February 16, 1999, Tuesday, sunny,
11-26C
[11:01 in the middle of nowhere]
I’m now sitting
on the uphill side of the highway about 10 km north of Balaghat part way along
the 6-hour drive between Nagpur and Kanha.
The car died and the driver has hitched a ride back to Balaghat for
help. The engine has been missing over
the last 50 km or so, and finally, now that the terrain is more winding and
hilly, the car just can’t make it. We
checked the distributor contact points, the spark plug wires, and they seemed
okay. Lots of gas in the tank. Seemed like a bad spark plug or a faulty
distributor or a congested fuel line, or a weak battery or whatever else. But the driver doesn’t even have a
wrench. He decided to go back to
Balaghat to fetch a mechanic. I elected
to stay with the car, given all my equipment in it. He flagged down a truck and off he went.
I
got out of the car, taking my computer and camera bags with me. I have no idea what the highwaymen situation
is like around here, and I have US$800’s worth of traveler’s cheques and rupees
on me. I climbed up the wooded slope on
the uphill side of the highway by about 100 feet. From where I’m sitting, I can monitor the car and the road
without being seen if I don’t want to be, and can also enjoy the view of the
lake in the distance submerged in a sea of trees. Right at hand I’m surrounded by bamboo and other types of
trees. Vehicles, mostly trucks and
buses, pass at about one per minute.
Some
observations on the road early this morning.
Recall back in Delhi, people (men) just urinate wherever they feel the
need, even right on the side of a major thoroughfare. Imagine people by the dozen pissing on a wall at the intersection
of Granville and Georgia! Well, along
the highway, not only were people urinating, they were defecating, within
spitting distance of the passing car, even women. Well, as they say, “If you gotta go, you gotta go.” But couldn’t they just get behind a tree or
something? Mind you, if you’ve cut off
all the trees, what can you get behind?
While
passing through Balaghat earlier, we stopped for a Pepsi (the popular pop in
India). Of course I was at once
surrounded five deep by locals, gawking at me, touching me. Being used to this, I just opened the pop
and began sipping it. While doing so, I
looked for a waste bin to deposit the bottle cap into it, in vain. Seeing my intention, one of the people hold
out his hand helpfully. I gave him the
cap, expecting him to take it to a bin I didn’t see. Instead, he just dropped the cap on the ground at his feet.
I’m
supposed to get to Kanha about noon. If
Anne and Chris and Faiyaz are, as Chris says, “anxiously awaiting my return”,
their anxiety may get to the bursting point before I make my grand reentrance.
[12:31 @ same spot] It’s been 1.5 hours – 90 minutes. Where is the guy? Balaghat is only 10 km away.
Is he having samosa or chai or a nap or…?
[13:13 @ same spot] Finally, those guys showed up, by bus –
the driver and two mechanics. They’ve
been at it for about 10 minutes. No
luck. At one point, one of the guys got
underneath the car, got a mouthful of gasoline (!), and spat it into the
carburetor. The engine started alright,
but did not hold. They’re still working
on it. Right now, looks like they’re
trying to clean the fuel line. After
that, what? Indian ingenuity at
work. Fascinating, as Spock would say,
from an outsider’s point of view.
[14:28 @ a place a few km north of
“same spot”] Well, the Indian ingenuity worked for a
little while. They took out the fuel
filter and blew in reverse, resumably cleared the filter. The car started fine after that. The mechanic decided to catch a ride to
Kanha. The younger guy would take a bus
back to Balaghat. Before we took off I
pulled a Rs.100 note out of my pocket and offered it to him. He declined first, but after looking at his
friend, he accepted it. And off we
went.
I
began to doze off, and was awakened when the car pulled off the road
again. Same symptom reappeared. This time, when they opened the hood, a
thick plume of acid fumes erupted from the battery. Thank goodness the mechanic is with us, not that necessarily
anything can be done about it. He
waited for the fumes to clear, then removed the battery. As I write, he plunged a hole on the top of
the battery and is now doing something with it. I think the end cell of the battery died and the acid ate right
through the plate and destroyed the electrode.
What he is doing is to use an electric cable to connect the power cable
directly to the plate of the second cell, thus making the voltage of the
battery 10 volts instead of 12 volts.
It won’t start the engine, but if we push start the car, the lessened
battery should be able to keep the car going.
Indian ingenuity at work again.
And again, let’s see how many more miles (feet) he can make this clunker
go.
[23:02 @ Rm. 112, Kanha Jungle Lodge] Home sweet home! At last I arrived here around 15:30 – a 9.5 hour journey rather
than the standard 6. Indeed this place
feels like home to me, in absolute terms, and especially relative to Delhi,
starting with a warm, hugging welcome by Anne, Faiyaz and Chris. The four of us pretty well spent every
minute of the remains of the day together.
I wish things would never change, but Chris will be leaving on the 25th
for Bangkok for a time, then Taipei for two months, and then, in August,
Vancouver. Anne and I are supposed to
go to Bandhavgarh on or around April 1, but I want to stay at and concentrate
on Kanha, and so does Anne. If Anne
goes to Bandhavgarh, Kim would not be interested in our work here at Kanha, and
Chris will be gone. So, I will tell
Pradeep that I will stay here at Kanha till mid-March, and so will Anne.
Anne
and Faiyaz told me that they have big plans for Kanha as the centre of tiger
conservation, in the following terms:
1.
population control as integral part of medical clinic;
2.
Techno-transformation - solar cookers for rural, LPG (liquid
petroleum gas) for suburban to stifle fuel wood market;
3.
cattle husbandry;
4.
cottage industry.
And
an overall coordinator for all four.
Anne told me, “I don’t know how many times we have said, ‘Let’s wait and
see what Anthony thinks.’”
Anne
loves the Atlas I brought, and was tickled by the “Hindi Made Easy” booklet,
which I chose from a humorous angle. It
was published earlier this century. In
it is a section titled “Directions to Servants”, where the orders include: [Bring my clothes. Fetch that thing. Don’t
bother. Speak loudly. That will do. You may go now. Get out
of the house. Carry out my
orders. Stand still. Come near me. Do your own work. Bring
it at once. You are very lazy. Never tell a lie. Never steal anything.
Bear this in mind. Dress
me. Undress me. Bring my trousers. Where are my socks? Take
off my boots and bring my slippers.
This is not properly washed.
Take this back and have it washed again. I will not pay you until the missing articles are returned. Bring my whip…]
Anne
has taken on the role of principal teacher of the free school in Dimple’s
absence, and a very popular one at that.
Faiyaz and I both joined in the teaching today, doing mostly arithmatic
(addition). On the side, I taught some
kids to play tic-tac-toe.
The
large solar oven and solar cooker have not yet been build, due to unavailability
of quality steel plates, until yesterday, when Faiyaz finally procured a 4’X12’
highly reflective steel sheet. So, the
next 3-4 days we’ll work on building and testing the two large models, except
tomorrow morning at 09:30, when Faiyaz, Anne and I will go to town to view a
quality breeding bull worth Rs.2200 (C$80 - cheap!). Faiyaz says he has already come to an agreement with Chichrunpur
to give them the bull on the condition that all extant low quality bulls be
neutered. The new bull will be free range
grazed by day and stall fed in the evening, and he will either determine ‘in
the field’ when to impregnate the cows, or have it determined for him in the
stall by the villagers.
Finally,
I met the two very lovely Indian couples from Calcutta, who asked to see
Champions upon hearing about it, and came back to the fire pit to join us
bubbling with enthusiasm and questions.
One of the ladies brought out her camera and took a number of pictures
with me. I gave them a copy of Total TV
with WCWC’s address, phone, fax and e-mail on it. They volunteered to link the Delhi Tiger Clubs with the Calcutta
schools’ environment clubs, and both with Canadian school environmental clubs.
Very
exciting prospects forthcoming.
In
a lull between activities, I caught up on things with Anne, Chris and
Faiyaz. Anne said, “I’ve been thinking
about your ‘artificial is natural’, ‘machines are alive’ and other
thoughts. They are challenges to conventional
wisdom. It is easy to shrug them off on
a day to day basis, but if you step back and take a good hard look at things
from a universal and objective viewpoint, perhaps even an extraterrestrial
perspective, these ideas make so much sense they are downright undeniable, even
inevitable.”
“I
know exactly what you mean, Anne.”.
“I’ve
been thinking about India as an organism,” said Faiyaz. “It would take the Deep Blue computer to
quantify everything involved. It’s mind
boggling. But there is no denying
it. India is as much a bona fide living
organism as you and me.”
“I’ve
done the same with Canada,” I concurred, “as well as India. I even look at myself as a body-cell of
Canada, one that has been injected into the body of India, by the mutual
consent of both nations. Right now as
we speak, this transplanted Canadian body-cell is communicating with a native
Indian body-cell named Faiyaz. The
picture gets a bit complicated as I recall that I was originally a body cell of
China, which was then transplanted to Hong Kong, which eventually transplanted
itself into Canada, with permission from Canada of course.”
“Considering
what you are here to do, I’d say that you are a socio-biological agent injected
into this national organism called India to fix some of it internal
problems. You are social medicine,
Anthony,” said Chris.
“As
are you, and Anne,” I said. “And Faiyaz
is homegrown medicine, exuded from within.”
Raminothna,
too, is social medicine, injected from the Great Beyond.