Sun, Cows, Seeds and Globalization

We are in the midst of celebrating a four day festival called Pongal. We honor the Sun, the earth, farmers, and farm animals during this time. Naturally, it is a much bigger and more important festival in rural areas than urban ones.

On the first day called Bhogi, the home is subject to deep cleaning. It is like "synchronized spring cleaning." In each street corner, a pile of old stuff is collected and this trash is burnt up in a community bonfire.

The biggest celebration is on Day 2. New crop like rice, lentils, sugarcane, turmeric and ginger root from the fields are part of the communal cookout. At dawn, families will set up a large decorated pot out in the open sun singing "Pongalo pongal" to allow prosperity to overflow in our lives like the boiling pot of sweet rice dish. It marks the start of Thai, the month of optimism, hope and new beginnings.

Farm animals are celebrated the next day, especially cows who are vital to the Indian food economy and culture. I think cows are to Indians what camels are to Arabs and horses are to Texans : ) Cows are washed, cleaned, decorated with paint and jewelry. When we lived in rural Pennsylvania, we would go to our favorite Meyer Dairy to make a donation to this farm and share with them the story of Pongal. By the way, this dairy farm still sells its milk in large glass bottles.

On the final day we offer food and water to birds and other animals like squirrels that live in our neighborhood. As kids we invited our animal friends to their feast by singing to them from our rooftops. We would then wait on the sidelines to see whose offering is eaten first by birds and animals.

As we celebrate this festival, I would like to share the groundbreaking contributions of a leading environment activist who is working very hard for indigenous farmers' rights world over, especially in India. She is Dr. Vandana Shiva. Big multinationals like Monsanto are patenting seeds. This means that farmers growing crops in their little farms in rural India cannot save seeds from their own farm for the next season. Outraged by this theft by foreign-based MNCs, Dr. Shiva has fought through many means to preserve cultural diversity in farming practices.

Dr. Shiva has so many achievements to her credit that I would have to devote more than just a single blog entry to describe her work. For now I wanted to introduce her to those of you who might not know of this exceptionally brilliant, resourceful, impactful, selfless activist-scholar.

(The illustration accompanying this entry is by the author and shows a boiling pot of a sweet rice dish called Pongal)