My dear fellow deshbhakts
January 01, 2018 09:50
As 2017 makes way for 2018, The Indian Express has asked me to write a New Year card in the form of an essay about what concerns you and the nation. Since I am older than most readers, permit me to begin by looking backwards.
Twenty-five years ago, Madhav Gadgil and I published This Fissured Land, a book on Indias environmental predicament, past and present. One reviewer, the British historian, E P Thompson, said he put down our book in a state of depression. Is it absolutely necessary that so much ecological writing should be so deeply depressing? he asked. Then he continued: Maybe it is, and should be. Yet, despite all exploitation and abuse, that vast area of fissured land, from the Himalaya to the tip of the peninsula, is so rich still in so many resources and species that one wonders if one might be permitted a glimmer of utopian encouragement. Might the downward drift not yet be turned around?
Read Ramchandra Guha's full column HERE
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