Govind Gujar: entomologist's journey to understand the Society we live in

  22 July 2022 Ordinary people are amazing आम लोग अदभुत हैं Photo 1: Women standing with loads of old clothes in front and on her back Photo 2: Rafi with bags loaded in to autorickshaw behind him Photo 3: Old clothes being loaded from the market behind car and auto lane Me: माँ , बर्तनवाली आई है (Mom, woman offering steel utensils in exchange has come) Ma: उसे आने दे (let her come). काफी पुराने कपड़े जमा है (lot of old clothes are now with us) And then begins hassles of bargaining between two. Mom tries to get more steel utensils for old clothes, and bartanwali (traditionally Boharin kalhaiwali or waghari community) aiming for best bargain. And in the end, the deal invariably is done, smiles on both faces, no matter how much time is spent. The above incident occurred many decades ago and remains fresh whenever I see women dealing in old clothes. And the same was repeated with mine too, last to remember some years before I retired from IARI in 2015. Only differenc

  1 2 I am not a fan or follower of Sadguru, Jaggi Vasudev that he is in formal sense. He is a spiritual leader and founder of Isha Foundation in Coimbatore. I did visit his ashram at Coimbatore. It is not his hut, but a vast expanse of forest land which he has acquired and developed into a kind of spiritual resort that his followers visit to fix up inner engineering software inside their external hardware bodies. Although I heard about negative aspects of Sadguru, I am drawn towards his ideas, missions that he has undertaken. Last time, it was RALLY FOR RIVER that attracted me. Visits to my town after I left it for graduation showed as to how river that we called Dnyanganga has nearly vanished over past five decades. Embankment in the upper reach called check dam nearly dried it for most times of the year. And then slowly, human encroachment took it over. Riverine ecosystem that ensured survival of humanity around it is now taken over by the piped water ecosystem. Loss of river ha

  Experts inspecting flowering of Sugar beet                               Sugar beet showing a root bulb, a source of sugar   10 July 2022 Most of us know that sugar comes from sugarcane, but few know that it also comes from sugar beet. I heard about sugar beet in early 1970s when I was told that Dr B A Lakhdive, retired agronomist of Dr Punjabrao Deshmukh Krishi Vidyapeeth, Akola did his DAAD post-doctorate work on sugar beet at Goettingen in Germany. And that was the end of what I knew of sugar beet. It is only in last month that I got to see what sugar beet plants look like at Mukteshwar (Uttarakhand) where the ICAR’s Indian Institute of Sugarcane Research at Lucknow has an outpost to breed and develop seeds. Sugar beet cultivation is in infancy, despite best efforts of some farm scientists in the past few decades. Even our neighbour Pakistan grows it on about 1,014 hectares and produces 38,620 tons of beet annually. Dr Y S Nerkar, former VC of the MPKV Rahuri and ex-Director a