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SriRangaSri List Archive: Message 00016 Jun 2004

 
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              (continuing from Part 1)
------------------------------------------------------
Dear friends,

Since "annam", Food, is recognized to be the ultimate
source of all Energy, the Upanishad exhorts us to take
great care in conserving and using it wisely. There
are 3 great commandments that have been issued in this
regard:

       (1) "annam na nindhyAth!"

       (2) "annam na pari-chaksheeta!"

       (3) "annam bahu kurveeta!"

                (Taittiriya Upanishad: "brghuvalli")
(meaning):

        "Thou shalt not abuse Food!"
        "Thou shalt not discard Food!"
        "Thou shalt grow Food in abundance!" 

Tragically, we live today in a world where all 3
Upanishadic commandments are observed more in the
breach than in obedience. 

The clearest example of large-scale abuse of Food one
can find is in the industrial rearing of cows, sheep
and goats meant for slaughter far more than for dairy.
Cows are reared on modern, "scientific" methods of
dairy-farming. Instead of letting cows to natural
pasture, they are fed with artificial steroidal diet
to boost tissue-growth and body-weight. Way back in
1995, there was a worldwide disaster called the "mad
cow disease" which was a direct result of industrial
dairy-farming. Thousands of cattle afflicted with the
"mad-cow" disease were forthwith slaughtered and
destroyed... It was Man who had mindlessly abused an
important Food-source of the world but blamed the
insanity of it all on poor cows. It was a brutal
violation of "annam na nindhyAth!".

Early this year in 2004, close to 2 million chickens
raised in poultry-farms across countries such as
China, Thailand and Taiwan, and meant for sale to
worldwide fast-food retail franchisees like
MacDonald's and KFC, were all thrown into incinerators
and destroyed whole-sale. Reason? Because they were
found to have contracted a deadly epidemic called
"bird-flu". Once again, this was a direct result of
greedy, profit-driven, industrial approach to
poultry-farming. Two million poultry were farmed
mindlessly and then slaughtered equally mindlessly...
This in a world where 2 million children are known to
suffer from severe malnutrition every year! There
cannot be a more glaring example of "annam na
pari-chaksheeta!" in this world!

In the late 1980s and early-1990s, in the coastal
districts of Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala,
Karnataka and Mahrashtra, there was a craze amongst 
farmers to switch from cultivating paddy to prawns.
They saw there was far more profit to be made from
intensive-farming of prawns on their fields and
exporting them to US, Europe and Japan than in growing
rice and selling it to the Government of India. The
result was a dangerous decline in food-stocks in the
country's warehouses not to mention environmental
degradation of some of the most fertile coastal-belts
of rural India. This was a case of farmers getting
more excited about "greenbacks" than about "green
revolution"... and it was a grim reminder of what
happens when Man does not abide by the Upanishad
dictum: "annam bahu kurveeta!".      
    
                ************
              (to be continued)

Rgds,

dAsan,
Sudarshan





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