That was the last time Magik performed together.

I stopped by the NGO I'm working with to drop off a deposit for my road travels through South 24 Parganas District this weekend and stopped to meet and chat with the director of the Society. He was great, and I learned a lot more about the organization's history and work (conversations like this are important... when I asked if the Society kept any monitoring and evaluation data I could look at the director laughed at me. "We believe in good faith," he said). The more I learn the more pleased I am that I ended up attaching myself to this particular NGO... it was founded in part by Jayaprakash Narayan, the Gandhian-Marxist freedom fighter who was one of the main opponents of Indira Gandhi, especially during the period of national emergency from '75 to '77. Narayan was also besties with Masanobu Fukuoka (who died just a few weeks ago), one of the "fathers" of natural farming, and together they championed small-scale natural and organic farming in rural India during the time of the Green Revolution, the Rockefeller and Ford Foundation-led shift towards a mainstream agriculture in India that used new "high-yielding" varieties of wheat and rice, engineered varieties that were highly reliant on foreign-made petroleum-based fertilizers and water. This pretty much spelled the beginning of the end for small farmers in India (and Mexico) as well as a new era of irrigation-intensive crops where large agriculture is one of the greatest consumers of water in India--a resource to which access is increasingly tenuous for many segments of Indian society. I could rant about the Green Revolution for hours--there's all sorts of talk about replicating the process in Africa which comes from the "rice in every bowl" rhetoric pushed by Lester Brown, etc., but I'll stop there. My point was that the work done by this NGO doesn't make me feel sick to my stomach yet, which is really saying something.