Samanvaya News Room

The meeting was attended among others by: Mr. Jaishankar, a software professional turned organic farmer who is adopting methods of Fukuoka in his farm Mr. Prabalan of Oasis books whose founder activist group, Poovulagin Nanbargal translated the 'One Straw Revolution' in Tamizh and Prof. Swaminathan (ex-IIT-D) who has been gifting One Straw Revolution as a philosophy book to many students and friends of his for more than a decade All the three shared their reading and experience of the book One Straw Revolution and its relevance today to many of us caught up in the modern rush based on speed and efficiency. A detailed report on the proceedings will be in our website soon.

Organic Farmer Mosanabu Fukuoka of Japan is a major inspiration for organic farmers from all over the world. His 'One Straw Revolution' was one of the books on natural farming that has been read and re-read by many who have since then embarked on natural farming themselves.  Fukuoka died at the age of 95 on 16th August 2008. A short memorial will be held in his honour at the Samanvaya office on saturday the 23rd evening between 4:30 and 6:00 p.m. Farmers, Friends and Fans of Fukuoka are invited for this gathering.

6th Samanvaya Freedom Lecture

Samanvaya represented by Ram participated in the 1-day brainstorm workshop organized jointly by IBM, NISG and Byrraju Foundation at the Byrraju Foundation headquarters in Hyderabad. The New technology, 'Listen to Believe' promises to eliminate the dependency on keyboard, mouse and monitor for web access. The simple access to a local network through voice and mobile phone is a major breakthrough. If this technology could be further thought out and made into a package of relevant applications and simple content management methods, it could definitely serve the rural community rather well. The rural ICT implementation, RICT for short is almost a decade old and such newer technologies need to build on the learnings from past mistakes (more than past successes) so as to be relevant to the locality and the user community.

Swami Vimurthanandaji, editor of Sri Ramakrishna Vijayam released the publication as part of the Samanvaya 10th Anniversary on 8th August 2008. The initial copies were received by Sri. David Barunkumar, Sri. J.Prabhakar, Sri. Jaishankar, Sri. A.L. Rangarajan and Sri. Muthuswamy of Kuthu-p-pattarai. Releasing the publication the Swamiji emphasized that it is important that more discussions take place around the works of Gandhiji.

We often get invited to talk to people about Gandhi, we go with different expectations. But, this was a different programme. A group of American scholars on a path of discovering Gandhi in India. I realized that one of the problems we often end up getting frustruated or angry whenever we talk about Gandhi to Indians is that our expectation is rather high. But in this case, we had no expectations from them in terms of either understanding and action.  If anything I was intrigued as to why would American scholars want to understand Gandhi, to me it seemed to be a scholarly adventure into a fascinating mind and visit his land to understand it better if possible. Of course, when one of them told me that she had promised to Dr. Vandana Shiva (whom they had visited earlier at the Navadanya centre in Dehra Dun) that she would never ever drink a Coke or Pepsi because of what Dr. Shiva had told her about these companies, I realized that perhaps there could be quite a few personal journeys e...