to natural processes or caused by human interference. I have noticed that many of these processes were simply attributed to human interference since more people live along the northern Indian Ocean. We targeted certain processes, mainly de-oxygenation, and noticed that natural processes are more important than hitherto anticipated. We need to be careful of what kind of data we have with us when we blame a country or society for their impact on oceans and atmosphere.

Before we say something about human-interference, we need reliable data. Unfortunately, if there is a bloom we say it is because of pollution and if there is no bloom we say it is because of climate change. The ocean is a complicated place with its own dynamics. The occurrence of a bloom is not only because of pollution and climate change. Overall, I am happy doing research to understand our oceans.

***





VUNDAVALLI ARUN KUMAR



