Journey to India

In my last few days in Goa ( I am in Delhi now ) I was uplifted to see some really good coverage in the national newspaper, as well as places of the environmental crisis that India is facing. There are two magazines worth reading that I know of, and probably many more: Hard News (hardnews.com) and Himal Mag (himalmag.com). India's challenges, environmental, human rights, law & order, etc. are all concisely and squarely faced. The national newspaper had a huge spread last week covering success stories of people who were fed up with the politicians, and cleaned up rivers all by themselves, and started mini revolutions of people taking action. I also met an American couple who are living in Varanasi for a year. She's a writer and he's a professor of Hindu religion. I don't have his last name handy, but David wrote a book : A River of Love in an Age of Pollution. In it he traveled the country and among other things interviewed river activists. He made a friend in Kanpur, my home town, and this fellow, Rakesh, pictured above, has given up his personal life and career to clean up Kanpur. More on him at www.ecofriends.org. I plan to follow and support the Kanpur cleanup. I had read in a November Time magazine report that Kanpur was among the ten most polluted cities in the world. This man has taken on factories, the city, but in a positive and motivating way. He has personally hauled out bodies from the Ganges to give them a proper funeral. A Sikh man in the north got so fed up waiting for politicians, that at a meeting he personally jumped into the water and starting hauling out garbage. That has now become a legend, motivating thousands, and they now have a pristine river. Good news.