The Heaviest Radish
Photo courtesy Moti Bagh (2019). Public Service Broadcasting Trust.
I woke up this morning to the heaviest radish in India. In a documentary by Nirmal Chander on his 83-year-old uncle Vidyadutt Sharma, I was again reminded what human resilience could achieve. On a 5 acre farm in the Himalayan village in Northern India, Vidyadutt Sharma has built Moti Bagh. He calls himself the ‘odd one out because, despite holding the record for growing the heaviest radish, which weighs 23 kgs, he is surrounded by 7000 ghost villages. Most farmer families have migrated to urban areas, leaving the fields barren.
Vidyadutt Sharma’s stoic demeanor to nurture his land in Sanguda village in Uttarakhand’s Pauri district through hard work and poetry reminded me that change happens when one ‘walks the talk.’ In 2011, when I traveled to Uttrakhand for the ‘Valley of Flowers trek, animals were walking out of the huge natural reserve because it was to be made more attractive for avid trekkers like me. This led to a decrease in cross-pollination, and I was told that the valley had witnessed a steady decline of flowers ever since. Animals, along with insects, wind, water, birds, bats, and snails, are the biggest pollination agents in plants.
In an article in the Scroll , Chander observed, “Uttarakhand is peculiar in its migration – it is both inter-state and inter-state. People leave the hilly regions to work in places like Dehradun and Hardwar in the plains. They also leave and settle in other big cities, and they don’t necessarily come back. You have a high density of population in one place and abandoned villages in another. That has affected the ecology – the wildlife is coming back, but the relationship with the land also changes. Aspirations have grown, and as agriculture seems less viable, educated people don’t necessarily see themselves as farmers.” The documentary also talks about how Nepali farmers fill in the void of the absent ‘homegrown’ farmers despite being discriminated against.
I wonder how educated I really was when I signed up for the trek with absolutely no clue that my brief migration to the valley for leisure was adding to the problem. My migration to Siem Reap, Cambodia, in 2018 and now my attempts to migrate back to India are hitting a dead end because of the Coronavirus pandemic - which is a by-product of this increased hyper-connectivity.
Migration is a complex issue, but in true Douglas Adam style here is the lighter side of it, “Bypasses are devices that allow some people to dash from point A to point B very fast while other people dash from point B to point A very fast. People living at point C, being a point directly in between, are often given to wonder what's so great about point A that so many people from point B are so keen to get there, and what's so great about point B that so many people from point A are so keen to get there. They often wish that people would just once and for all work out where the hell they wanted to be.”
25 km from the ‘Valley of Flowers’, in a small town called Badrinath, there is this old story of villagers who went on a hunger strike so that they could have a bus connecting their village to the main town. Giving in to the mounting pressure, the local government introduced a bus, and it is now called Bhook Hartal (hunger strike). The bus, like hunger, doesn’t have a fixed time. It comes and goes whenever it wants.
