Wisdom comes in shades of grey I always joke. But it is increasingly coming through men in saffron. I got a call at 9 pm for dinner and conversation from a saint. Swami Ravikant Pathak, Prof of sustainability from the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. He has been a face on zoom calls for me and I decided to look up my junior from IiTB chemical engineering for a few minutes.
But as is often the case – it ended up as a long meeting that went on into the wee hours of the morning. The key takeaways are absolutely fascinating:
1. Water is not just a base of life. But water has life of its own. Just because all water is H2O – chemically speaking – all water is not alike. The water of the Ganges at Gangotri is not the same as that extracted by Gates Foundation from sewage. The angle at which the hydrogen ions link is different. The way to extract drinking water from sewage is to feed it to plants and then extract the water from the juice. Or avoid mixing water with urine and solid human waste. It is something that Srinivas Rachakonda actually does at Prakriti Prerna with urine becoming urea / ammonia and solid waste becoming solid fertiliser. The STP model is like mopping the floor instead of blocking the leak. The toilet has to be redesigned fundamentally. First it was western toilets – and now they want to use the same principle for humongous data centres.
2. Water is considered free and misused in all western technologies – thermal power plants for example. Each kWh of power consumes 1.5 litres of water. The reality is that water and coal can be used differently in a power plant. In fact a lot of the pollution caused by coal can be prevented if the water cycle is built differently.
3. We have timeless wisdom and we have recent technology masquerading as science. When science and timeless wisdom clash – or are inconsistent – it is always timeless wisdom that wins. I recall super ayurveda Vaid Deepika Gunawant telling me that the Ayurveda classics have never been wrong in fifty years of practice. And the western medicine theories are rarely right eventually. Finally the Nobel prize went to concepts like fasting. Shantaram Kane and Christina W. brought it out brilliantly in the book Ayurveda Revisited.
4. Water comes free at our doorstep every year transported over continents. We need to respect it, protect it, conserve it and restore it.
5. Water has a life. It responds to music, to mantras, to tantra. We need to study this more.
As we all move to the final act for revival of VikramShila Mahavihara in the land of the Buddha – Bihar. The concept of centres of excellence needs to take a leaf from the Fraunhofer Institute.
Swamiji agreed to guide us to set up a Water University and Water Museum with help from Padma Sri Umashanker Pandey.
The Mahavihara as we conceive it is a university of universities. And water is probably the first area that can benefit from ancient wisdom and deserves a Research University of its own.
