Heavy incessant rains, accompanied by winds, flash floods, landslides, and depression-induced. Gujarat, AP, and Telangana. Thousands are getting relocated. Many places are disconnected. Road and train services are disrupted. Schools have been shut.
Haryana elections have been rescheduled to 5 October. Counting is on 8 October. Can we do development politics, rather than offering sops, non-productive, or anti-sustainability subsidies? Can they be purposive? Can Governments be minimum, to offer governance maximum? Can we transcend DBTs, and build ecosystems for better living, and livelihoods?
Himachal offers Minimum support prices for natural farming produce. A first.
The World Food Prize Foundation has launched its first cohort of Top Agri—food Pioneers, TAPs. 38, from 20 countries across 6 continents. From a variety of disciplines within agriculture, horticulture, forestry, livestock, food systems, etc. First cohort included: Leigh (CIFOR-ICRAF); Pawan Kumar (SM Sehgal Foundation); and Vijay Singh Meena (IARI, India). We expect a cohort every year to be added.
In hindsight, it appears I traversed, traversing several trajectories. They continue to coexist, with varying degrees of intensity, relevance. Transition 0 – academics – pre-Gurukulams, and through Gurukulams. Transition 1 – teaching, learning facilitation; development practice, participation, and macro-micro practice; value-chains, market, collectives, enterprises, commons, and tribal communities; information, analytics, systems, architecture; visioning, planning, and strategy; philanthropy, paying back, and forward. Transition 2 – livelihoods lifework; poor, vulnerable, marginalized, PVM; civil society, community collectives; portfolio entrepreneur; self-help movement, and institutions – identity, solidarity, capacity, rights-entitlements, well-being, and freedom; women, disabled, youth, and elders – marginalized for marginalized, agency – will-willingness, ability-capacity, and space; practitioner-academic, people for livelihoods-poverty reduction-development LPRD, young professionals; mentor, and thought leader, 7L – life, living, livelihoods, linkages, leading, learning, and love – practice-support. Transition 3 – value custody, trusteeship – hope, faith, promise, love, and coexistence; natural farming-living-livelihoods – practice, research-academics-learning – local, national, and global.
We fail more than we succeed. We may not talk about failures. What we share might be the best, selected, and edited parts. Reality is more raw and unfiltered. Our small successes are built on our huge failures. Some of these are crushing failures. Losses are immense, and probably unrecoverable. Depression, anxiety, low or no confidence might be there in the background. Most, who talk successfully, might be clueless about life. No one is amazing, happy, and successful all the time. Life is a normal curve, with some great moments, a lot of normal, average moments most of the time, and a good number of depressing, low-confidence moments. This is fine, beautiful, joyous in itself. Maybe, we need to increase the total moments of reckoning so that our great moments increase in proportion. Can we maximize total moments for all our coexisters together? Can we increase the number of coexisters? Can we increase greater joy by sharing amongst the coexisters? Can we decrease the pain, anxiety, and low confidence by sharing amongst them? Together we should peak, we should do good, we should be happy. Can we?
Yes, we can. If we coexist, if we flow in thick and thin, peaks and lows. In N? aniruddhayoga for 7L.
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