Renata in India: Week 2- Days at Work

The first workday after the wedding started with unusual excitement. Liz and I had some trouble catching a bus and thus we were 30 minutes late to work. As soon as we finally turned onto WLF's street, we saw Mr. Masagi hastily beckoning us to hurry up and get in the car because we had an important program to get to. After we got into the car, we realized that there would be four people crowding on the backseats, so Liz sat on my lap for the hour-long car ride. We didn't really know where we were going, so the conference on Industrial Water Management in Karnataka at a 5 star hotel that awaited us really was a pleasant surprise. I even had a chance to participate in a round-table discussion with heads of major industrial companies, clean tech companies, and water-related government agencies. I very much enjoyed the conversations that we had and it felt very satisfying to be able to relate a lot of my studies from the past year to the discussions. It was also interesting to observe how out of place my boss seemed in the company of men and women dressed in suits and speaking with much lighter English accents. Ironically, it seemed to me that as simple and relatively under-resourced that Mr. Masagi's company was, he was doing a whole lot more for water conservation in Karnataka than any of the heads of companies that were present.

After the conference we headed out to a coconut farm where Mr. Masagi has implemented rainwater harvesting technologies. I was able to see non-irrigational agriculture (patta bunding), a lake constructed for rainwater harvesting, an injection borewell for groundwater recharging, and a borewell for domestic water use. The only unpleasant part about our visit to the farm was the overwhelming presence of mosquitoes. They were swarming everywhere!

The next couple of days we spent working on the English version of Mr. Masagi's book, Bhageeratha, about the war on water crisis in India.

These past two weeks in India have reaffirmed and strengthened my desire to protect nature and fight human acts that destroy it. The simple joy of escaping the city over the weekends just to breath fresh air and not waddle in muddy, filthy rubbish has quite overpowered my senses. In my musings over quieter evenings I realized what the tragedy of the human race really is. With so much humanism and cynicism of equal strengths constantl battling in my heart I don't know how I haven't been able to see this before. The tragedy is that we as a race know that the biosphere would be much better off without us and we would do the Earth a favor by going extinct while at the same time we are constantly struggling to survive and are so emotionally attached to our fellow humans. It seems to us that the only hope we have for survival is to love our fellow humans and live together in harmony, and really, loneliness and heartache are the surest and fastest dagger to one's soul. Yet it must be in protecting our environment that we join hands if we hope to survive at all. Why can't so many people see this? We find as much beauty in a falling snowflake or the chirping of birds on a fresh spring morning as in a delightful poem or a genuine smile, but it's our accursed human nature to see beauty in all that we would destroy on a whim in another situation. It is difficult to deal with such thoughts, especially in a foreign place without a friendly smile or a comforting hug, but I am glad that I'm no longer fooling myself with thoughts of idealism. In fact, I am more excited than ever to return to my studies at dear old Dartmouth and to spend just a little more time sheltered from the atrocities of the world.