It was a sunny day and the usual Bangalore pollution was in the air. We were headed through the freaky traffic of Mysore Road towards Kengeri with our own imagination of how a farm near the city would be like. For me, it turned out to be very different from what I had imagined. It was an atmosphere very different from the city and that too just few Kms away from here; almost as if we were teleported to somewhere much inside Karnataka! This was the "Maithri Farm" we visited on a Sunday in January to record a podcast with rare thinker, environmentalist - Nagesh Hegde.
In high school, we had a lesson in our Kannada text book that was taken from "ಇರುವುದೊಂದೇ ಭೂಮಿ" (translates roughly to "One Earth") - a collection of essays authored by Nagesh Hegde. In this essay titled "ಪಶ್ಚಿಮ ಘಟ್ಟಗಳ ಪತನ" (translates roughly to "The destruction of Western Ghats") he had discussed with a simple narrative how the forests below Sahyadri facing the axe are affecting the rest of the region in Karnataka. Had we not read this, we would've never realised how significant the effect of changes like deforestation, encroachments happening in Western Ghats have been on us. The simplicity and effectiveness of narrative was such that many of us read it seriously rather than just for the end of the term exams.
The 10th edition of podcast on Sampada features a discussion with this widely read author. The interview has been done by Prashant Pandit. The discussion is very informal (kept that way on purpose) featuring several topics including "the death of ಚಳುವಳಿ (movements)".
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