Script - Karuna Farms

(Its cloudy and chilly as ever out here at the Kodiakanal bus stop.
I reached here, after a 12 hour journey – wait for my carriage to arrive. A classic old jeep which I share with the driver’s toddler. Still half asleep and hardly gotten over the bus ride shakiness I’m bounced all the way down to Karuna Farms - Neville's organic coffee estate. Neville’s busy when i arrive and I'm shown to my little cottage.
As the days go on I’m told that 20 years ago that place used to be a cow shed… that would explain all the cows grazing right outside my door. Its beautiful outside and in, the cottage is quaint and over looks a patch with banana palm, an avocado tree, a bunch of coffee plants and path that goes towards the cottages of other people who live around the forested plantations. I’m left to my own thoughts for a good hour- I freshen up and think of what the hell I’m going to ask this man.
There is a knock on the door and I’m summoned for tea and a talk to Neville's cottage. )


(I’m staring out the porch at this cliff with conifers growing on top, the last time I came here the clouds had settled so heavily upon these mountains that one wasn’t even aware of the landscape around. Almost as in a island of isolated existence. That feeling is lifted as this time I can make out the shapes of far off hills and the villages set within. )

Me: umm, I’m unsure of what this place is about Neville – How did you begin? What do you grow?

N: The farm started 23 years ago. Not as farm though just as a vegetable garden. It soon became a part of a group of 10 people who were trying to create a market for organic food in Kodaikanal. Almost like a movement. We wanted to escape the madding crowds of the city seeing how they were running towards the wrong end of the spectrum.

(The expanse of 20 acres belong to the farm is a palette of all shades of greens, blending into dark blues, specked with vibrating dots of pinks, yellows, purple and whites of the wild flowers. All this through a thin gauze of mists and clouds lolling around low over the valley.)

Me: You bought 20 acres of land for a vegetable garden?

N: I see the chemical food in the city has left you pretty dim… Its okay, it took all of us a while to get those brain numbing, body eating substances out our bodies.

NO! This whole patch of land isn’t mine. Its sprawls over such a large area as families keep coming and joining in our endeavour.
I’d bought a large part of it though, and it was amazing what this soil could grow. Blueberries grow wild here!! But it was hard trying to make room for organic products in the market, especially then when people were looking at the industry to save their very lives. You know, show them the light.
Trying to even get organic fertilizers and manure was a pain… EVERYTHING had chemicals in it. I saw true poverty and hunger then, but you know, I never gave up tending to my land. And now its grown to this living breathing and constantly growing creature which feeds me, my few other and all the other families that have built their abodes in there.

Me: Well what changed? And how did you finally manage to get it going? Did you run around spraying seeds across this land and hope they’d grow?

N: Haha! Well something like that initially… I won’t deny screaming – FREEDOM- and running down the valleys scattering seeds.
But no, I kept taking loans, attending workshops… seven of my partner absconded, and asked me to give up as well, told me to give up on my foolish dreams. I did give up… I gave up farming for economics. And then suddenly, when all my focus was on creating a sustainable environment within this place, it started blossoming. I never tried encroaching on the lands of the native people living around here, and I still make sure we have enough indigenous tree around.
It was just about knowing your land, you trees and yourself. It’s a pretty simple system that nature is based on – but we’ve gotten so far removed from it that feeding ourselves without depending on the market becomes a problem.
(
He stops for a breather an a sip of his tea while I scribble away trying to keep up with him. )
He continues with a chuckle, “The morons who left then are now left with dead lands and in debt… and look at me – the recession barely affected me. I’m not saying its easy… its become EASIER. Its still hard, we do depend on the outside world for the upkeep of this place… no human lives in isolation.
But we do our best to be as self dependant as possible. Everyone in is DOING something for the community – we have a yoga hall that’s being built. With mud, straw, cow dung and wood – so the vibes there are pure. We have healers, musicians – Alex is building something called the earth ship and his girlfriend has started a Steiner school for children. And what I’m really proud of is the fact that we’re completely off the grid – solar panels and storage batteries and all our waste is composted or reused.

Me: You make it sound almost easy… you’ve set up your own little world here – separate from the others. It really is like an island of hope you know…

N: Hah! Yes that’s what it is… and more.

Me : I think its funny how, all these things – the sustainability and organic food endeavour is still associated a little with the hippies… but its spreading in the west and a bit over here as an elitist thing. Like people have to be rich to live holistically.

N: We had the manager of The Grateful Dead come up here once – and a boy who living with us then told him that the hippies were dying out as was their flower power. And he told him that the flower power wasn’t even in bloom yet. You see all we hippies had done was sown the seeds then for the future. All these “trends” that people are picking up on were a part of our lifestyle before – in India. That’s why the hippies came here – they saw hope in spirituality, peace, yoga, vegans, I- ching and the small communities living in harmony with each other and their environment.
THAT is the future. Eating, dancing, healing and developing a stable relationship with what was given to us is the future. Now a cloned PIG or a sheep or even your nuclear plants. People are on a self destructive path now.
This technologically developed generation isn’t sustainable – it will crack and crumble and your planes will crash.

WE are setting the base for the the future.... Its not like we live in isolation from the science and technological advancements... we use the basics - GPS, the Internet, blogs and websites - but we play smart and we power these appliances with solar panels - we generate our own power and store the excess. We are ideological not fanatical.

Fanaticism makes you blind.
They can run around doing what they do, things are going to get progressively worse but a large part of the people will still be blind to it - BUT WHEN THE SHIT HITS THE FAN - hell, you can't eat nuts and bolts.
Already we’re faced with complete starvation of the people – look at North Korea – they HAVE NO FOOD TO EAT. What do your mobile phones and big cars do for them then?

Me : You know when someone… anyone talks about sustainability and simplistic living back in Bangalore – people look at you like you’re stupid. I mean my own friends – who are educated and aware make fun of green peace activists and they just can’t grasp why I would walk or take a bus instead of an auto ride. They see it as a big sacrifice to do the simplest and most basic of things. I don’t really understand that psyche… and I guess they don’t understand mine either…

N: Yes, see… they’re only moving along a path which is right for them. And only them. The future, the others don’t matter and that’s a psyche that has been adopted from the west.
People in the countries with the developed economies are driven by the wrong thing… the wrong fuel. And they use the media to propagate their psyche of dissatisfaction.
We are controlled by our minds… but our minds are controlled by intelligence and what controls the intelligence – it’s the ego. And these people have unbalances and perverse ego of immediate gratification and the I WANT.

They are making you believe that this lifestyle is the best suited for EVERYONE and the media has you worshipping false idol.
Here in Karuna farms we try to achieve some sort of a balance...

Me : Yes, my friends back home are mourning the death of Michael Jackson… I mean the guy sang well, was popular …

N: Michael Jackson… well he was talented. I listened to his music too… but that man, if you can call him that anymore went absolutely crazy with his success in hand. He became a degenerate. All he propagated in the end was consumerism, popularity and chemical unnatural lifestyle. He lived in negativity and died in it. He died in DEBT, so forget being spiritually actualised the man didn’t even succeed in the materialistic world.
And as for your friends and the Indian youth in general – You’re all 20 years behind – While the west goes on to adopt our old ways we fall even deeper in this abyss of economic growth. Everyone wants to add to the economy and make India a “Super power”. To what end? By simply becoming more and more unnatural.
What they don’t realize is that the environmental repercussions are going to snowball, sooner than they would like to believe. They need to be a little more far sighted and be SELFISH if you have to be. Make these changes for yourselves.

Me: Well these ideologies, they’re connected with the dirty hippies and well, drugs.

N: Well lets face it, its true. But the nasha has to change. Alcohol is the current nasha – which the market and government is only too happy with. It makes you aggressive and want more. The more expensive your alcohol the better you look with it. People buy more and more alcohol as the craving for it can get insatiable. People associate it with relief, fun and a sociable lifestyle. Which is pure bullshit. It’s the nasha of the consumerist lifestyle.

Ganja is the complete opposite – it makes you passive and content with what you have. An old pair of jeans and some food to eat is what you’d be satisfied with and it makes you question everyday life and routine. You can grow you own and hardly need to be dependant on damn supermarket for it.
And its absolutely natural – so suddenly you appreciate nature and environment a little bit more.
This mind set of the "dirty - hippie" came later... when even that lifestyle too started getting consumerist and bastardised - politicised rather.

Its two opposite lives and mind sets - what we need to achieve is not the black or the white - but a shade of green in between…

Am I going too fast?”

I stop scribbling and I notice I’m bent over with my tongue stuck out between my teeth bent completely over my piece of paper.
Me : Oh no, This is great… rant… I mean talk on.

N: Well anyway – Today’s big war truly is Economic Growth v/s Nature - not the little 9/11 and terrorist attacks and other such skirmishes. All these small communal fights and a few people dying because of greed and neglect, they’ll stop mattering when we don’t have anything to eat.

Our basic needs are still the same and we are like animals... like sheep, following the leader of the herd but the leader of this herd is blind or halfway there... they will all follow him into the ditch. Let them fall... that's when they'll wake up.
But there is fortunately a difference between us and animals. We can create and shape out own destiny, so we are in fact responsible for our actions. However, in spite of our scientific outlook, our calculation have gone skewed, somewhere far back.
So I guess spirituality is needed somewhere, to guide our mind to do the more sensible thing. People have forgotten about their spirituality. Its all about the connection each person makes with the earth, the universe and one another. They share a collective unconscious as well a responsibility towards one another. See the thought of karma and ones fate after death is ingrained in us an this land. You can ignore, but can you escape it?

This is the negative age, where people have forgotten themselves and their core, but its coming to an end one way or the other. We an opportunity to pick ourselves up.

The flower power isn't dead - its flowers are just about blossoming. Some seeds have gotten picked away by the birds – but some are still around. We started this and YOU the flowers... its up to you to spread the color and vibrant energy already.

Me: ut, there's only so many of us… and so many more of them and they keep reproducing and making armies of themselves…

N: Yes, the consumerists are predominant, but the 10 - 15% count on the cosmic level.
You can’t blame the people making these armies, they’re scared of being anything but what they are told to become.
The west has been propagating disinformation and a false illusion of what a successful life is- an illusion they propagate through the TV. They have made us believe that their life is better and their people are more beautiful, happier... but there are beautiful and ugly people every where... physically and otherwise. TV is an amazingly powerful medium- hell even the commies sold out eventually.

Me: it all sounds pretty bleak to me.

N: Well, they call me the prophet of doom - but the planet is destined for change...

All the tsunamis and earthquakes and draughts are just a small knock on our head coming from mother nature. She’s just disciplining us, her children. But of course people want to forget the hurricane Katrinas and go back to living “normally”.
We're falling in a trap of lies - blaming the swine flu on a poor pig... and AIDS from a monkey... HAH.

Its their damn chemical companies, that screwed up somewhere... pigs, hah!... LIARS!!

And this GMO ... they're playing with GENES we couldn't interfere more with the laws of nature and life.
They are still naïve, even they could have made great things... positive things, but they are trained and leashed up by the people with the money.
They come up with things which are filled with chemicals themselves and make us more dependant on the drug industry, oh it’s a beautifully structured system they’ve come up with... They’re making us pay for things that are bad for us so we can then buy the things to undo the effects of the things we had previously bought.
But the west is now smartening up... Obama is going to clean up America and shit on us. People here are easy to manipulate... just show the donkeys the carrot made from western money and they hee - haw all the way running blindly after it.

Look at Chindabaram - he was to make us a SUPERPOWER? He's doesn't even know what that means, all we'll be doing is falling deeper into the ditch dug up by the west.

Me: well money, money, money is a pretty popular mantra…
N: There is such disparity in the way money has been distributed in this country. There’s Ambani - the rich bastard - is sick rich, off OUR money - the billion people of India and has absolutely no clue what to do with it. And then there the real people, who are actually working everyday of their lives but can’t get access to a decent meal for the day.

I had money... i made good use of it - didn't lose a thing during recession - but i still face difficulties with farm... all you have to do is patiently tend to the problems and return to the good days again. We shut down an American factory here, dumping mercury into the lakes - we have proof of the corruption in the damn supreme court! Who do the people turn to? Its this helplessness that makes people turn their backs and deny the presence of any real issues.
We won that one... but then ten more such pop up.
I feel satisfaction in knowing that i haven't just been fighting a system... but created an alternative one as well.

Me: well coming back to here and now and mainly my project, Do you really think its important to distance oneself from the city to lead a sustainable lifestyle?
I’m talking about Bangalore in specific.

Neville – Man, Bangalore used to be amazing – amazing open culture, superb bands and the most mind blowing parties. The weather was great and that place was GREEN. They’re going to have it pretty easy to go back to better ways, in fact you have better access to a lot more resources than you do here.
Me: Well its barely the same, People don’t want us to dance, live band shows are becoming more and more rare. And well the trees are mostly gone…

N: No… that’s not true. Is it?

Me: … There’s still hope for the city though, pretty much why I’m doing this.
N: well they can do plenty of things to help.
Urban sustainability -
• Everyone go 10% down on their consumption.
• Take time to value yourself, your life and the place that you live in... just take a moment to breath.
• The cities don't need to go - they just need to prioritise and scale up on the sustainable way of life - even the way the building are built can reduce out carbon footprint by miles - if done the right way ofcourse.- use solar panel, solar water heating systems, harvest rainwater.
Its all there for us now, the awareness, people who are willing to help, the technology. We just have to be willing to move the right way.
Me: Well and those who can’t do it on their own can come here huh?
N: Haha, they’d get a pretty hands on experience out here… I’m going to go … a bit busy right now.
He goes, sits cross legged on a fallen tree log next to the creek, closes his eyes and leaves me to find my way back to my cottage.
K. Farms and its history - 20 different kinds of fruits grow on this farm - apart from the indigenous plants and trees which are given a lot of importance, so as to keep the local vegetation alive. [kalyana murunge - for nitrogen and shade; Bananas - every part of this tree is useful for medicinal purposes as well as consumption as food; coffee - the main estate product,
Avocado and Jackfruit for shade and food, similarly the Oranges, lemon and sweet lime AND cardamom + Another part of the estate has blue berries, peaches, plums, guavas, custard apples, tomatoes , cherries and pomegranate] - All of these trees need each others and so does the soil.