The COVID-19 pandemic presented a contrast in the way it rolled out in 2020 and in its second wave in 2021 in India. The rigorous lockdown in 2020 prevented large-scale spread of infection and hospitalizations, and mortality levels in India did not exceeded the global trends. However, migrant workers suffered untold miseries and peeled off the veneer off a heartless, self-centered, and transactional society.   

Then, for many months, the pandemic appeared to have receded, and people were back to their carefree ways that included large gatherings and congregations, be it rituals, festivals or election rallies. Even cricket matches were watched by people in packed stadiums. The arrival of an indigenous vaccine along with other global brands created the hubris of India as a “Vishwa-guru” that was leading the world in effectively handling the pandemic. 

 And then, the second wave struck. Even the best hospitals raised their hands in their failure to provide oxygen to needy patients. Questionable therapies like administering convalescent plasma were used to earn enormous profits by the hospitals. Beds were given to highest bidders. Unproven medicines for COVID-19 were sold in the black market. It was as if vultures were hovering everywhere. People were out in the streets not having a hospital bed. To have people not have oxygen was really tragic. 

 What might explain these staggering letdowns in a country that was discussing QUAD with the US, Japan and Australia to counter China only on March 12, 2021? Suddenly, we were receiving oxygen tankers from other countries in aid to fill the demand deficit and a section of the Western media was showing shocking pictures of long lines of dead bodies waiting for cremation. The entire system seemed to have collapsed like a pack of cards. 

In engineering parlance, there are two ways of looking at systemic failure. One focuses on how one part of the assembly failed and took down the whole system. It is a more familiar narrative: find the missing piece, the worn-out cog, the exhausted element that brought the machine to a halt, fix it and voila! Supply shortage of Oxygen in hospitals was highlighted at the center stage of the COVID-19 second wave and fixing it was seen as mission accomplishment.

However, there is a second way of looking at systemic failure. It requires widening the scope to think about the system as a whole and how it crumbled. What turned the well-tamed COVID-19 pandemic into a quick-moving and relentless public health emergency? The answer is – mass religious gatherings, cricket matches, and a general attitude of “all is well” on the one hand. On the other, huge federal budget allocations to augment hospital facilities were found unutilized by many states. Both were the hallmarks of hubris – the arrogance of doing no wrong and doing nothing. A widespread view amongst people, that they are outliers, prevailed with many living in the false belief that “I am in some way distinct from the others, and nothing will happen to me.” 

Media channels had their own hubris. One reality was shown in so many different ways based on who was reporting. Negativity and cynicism were galore. TV reporters were seen cherry-picking scenes, rather than communicating the ground situation. Thousands of lives were saved by valiant doctors, staff and volunteers bringing oxygen from factories on their two-wheelers to help people in need. The way tons of liquid oxygen is now produced by our non-medical industry after modifying their plants in few days’ time is also historic.

 In Greek mythology, hubris is punished by the goddess Nemesis. Overconfidence in our specialness led to lack of preparedness, prevented collaboration with others, and limited the opportunities of learning from the experience of other countries. Deficiencies in administration and greed of the people emerged as punishment by Nemesis for the hubris of “world-power India.” Two lessons are apparent:

1. Panic mongering for profiteering – Most Covid positive patients may recover on their own. The things needed for them to do so are oxygen level monitoring to maintain a level of 93 and above, Paracetamol for fever and body ache, and home isolation to make sure that they do not pass on the virus to others. Large numbers of hospitals beds were occupied by the “affluent anxious,” denying them to those who actually needed them. People were seen squatting on beds for their “Masters,” should they need it. 
2. Highjacking of science – In any infectious disease, the virus mutates while jumping from one host to another. The science is that every mutation adds to transmissibility and virility is lowered. Mutations happen in clusters along the genome. In the SARS-CoV-2 virus of the 30,000-letter long genome, hundreds of mutations have happened and will continue to happen. A hype was created about “double mutations” and the “Indian mutation.” When intellectual garbage was overflowing like an open drain in social media, most of our scientists stayed away from making public rebuttal. 

Except the availability of a vaccine, and cognitive surplus on rampant media, there is no difference between the 1918 Flu pandemic and COVID-19. COVID-19 will run its full course over about 3 to 4 years and stop after herd immunity is achieved, making the virus incapable of causing any mortality. Till such time we need to be humble – moderation in living, and the self-discipline of wearing masks and maintaining social distancing. A very large number of people are just not doing this. 

Nature is as brutal as it is benevolent. Post globalization, in the late 1990s, a pandemic was imminent. It happened in 2002 as the SARS-CoV, in 2009 as H1N1, and then in 2012 as MERS. Luckily, it remained confined to a few countries. Finally, SARS-CoV-2 became a pandemic as a large number of infected tourists carried it across the globe while holidaying for the Chinese New Year in 2020. There were signs of trouble, but they were ignored to prevent losses by the airline and hotel industries. And we had the COVID-19 pandemic! 

A recurring theme in mythology is that of a man or woman who loses sight of human limitations and acts arrogantly and with violence, as if an immortal, and pays a terrible price for it. So, what is the lesson? 

Don’t get carried away and suffer despair. Be humble, live with humility, and like a reed, bend before the storm, waiting for it to pass by, which eventually it will, as it has to. Know your limitation of being a mortal and plan your life a little more meaningfully. 

I studied mechanical engineering and became a missile scientist as a fairly good accomplishment of a career, which got me an opportunity to develop India’s first titanium airbottles, used in missiles to power the control system. The airbottles were successfully tested at Aerospatiale factory in Bordeaux, France, in 1985, in my presence. I was floating on Cloud Nine as they say.

Then, two things happened. I had a severe bout of tachycardia and was admitted to Nizam’s Institute of Medical Sciences, Hyderabad, under emergency. My heart rate was 240 beats/ minute and ECG waves were not even getting plotted. I was given electric shocks that broke the spell. But then, I did not respond to any of the available arrythmia drugs and had several other episodes while in ICCU. 

There, on February 8, 1987, Dr APJ Abdul Kalam, Director Defence Research & Development Laboratory (DRDL), where I was working, visited me and right at that moment, I was in   tachycardia. He nervously asked Cardiologist Dr B Soma Raju, who was attending to me, if he could do anything. Dr Soma Raju asked him to procure Amiodarone HCL, a new anti-arrythmia drug recently introduced in Europe but yet to arrive in India. And Dr Kalam got the drug for me pulling it off in a way that only he knew how. 

Amiodarone acted on me like a “Sanjeevani.” Arrythmia disappeared like a bad dream and I joined my work in two weeks’ time as if nothing had happened. Realizing the ephemeral nature of life at a rather young age, I grew up in that one month as if by a few years. I gave my best to the Akash missile airframe and developed it almost single-handedly, winning in the process, Dr Kalam’s heart. He started calling me “Buddy.”

When in 1992, he moved to Delhi to head DRDO, Dr Kalam transferred me out of the missile program and assigned me, what he called the “superior” task of developing civilian spinoffs of defence technology. He observed that most of the medical devices and consumables were imported and that only the rich could use them. Life-saving medicine must be affordable and for everyone, he believed. 

We created a Cardiovascular Technology Institute with World Bank’s financial assistance routed through the Industrial Credit and Investment Corporation of India (ICICI), which later became ICICI Bank. I successfully developed India’s first coronary stent with Dr A Venugopal Reddy at the Defence Metallurgical Laboratory (DMRL), making the very special steel. This work fetched me the 1997 DRDO award.

In 1999, legendary Prof Kakarla Subbarao, Founder Director, Nizam’s Institute of Medical Sciences gave me Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine. It was such an intellectual feast. I have never read that quality of English writing – no jargon and the most complex ideas expressed in plain words and phrases of dew-like clarity. 

Dr B Soma Raju gave me Aequanimitas of William Osler that tackles head-on a timeless question: What makes a good doctor? “The practice of medicine is an art, not a trade; a calling, not a business; a calling in which your heart will be exercised equally with your head,” writes Osler.

In 2001, as if ripened to receive him, I met Maestro cardiologist Dr P Krishnam Raju. The only son of former Executive Engineer with the Andhra Pradesh Government and a landlord, Dr Krishnam Raju never allowed his wealth and privileges to act as deterrents to hard work. He won eight gold medals, every year topping his class, that included the first ever cardiology gold medal from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in the year 1978. Dr Krishnam Raju had been Head of the Department of Cardiology in Osmania Medical College, Hyderabad, till superannuated.

In 2005, we went to Myanmar together during Dr Kalam’s Presidency to help introduce super-specialty medicine there. Many people in Yangon spoke to Dr Krishnam Raju in Telugu. We learnt that their ancestors had sailed to Burma (earlier name of Myanmar) as it was part of British India and Rangoon (earlier name of Yangon) was the “happening city” as Mumbai and Dubai are now. 

When we were walking through the campus of Rangoon Medical College, Dr Krishnam Raju noticed that it was an exact replica of the Andhra Medical College at Vishakhapatnam (called Waltair by the British). He correctly predicted various buildings in the campus. The same engineering team would have constructed both the hospitals. The first Indian woman cardiologist Dr Padmavati (1917-2020) studied here. Her photo was placed in the conference hall. 

Sitting through the long sessions with Dr Kyaw Myint, the learned Health Minister of Myanmar, who had three FRCPs in Medicine (London, Glasgow, and Edinburg), General Tin Maung Aye, the Chief Cardiologist at the Military College of Medicine, and other doctors, I learnt that medicine had been more of an art and only very recently with the advent of interventional technology, was becoming a science. 

Any medicine is essentially a poison and what dose was good for a patient had emerged over years of scientifically collated “practice” of thousands of doctors across the world. Also, any new procedure that was not possible earlier is pregnant with long-term consequences, which must be anticipated for and taken care of through rigorous clinical trials. 

I have seen first-hand, how after the advent of computers, medicine was turned into a process-driven process with clinical guidelines, evidence-based treatment, and the diagnosis-related group (DRG) system, which turned hospitals into an industrial enterprise. Later, terms like “packages” started being used and finally medicine became a business enterprise driven by insurance companies ensuring that you get only this much treatment, and hospital owners ensuring that you are provided “all the possible services” that you can be billed for. 

So, what does a doctor do now? Is he destined to be a mere cog in the wheel of this money-making machine? The two biggest threats to medicine are doctors who buy their medical seats at a high price and then “recover the investment” lifelong from their patients; and private hospitals owned by faceless investors, mostly foreigners. These two are indeed a curse on the Indian healthcare system. 

Dr Krishnam Raju feels that the doctor-patient relationship is sacrosanct. As a doctor, if you lose the trust of your patient, you are finished. He feels that though things are not very good at present, India has not yet become as bad as other countries in this regard. Indian doctors indeed put patients’ care first, before profit. As we can see during the current pandemic, they are also putting their lives at great risk to save ours.

About the biggest health issue of our times, Dr Krishnam Raju quotes Mother Teresa, “The greatest disease … today is not TB or leprosy; it is being unwanted, unloved, and uncared for.” He feels that children are not caring enough for their parents and perhaps it is a backlash of the neglect of the ambitious people who chased their careers over their children when they needed them. There is hurt everywhere, like an overcast sky, and it is time to give priority to healing, loving and caring starting with our own selves and our families, friends, neighbors, colleagues at the workplace, acquaintances, strangers, humanity as a whole and extending to every creature living on the planet. 

When tall, handsome and perspicacious, Prof. RC Paliwal taught me Thermodynamics at the College of Technology, GB Pant University in 1972, it was amongst the first courses that acted like a moat that must be crossed to enter into the citadel of engineering. I started learning how tangible things like steam and ice are “made” by moving heat energy in and out of water. It was in those days that I learnt a mysterious term called “Entropy.” 

 Prof. Paliwal called “Entropy” the ultimate reality of the engineering world, while teaching the second law of Thermodynamics. In an isolated system, that is not plugged into the environment, entropy keeps increasing as the system inexorably becomes less structured, less organized, less able to accomplish the outcome for which it was designed and eventually slides into an equilibrium that is gray, tepid, monotonous and eventually dead. Everything that comes together, falls apart.

Later, when I read, through translations of the words of the 13th-century Persian poet Rumi, 

“I died as a mineral and became a plant, 

I died as a plant and rose to an animal, 

… As a human, I will die once more, 

Reborn, I will with the angels soar…” 

another aspect of entropy became clear. Nothing is lost. . . everything is transformed. When clever people are trying to organize things, entropy is shaking its fist at their effort. English philosopher-scientist Sir Arthur Eddington (1882-1944) cutely declared entropy as “time’s arrow.”

Our bodies grow and function following genetic material from our parents. The DNA & RNA inherited by us makes codons, which make amino acids, which make proteins. And from the proteins our body is built and draws energy from food, air and water. As time passes, the body ages and finally dies. So, is entropy the Maya? Not an effect but the original cause!

A 2003 paper proclaimed that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is the First Law of Psychology. It was written by John Tooby, Leda Cosmides, and H. Clark Barrett at the University of California. They called evolution, a story of ceaseless repetition and endless reincarnation of consciousness trapped into physicality. Whenever one sees functional order, one is seeing the downstream contrivances of natural selection. If we make a human being a closed system – free from society – the second law of thermodynamics tells us that every individual would start out and end up a horrifying monstrosity.

It is a well-established fact now that gene activity can be turned off and on by environmental or extracellular factors such as sensory experience, social context, hormones, temperature, diet, and photoperiod. These factors make gene action dynamic, contingent, and bidirectional. Continuous exposure to light, especially blue light emitted by the black screens of TVs, computers and mobile phone screens is changing the present young generations and the future generations through them. The bad news is that an increasing number of young people are opting for living single lives.  

Chasing and fleeing are not just sequences of muscle contractions – they are goal directed. A life without a goal is indeed an organic waste. When you are surfing the Internet – is it goal directed? If it is not, some faceless program soon sucks you into the entropy of “wanting” unnecessary things, which are mass produced for profit. How stupid is “liking” or “disliking” someone whom you have never met and would never meet! 

Similarly, poverty of the masses is the entropy of wealth generation by the few. It is the default state of mankind and therefore, widespread. Generation of wealth is a goal directed organized activity. Matter does not arrange itself into “things”; we need “engineering” to make products. Products do not get sold on their own. We need “businesses” to make them reach the needy and “collect” from them the “price” to plough back into making more and better products. Of course, money wealth thus generated, at times turns into entropy of gold and diamonds hoarded by the rich. 

So, make no mistake about the truth that human survival depends on how it controls natural evolution to its own advantage. When the coronavirus pandemic started, we could control it by the discipline of lockdown. Even a vaccine has been made in less than a year’s time. But then, we allowed entropy to enter into reckless behavior and a second wave of pandemic hit those areas where people allowed their pleasures and conveniences override caution.

Our biggest armory as humans is our cognitive, emotional, and moral faculties. These are provided to us by education, the family system and religion. We see that these three systems are infested with bugs unleashed by global corporations with long-term agendas and politicians out to grab levers of power.

Consequently, education is now seen as a gateway to get a job, a family has turned into a zero-sum give and take system and religion has regressed into rituals and cults. But worse still, our minds are getting polarized around our egos. Most of our emotions revolve around the pleasures and domination of others. Most of the educated, highly placed, affluent people of today are indeed highly insecure bundles of doubts. 

There is a trend to think as a stereotype, and act by projecting our own wishes upon others. Our leaders are marshalling evidence that confirms their convictions while dismissing evidence that contradicts them. “The Nation wants to know,” is the new cliché. These are all engines of entropy. Unless these are checked, mankind is going to be buried under cognitive wreckage and the garbage of consumerism. 

Swiss psychologist and philosopher, Carl Jung, famously said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” Entropy is our fate but not our destiny. Billionaires, Nobel laureates, sportspersons, professionals and artists do not emerge out of entropy. They are products of discipline, sacrifice, training and sustained efforts toward definite goals.  

When it is said that “the dust goes to dust,” it is not some random phenomenon. Cognitive evolution is the ultimate purpose of human life. So, live a conscious life. Know your place in the existential system. Control its processes, sense your internal milieu and interact with the outside environment, including people and institutions around you. Take only what is needed and dispose of what is not necessary. Even a little lowering of your guard, a little complacency, and you are “rushed and gushed” into the suction of the fiery mouth of consumerism, following the law of entropy.

A center of excellence is the best thing that can be created in this world. The reason is that it involves several decades of dedicated work, generations of people, and a great purpose that is relentlessly pursued without wavering. And above all, it changes destinies of countless people across generations. Unfortunately, India lacks such centers. There is no Indian university in the top 100 universities of the world and most of our national laboratories are not counted in the global comity of science.

I have been connected with the LV Prasad Eye Institute, Hyderabad, more as an admirer and know Dr G. Nageswara Rao, its founder, and Dr Tara Prasad Das, the second-in-command, as friends. In 1996, when Dr APJ Abdul Kalam started having difficulty in reading, I took him to the Institute. Dr Das checked his eyes, assisted by optometrist Ghanshyam, and he was prescribed glasses. He never had any problem with his eyes thereafter, but that visit created a lifetime bond between him and the Institute. 

When Dr Kalam became the President of India, Dr Das sought Dr Kalam’s help to start an eye hospital in Bhubaneshwar, to where he belonged. A word from Dr Kalam to Chief Minister Naveen Patnaikji made things move fast. I accompanied him on the inauguration day on July 3, 2006. At the time, Dr Kalam said, “This hospital has the great challenge of providing eye care support to Orissa (now Odisha) state where nearly 2 percent of their population is visually challenged as against the national average of 1.4 percent.” Sacrificing his retina research work wherein he is world-renowned, Dr Das stayed there for six years to ensure that systems and people were in place. And today, LVPEI, Bhubaneshwar is a center of excellence in its own right.

Months before he departed, in February 2015, Dr Kalam visited Rajgangpur in Odisha’s Sundargarh district to inaugurate a unit of the LVPEI there. True to its name, this beautiful district has half its area under forest cover and numerous colorful tribes dotting its landscape. But for someone who lacks the gift of vision, of what use is all this? The hospital soon became a hub for needy patients in Raigarh and Jashpur districts of Chhattisgarh, Simdega and West Singhbhum districts of Jharkhand, and the Keonjhar district of Odisha. There was no good eye hospital even in cities like Jharsuguda, Sambalpur, Deogarh and Angul in this region. 

While returning to Delhi, at Bhubaneshwar airport, Dr Kalam hugged Dr Das and said, “I am proud of you.” Who knew it was the last time they would meet! Today, similar to Rajgangpur – LVPEI has established hospitals at Rayagada, Berhampur and Keonjhar; the fifth one in Odisha is being built at Balasore, not very far from the Wheeler Island, now called APJ Abdul Kalam Island. 

I had my cataract surgery done at the LV Prasad Eye Institute, Hyderabad, on May 13, 2015, in the left eye and recently, on March 3, 2021, in the right eye. Dr Das received me at the hospital as a brother would. Both procedures were conducted by Dr Pravin V. Krishna, Chief of Cornea Division at the Institute. Dr Pravin’s father is a Radar scientist who worked for the Electronics Research & Development Establishment (LRDE), Bengaluru. In Defence parlance, ‘E’ is used for explosive and the second letter ‘L’ is used as abbreviation for electronics. Dr Pravin did his medical graduation at Bangalore Medical College and ophthalmology at Guntur Medical College. Living in Hyderabad for the last 19 years, he sees LVPEI as his sanctuary. 

Keep doing your work like a precision machine, in a sterile environment, serving people whom you don’t even know, is how I understand “Tapas,” as mentioned in the Bhagavad Gita, and what we can call “ardor,” in the modern world. People like Dr Nageswara Rao, Dr Tara Prasad Das, and Dr Pravin Krishna are indeed blessed souls who have been sent in this world to relieve pain. Ordinary people and those in the medical profession who opted for making money and collecting toys like big cars, diamond studded watches and gold tipped pens, would never taste the bliss these people feel.

How is a center of excellence created? And more importantly, how does it sustain itself?

For the sincere seekers of answers to these two questions, LVPEI is indeed gold-standard. First comes the land. It must be owned by the hospital. The Hyderabad campus of LVPEI is built over the land donated by LV Prasad Film Studio after their Telugu film Maro Charitra (1978) and its Hindi version Ek Duje Ke Liye (1981) proved blockbusters. Except giving his name to the institute, LV Prasad forbade his successors from interfering in it in any manner. Dr Nageswara Rao approached his non-resident Indian friends for donations in order to create the institution, like Buddha did to create the Sangha. Almost every room bears the name of the donor who helped create it. Later, Dr K. Anji Reddy, founder of Dr Reddy’s Laboratories donated a part of his fortune made in pharmaceutical industry to modernize the building. 

Next come the human resources. You need people for whom serving a patient is a “calling” and not a job. And they must be continuously trained by the best in the world and on the best of the machines. When Dr Rao was elected Chair of the Board and CEO of the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness (IAPB), he refused to relocate to London and in an unprecedented gesture, IAPB shifted its headquarters to Hyderabad for his entire term in office. Everyone arrives at the Institute at 7 a.m. and attends one hour of learning before reaching their workstations at 8 a.m. Every month, employees are acknowledged for their good work through a peer review system. 

Good medicine rests on Research. What a patient needs must be sensed right by the doctor and delivered right by adapting global technology to the local conditions. Renowned scientist, Dr D. Balasubramanian, chose to work at LVPEI after his retirement from the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology as Director. He told me that it was here that he carried out the best of his work on stem cell biology and its use in restoring lost vision. Seeing him working in his eighties is like meeting a Rishi.  

Finally and of utmost importance is the working capital that is needed to provide world-class treatment and services on a day-to-day basis. The general solution is high tariffs that have given our best hospitals the tag of “five stars.” LVPEI has solved this problem by starting a “Sight Saver” system. Here, people voluntarily pay high tariffs, just as we buy a business class ticket while travelling by air. A part of this tariff is used to subsidize the treatment of poor people, who pay low tariffs and even nothing, in many cases. Like in the aircraft that ensures safe travel for everyone, there is no difference in the quality of the treatment. However, “sight savers” are given other facilities, like the use of a good lounge or parking area near the entrance and other making-you-feel-special mannerisms. 

Why are there not many other hospitals like LVPEI? May be goodness has to always be in limited supply! Not many doctors make it their life’s mission to create institutions that outlive their lives, keeping their families away from ownership, and living and dying while doing their work and serving others. I know many people who are in the Institute since its inception. It is not that they get the highest salaries here, but they feel rich on being a part of this Institute and put this bliss at a premium. 

Books have been my companions since childhood. My father worked in the Meerut Municipality and during the summer holidays, I would get books issued from the Loyal Library at the Town Hall, near his office, in his name. I mostly read Hindi books. I acquired the skill of reading English books in 1974, thanks to Late Ved Prakash Agarwalji. He also guided me into reading philosophy. After coming to Hyderabad in 1982, I started buying books. My first purchase was Wayne Dyer’s book, The Sky’s the Limit. I paid Rs. 80 for it at the roadside book stall at GPO in the Abids area. 

General R. Swaminathan and Dr APJ Abdul Kalam took notice of my literary talent. I published my first book with General Swaminathan in 1988. It was he who seeded the idea of a biography in Dr Kalam’s mind, and this is how Wings of Fire was written and published in 1999. The book was very well received and indeed made Dr Kalam, who was already a celebrated scientist, a public persona, loved and admired by commoners across India. Twenty years later, Wings of Fire is still ‘hot’ and sells in good numbers. 

In a sense, books are like pictures of the author’s thoughts, giving the readers an everlasting vision to posterity. These days, I prefer to write blogs and columns, which are more like snapshots. However, the wish to write another timeless classic like Wings of Fire remains, perhaps to record the remainder of my readings and experiential learnings. I dabbled with the idea of doing a Carl Jung, who wrote Memories, Dreams, Reflections starting with – “My life is a story of the self-realization of the unconscious…” – but gave up as I found myself confused. 

The idea, however, pushed me to study Vedanta, first Swami Vivekananda and later, the original champion, Adi Shankaracharya. I can now see myself as a part of “One,” but I am still not thorough enough to be able to see others around me also as parts of the same “One.” I have read Greek philosophy and find myself closest to the tradition of Stoics, which I see as a secular version of the Shrimad Bhagavad Gita. 

The purpose of human life, as I understand it, is to realize God-consciousness. All the drama of the world is meant to facilitate this realization for every person. Wise people not only watch this drama but also leave behind their comments and wisdom as thoughts in the form of books to share with the people who live after them, like engineering handbooks providing standards of threads and surfaces.

A few months ago, I stumbled upon Roberto Calasso’s book, Ka: Stories of the Mind and Gods of India. The meaning of “Ka” – Who? – was indeed intriguing.  It was taken from Rg Veda Mandala 10, Hymn 121 – कस्मै देवाय हविषा विधेम, What god shall we adore with our oblation? I was amazed to read this book capturing brilliantly the entire stream of Indian thought from the Vedas to Buddha. How could an Italian know all this? Later, I learnt that before this book, Calasso had been writing about the myths of various civilizations since 1989. Ka was published in 1996 in Italian and in 1998 in English. He later wrote one more book on Indian thought, Ardor, in 2014. 

I always found it paradoxical that Vedic people performed sacrifices. Especially, the killing of a horse for the Ashvamedha Yajna seemed barbaric and indeed repulsive. However, after reading Ardor, I could understand that Vedic sacrifice was the means to acknowledge and contain violence through religious rituals and practices. As Calasso puts it, the modern gods of money and power claim scores of victims in their enterprise, which are basically sacrifices for their success.

Calasso was born into an aristocratic family in Florence, Italy, in 1941. His father was a law professor and mother, a scholar of German literature. In 1954, the family moved to Rome. Calasso worked for a publishing firm in Milan and became its chairman in 1999. He was quoted by the New York Times as saying, “…the tradition of literature is a kind of living creature, a ‘serpent of books’ winding its way through the centuries…”. Calasso indeed is using his life and work to capture the evolution of human consciousness through the ages – from the ancient to the modern. 

In February 2018, Calasso told The Hindu, “India, as you know, has been submerged with money these last years, and that has changed many things, both in a good and in a bad way. The scene has been transformed in a dramatic manner. And it’s only the beginning . . . the word ‘post-colonialism’ has produced many distorted consequences.”

To me, inequality in the world is demonic distortion. The wealthiest one percent of the world’s population owns more than half of the world’s wealth. This was possible due to technology, which was unleashed over humanity without the option of rejecting it. Celebrated author and professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Yuval Noah Harari, calls these very powerful people as Homo Deus, gods in human form. 

The way nano, bio, and info technologies and cognitive sciences are converging, in the not very distant future, privileged people, by virtue of wealth, or power, or whatever, will live long lives with enhanced cognitive skills and physical health. The poor and impoverished will face strange pandemics and perish. Would this be called a restoration of order? In Hindu mythology, the next incarnation of God is scheduled by the name “Kalki,” a humanoid, a robot with human form or characteristics. 

The other day, I was having a discussion with Prof. Seyed Ehtesham Hasnain, a renowned microbiologist, former Vice Chancellor of Hyderabad University and a JC Bose National Fellow. I remarked that the way the corona vaccine was developed in less than a year’s time, it looked like beginning of the end of the pandemic era. Prof Hasnain said, “I hope so, but better put a question mark.” Although science knows a lot about viruses now, the enigma of life is too deep and dark. The short of the long view is that despite advances in Science and Technology, we could not predict the arrival of SARS-CoV-2 and may not be able to predict the next big pandemic either. Maybe a book needs to be written connecting the scattered dots to find the pattern and capture the vision out of fast-changing frames.  

I have been blessed with the love and affection of some outstanding people, who gave me new insights and changed the way I think and feel. It all started when I arrived at GB Pant University for my graduation in Mechanical Engineering. It was indeed a transformative experience. The sprawling campus, organized as a semi-circle with the administrative building at the center, overlooking the vast farm spread up to the horizon, was surreal. Rows of trees on both sides of every road; I had never seen this quality of landscape earlier. A thicket of eucalyptus trees surrounding the campus was another wonder. I learnt that these low-altitude hybrid trees, planted in 1962 over a 100,000-ha area of Terai, indeed paved the way for the people settling down here in what was otherwise wild. 

In 1982, I relocated to Hyderabad and witnessed the creation of the Research Centre Imarat (RCI) in the mid-eighties as the missile integration laboratory. In ‘Wings of Fire’, Dr Kalam shared that on the penultimate night of the Agni Missile launch on May 21-22, 1989, when Defence Minister KC Pantji asked Dr Kalam what reward he would seek for the success, Dr Kalam asked for an urban forest of 100,000 trees in the new campus. It indeed happened. Now, three decades later, when a flight takes off from the new Hyderabad airport Eastward, flying over the RCI, nobody can miss the thick green cover in the otherwise rocky plateau of Hyderabad. 

After becoming the president of India in 2002, Dr Kalam launched an ambitious Providing Urban Amenities in Rural Areas (PURA) mission articulated by Prof PV Indiresan, Former Director, IIT, Madras. Dr. Kalam saw the migration of villagers to the city as a serious problem and developed alliances with knowledgeable people in urban planning. On July 14, 2004, President Kalam inaugurated the CII-Sohrabji Godrej Green Business Centre in Hyderabad, declared as the only building in the world with ‘platinum rating’ under the Leadership in Energy & Environment Design (LEED) rating system Version 2.0 of the US Green Building Council. Only two other buildings in the US had this rating under Version 1.0. The celebrated Hitec City of Hyderabad was taking birth and it was such a timely event.  

I was present during the tête-à-tête that President Kalam had with the charismatic Jamshyd Naoroji Godrej after the function. When Dr Kalam asked him who indeed leads urban planning in the world, the Chairman of Godrej & Boyce crisply said – Japan. The mechanical engineer who had studied at the Illinois Institute of Technology explained, “The difference between Japan and the rest of the world is that in Japan, they plan extensively.” They both developed an instant bonding. Later, he invited Dr Kalam to inaugurate the Green Building Congress on September 15, 2005, in New Delhi. It was indeed a special day, celebrated as Engineers Day in India, Sri Lanka and Tanzania, honoring civil engineer, Sir M. Visvesvaraya, on his birthday. Dr Kalam made me a part of the event.

At the Green Building Congress, Dr Kalam said, “In our country, there are 300 million people who are in the mid-income group category and about 260 million people are living below the poverty line. Each one of them dreams of having a roof above his head. In order to make their dreams a reality, we need about 100 to 150 million houses to be built in the next 15 years. Today, when we talk about Green buildings, it always means a high society building or a high-tech laboratory. This Green Building Congress should address how you would give the benefit of the Green technology to the middle class and below.”

As if hearing this clarion call, Ashutosh Pathak, who studied Civil Engineering at GB Pant University, decided to make it the mission of his life. After his master’s at IIT, Delhi, in Building Sciences and Construction Management, Ashutosh joined CPWD and was working as Director, Public Works, in the Government of Delhi. Later, he freed himself from bureaucratic tangles and joined JP Greens, the biggest urbanization project that was being rolled out in the National Capital Region. He metamorphosed himself as the angel creating a holistic living experience through the perfect amalgamation of residential, commercial, institutional and recreational facilities in a self-sustainable format.

In 2010, I met another crusader of sustainability, Dr A Mohan Rao. A Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1972, he worked for GE Power for two decades, and pioneered private sector power generation in India. Dr Rao was starting a Bioenergy project to distil out the energy from the waste of the sugar industry (Press Mud and Spent Wash) and turn the remainder into organic fertilizer. He invested his own money and created the plant at the Warana Sugar Mill. But more than completing it, he obtained all the regulatory approvals for the use of biogas as LPG grade fuel and CNG grade automobile fuel. As a perfect example of serendipity, Dr Rao found Carbanion 6-6-8 in the final residue of this process, which acts as a highly potent Biostimulator for the plant, acting as a catalyst for photosynthesis.

His success was seen by the world and Rio Grande Valley Sugar Growers, Santa Rosa, Texas, invited him to replicate his plant there. In fact, until I saw at his working table, Thomas Edison’s words, “Until man duplicates a blade of grass, nature can laugh at his so-called scientific knowledge,” I had really not understood the source from where the spring of his enthusiasm was spurting. The coronavirus pandemic has shown us the perils of living too fast, pillaging nature, and disturbing the evolutionary balance that is as delicate as it is ruthless. This balance can take lives as efficiently as it creates them. 

Then I met Govind Dholakia, the self-made diamond baron in Surat. In 1964, he arrived as a diamond polisher from his arid land in Saurashtra, the peninsular region of Gujarat, at 16 years of age. He established his own diamond company – Shree Ramkrishna Exports in 1970 – which now (in 2020) has an annual turnover of US$ 1.5 billion. When he was creating the new building for his company, he decided to go for LEED’s Gold rating and met in that process, Mahesh Ramanujam, President and CEO, U.S. Green Building Council. Govindbhai later received the USGBC Leadership Award from President Bill Clinton in November 2017 at Boston, USA. The building has recently secured LEED’s Platinum rating.

These gentlemen are indeed the finest examples of the people of the modern world for whom green is not an adjective but a verb. Whatever they do, they place Nature at the center of their enterprise. For them, the Earth is the ancestral mother of all life and they worship it with their work. Even before English environmentalist, James Ephraim Lovelock, proposed the Gaia hypothesis, which postulates that the Earth functions as a self-regulating system, Indian ethos had advocated taking care of the Earth and all the forms of life it supports. 

I vividly remember when as a child I had recovered from a bout of fever, my mother made me offer a dried coconut, cut and filled with ghee and sugar, at the anthill under a huge tree. I now understand the meaning of that ritual. It was an offering to the unseen forces that supported life. As if to decode the ancient wisdom, in 2010-11 at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a year-long seminar was organized to explore the study of the unseen.

Recently, Ashutosh completed his transdisciplinary research on Soor Sarovar Bird Sanctuary near Agra, doing a total economic valuation of ecosystem services. Ashutosh fastidiously established the various benefits that humans get from functional forest ecosystems. He cautioned against rampant and unbridled construction activities destroying such systems, especially urban and peri-urban forests. I see his work as a template for the future of habitat.