In quest of abundance (Part 1)

Economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources. As a “good” student, I memorized this line and was generously rewarded for having given the “correct answer” in my exams. Like everyone else, my journey with 'economics' began with being schooled with the notion that, in order to live happy lives, we needed things (‘resources’) which are in limited supply (‘scarce’); and that we all needed to compete for them; and that economics was going to help us with the right tools to do that.

As a child whenever I saw abject poverty, I felt heart-wrenched and swore to somehow make it rich so I could do charity. In those days of Star TV, I saw the fashion world as one with the treasures I could tap into for that purpose. I spent about four years in pursuit of becoming a designer. Later, a deep-dive into volunteering through my college NSS steered me away from that path.

Fast-forward to my first job in an environmental NGO at 21. There, among many things, my work involved preparing project proposals and reports to aid agencies like the UN and USAID. I saw the power these agencies wielded and aspired to get into influential positions in them so I could direct money to deserving projects in poor countries.

A couple of years later, during the landmark WTO protest, I happened to be in Seattle for a youth program on ecological restoration. For a few months leading up to the protest, the city buzzed with teach-ins on globalization and its many horrid faces. I hopped from one workshop to another lapping up all the new knowledge about the World Bank and IMF being the faces of the military-industrial complex wrecking the planet and all life on it. I participated in the protest too, quite a remarkable experience of the collective human spirit. The same year was Narmada Bachao Andolan’s Jal Satyagraha, when I learnt about the madness of large dams built for “development”. But still being able to see myself being in the UN and impacting things from the inside, I applied for higher studies in ‘Sustainable International Development’ (SID) in the US. One of the three recco letters was from the notorious MSSwaminathan who was then known to me as a sweet uncle. (I was totally clueless about Green Revolution back then!)

For a whole year at SID, I slogged through statistics, micro-economic and macro-economic theories and was well on my way to a doctoral program in environmental economics. Since I was good at logic, I loved my classes and assignments and handled numbers and graphs with ease. I assisted a professor in a research to figure out whether income levels of two Honduran indigenous communities affected wildlife there by cramming numbers through Econometrics, always wondering if there was a simpler way to find this out! Elasticity, supply-demand, marginal utility, opportunity cost, efficiency were concepts that began to slowly occupy my head.

During my time absorbing these concepts, every now and then my inner voice would throw up questions which I’d raise in my classes. I asked one professor who taught a course on ‘The History of Economic Thought’, “Hasn’t Gandhi said something important about how to organise our economies?” He replied “Gandhi? Hmm… I don’t think so! Well, may be, I don’t know. It does not concern us anyways.” I asked another professor “All these graphs of supply-demand, elasticity, etc. give me the image of people as consumers without hearts or free-will to choose not to buy, or to make their buying decisions based on reasons other than price. These graphs make people look like puppets that can be moved around the ‘x’ and ‘y’ axes. Something does not feel right about it.” He said “I don’t know how to answer this one! Well, this is economics. Take it or leave it.”

Very unconsciously, I was being trained to look at many things in my life in terms of their economic and financial costs and benefits. I was assigning dollar value to trees, air, water, etc. even as I was walking through a forest. I remember doing an assignment involving detailed monetization of ‘Ecosystem services’ (dollar value of the oxygen given by the trees in terms of the diseases they would prevent and hence money saved by the economy, and so on). I even began to subconsciously monetize my own simple life pursuits. All this was happening in such an innocuous way that I wasn’t even aware of it. It was like I was acquiring a new pair of lens to see the world through. From time to time, for brief moments, I’d experience a certain weird feeling about becoming someone very unlike me. But I used to brush it off as some kind of a growing pain. I believed that I was shedding my naivete for equipping myself to deal with the ‘real world’ out there.

During this time, we also got to visit the World Bank in Washington DC and the UN Headquarters in New York, my much-aspired-for destination back then. Obscenely opulent structures with enormous carbon footprints. Walls adorned by sleekly framed pictures of emaciated Ethiopian children, ethnic kalamkari and bathik wall hangings and curios from adivasi cultures shocked and sickened me, to put it mildly! And when I learnt about how Indians who worked in these institutions in high positions enjoyed full tax exemption, sponsorship of their children's schooling, free international family vacations, and subsidised food from various cuisines of the world in their food courts, I felt disgusted. (The poem 'Development Set' articulates the whole thing quite brilliantly.) But I promised myself “If and when I get into these institutions, I will be different.”

For my second year, I worked very hard for almost two months to win a grant for advanced study in environmental economics, in preparation for my PhD. A few days after I was awarded the grant and the accompanying sense of immense achievement, I spent three sleepless nights in a row. There was a growing inner discomfort that I was not on the path meant for me. In a leap of faith, I cancelled my second year project, raised funds from friends and decided to backpack in rural and tribal India to find my own answers to questions that I couldn’t even articulate back then. Just that weird troubling feeling about this whole called ‘development’!

Over five months, I backpacked to about forty villages across ten states, and a very different world opened up in front of me. I was deeply touched by my experiences with the ordinary people and the land. The culture which had thus far been presented to me as “backward” embodied values that I held very highly: simplicity, humility, cooperation, trust, trusteeship and a certain deep reverence for nature. All my notions and ideas about ‘development’ and ‘scarcity’ were disrobed one after another.

In one of the tribal villages in MP where I stayed, I saw an elderly woman herding and taking great care of cows in their village. My “educated” mind asked her 'How much milk do you get from these cows?' It was trying to calculate the effort put into maintaining the cows vis-a-vis the economic benefits. She gave me a strange look and said 'Voh hamare saath rehte hain. Jab dhoodh dethe hai, tab ham thoda lete hain' and talked of the cows as members of their community. She explained that they took milk from them only if and when they produced more than needed to feed their young ones.

In another adivasi village, I spent time with women who were sitting together embroidering their skirts with exquisite designs. And some others were artistically weaving their straw brooms, a simple object of daily use. As I sat watching them, I was reminded of a talk by Satish Kumar in NY city that I had attended just a year ago while I was still a student of modern economics. Satishji had spoken a lot about his grandmother who used to make such elaborate embroidery and how much he learnt from her being. He ended his talk by saying ‘To counter globalization, please slow down. Go home and bake your own bread.’ I couldn’t make any sense of what he said back then. Just a year later as I sat with these women connecting to what was getting evoked for me, I could feel in my bones what he had meant! That our mass-produced products in the global market have been sucked dry of their soul. That these women were not making mere pretty cotton garments but were weaving the songs of their souls into their skirts and their brooms, and definitely not because anyone was going to pay them anything for it. They had a certain sacred view of matter that I had thus far never encountered in such a manner!

I slowly came to understand the complexity of the systemic rot. I started placing a lot of, until then, seemingly independent pieces of the puzzle, together. I stopped believing that tinkering here and there was going to help. The very worldview of people as being purely rational and selfish, and of nature as resources to be exploited to endlessly chase economic growth as a way towards human happiness, needed to be challenged and changed. We needed to reclaim our own traditional worldview of nature as our mother and sustainer, of all life as sacred and one, of human happiness as lying outside materialism, and of change as something that essentially starts from within oneself and radiates out into the world. I was convinced that we needed a fundamental re-telling of our story as a race, who we are, where we are, why and how we got here, where we want to journey towards and how.

Different people I met along my journey gifted me Fukuoka’s One Straw Revolution, Kumarappa’s ‘Economy of Permanence’, Gandhi’s ‘Hind Swaraj’, Schumacher’s ‘Small is Beautiful’ and Ivan Illich’s ‘Deschooling Society’ which I lapped up during my train and bus rides. My own emerging truth was beginning to resonate with what all these masters had articulated in different ways.

During my travels, on the one side, I was distressed by the havoc that green revolution had unleashed on all life. On the other, I was fascinated by how abundantly natural farming was yielding. Spending time in 'Indraprastha', a food forest near Mysore which had 2,500 different varieties of crops grown on 13 acres, with the farming family harvesting something or the other round the year, overwhelmed me by its abundance! Panchagavya was a recent (re)discovery from Vrikshayurveda back then, and farmers were reaping abundantly by applying it on their farms. They were even diving deeper into it to find other treasures like gunabajalam, and further improvising them to create their own ‘navagavya’ and ‘dasagavya’. They weren’t sitting around waiting for an expert to help them ‘allocate scarce resources’, or claiming ownership of any of this knowledge estimating the royalty owed to them. They were innovating for the collective and sharing joyously all this knowledge through farmer gatherings everywhere. I learnt that Indian farmers had developed and taken care of over 2,00,000 varieties of rice alone (and similarly other food crops) and stewarded these stocks and the knowledge about them communally, without the need for IPR for any of them! They did it with great joy and pride, sung songs on them, celebrated festivals around them and lived such rich lives.

I spent three weeks volunteering in Pebble Garden in Auroville with Bernard and Deepika, who had transformed a rocky barren land into a copiously producing food garden with the help of termites, without waiting around for any funding, workforce or any external resource!

I spent a couple of years working with Rajendra Singh campaigning against the interlinking of rivers, telling the story about how simple traditional practices in harvesting rain water had created a forest and perennial rivers in thousands of villages in the desert of Rajasthan.

Restoring our lost connection with the sacredness of life and nature. Restoring the Commons. Restoring simplicity. Restoring democratic techniques. Seemed like a simple recipe for ABUNDANCE.

My farm visits, and my brief association with Nammalwar and Dharampalji made me look at the wisdom of ancient India. I discovered a fascinating book called ‘Annam Bahu Kurvita’ and read about the famous Chengalpattu data unearthed by Dharampalji especially about Tirupporur and Vadakkuppattu villages. “Annam bahu kurvita. Tatvritam.” said the Taitriyopanishad. “Grow food abundantly and share widely. That is the inviolable discipline of life for the one who pursues Brahmavidya (divine knowledge).” It was immensely enlivening for me to learn that the soil where I came from had talked about abundance and a culture of sharing, and had made ‘aparigraha’ (non-accumulation) one of the primary yamas for a yogic life. My culture had not only articulated this deep philosophy with such conviction, but had even worked out elaborate technologies of how to go about it, millennia ago! I was so stumped by all this discovery that I remember a time when I went around talking about this to everyone I came across!! I even went to the Chennai Archives and dug out original handwritten Chengalpattu data, and found out that the street sweeper of a villager was paid almost equally to the village vaidya (doctor). And the vaidya himself / herself was compensated for his / her services not on the basis on how much illness (s)he cured, but on the basis of how healthy the people of the village remained. An economic design that rewarded health and life-affirming ways made a lot of sense to me!

It was clear that India, as a civilization, had come very far from her original philosophy and pursuits. She was confused about who she was, her soul caught in the stranglehold of ‘modernity’ and ‘capitalism’, which were all about quite the opposite values of greed, hoarding and scarcity, where GDP only increased proportionately with physical and mental ailments, crime, garbage, everything that is undesirable for a wholesome life on this planet.

How did we get here?

I am deeply grateful to Prof. John Byrne (University of Delaware) and Prof. Herman Daly (Univ. of Maryland) under whom I did some more further studies on Political Economy before finally deciding to move to grassroots works. I lapped up Adam Smith's 'Wealth of Nations', Marx's 'Das Kapital', Lewis Mumford's 'the Myth of the Machine', Jacques Ellul's 'Technological Society', Herman Daly's 'Internationalization vs. Globalization', Karl Polany's 'the Great Transformation', Claude Alvares 'Decolonising History', Vandana Shiva's 'Monoculture of the Mind'… Aha! That's how we got where we have!!

How do we get out of here?

Among all the books I had read, Kumarappa’s stood out for its simplicity and practicality. But on my visits to Gandhian and Kumarappa institutions, it seemed like those who ran these institutions themselves were not convinced by their own philosophy and relevance. The ones dedicated to promoting rural industries were, at best, manufacturing toxic detergents. As I took a walk in the T.Kallupatti campus one day, I discovered Kumarappa's hut where he’s said to have spent his last years. I got the keys to the hut from the campus's caretaker and went in. I saw the famous framed picture of Kumarappa’s professor 'the Indian farmer' on the outside and his library of books inside, all covered in dust and cobwebs. I spent a few hours cleaning them up and sitting there in contemplation. Was there anyone trying to live what these humble giants talked about?

As an answer I was taken to Elango, a Gandhian panchayat leader in a village near Chennai, who had been inspired by Kumarappa’s works. I worked with him for a few years with the vision of creating a vibrant village network economy. I traveled with him visiting failed and successful experiments in rural industries and panchayati raj, learning lessons from them, and giving talks on localisation. Whenever anyone asked Elango “In the face of such strong global forces, where mass-made products are made cheaper, has flashier packaging and aggressive marketing, how can we promote the dull local products?” he would respond with a lot of conviction “If I know the person who grew my rice and made my soap and cared for him, and can trust the quality, I would definitely choose that over a glossily packaged and cheaper rice from an unknown farmer. We need to cultivate this very humanity of our people and build our economy on it.” I was drawn by the conviction with which Elango would say this over and over again, anytime anyone asked him this question. Though the work with him had to discontinue for personal reasons, I was convinced about testing his hypothesis. The concept note for reStore began with Kumarappa’s quote “to bring together the consumer and the producer into such intimate relationship as to solidify society into a consolidated mass, which alone can lay claim to (an economy) of permanance."

While in the US, I had volunteered in food-coops which promoted the local, and also spent a couple of days in Ithaca studying the local currency 'Ithaca Hours' which ensured that wealth circulated locally and strengthened the bonds within the community, among the many things it did. Inspired by all these, the next ten year’s journey of setting up reStore, and then another co-journeyer Ananthoo taking it all to the next level of a retailer-cooperative called OFM verified this hypothesis. Creating an authentic experience of trust and abundance (by restoring community and our lost of connection with nature), by embedding economy within community (creating a communomy) was definitely one way to dismantle capitalism.

From there, moving on to experiencing learning naturally along with our daughter gave me the experience of an abundance of resources: places and people to learn from, open toys and tools that create an abundance of opportunities to explore the world, an abundance of time, joy and all things sacred!

Two years in Tiruvannamalai, I further experimented with sharing of skills and things, building relationships with the local vendors and farmers, sharing produce and resources, which further deepened my conviction. I now live in Auroville, another fascinating place where I meet so many people who hold a quest for abundance and are experimenting with different initiatives.

Five years ago, at the Economics of Happiness conference, I took up the invitation by Ashish Kothari to be part of a nation-wide network of initiatives working on creating radical systemic alternatives. Last year, I got on board to co-steward the Alternative Economies Vikalp Sangam connecting with individuals and initiatives from across the country and the world questing for abundance in such a variety of ways.

I somehow have this strong feeling that we are at the verge of a significant breakthrough as a race in our collective quest for abundance and feel blessed to be partaking in it.

Part 2: The Rich Soil beneath the Concrete