A special gift
Dear Friends,
Over the past few years, it has been a ritual in this land to offer a special gift to readers of Agribusiness Matters on my birthday. I turn 40 today and you get 40% discount if you sign up to Agribusiness Matters community over the next three days. I hope to continue this ritual until I…well…play this game.
Carl Jung was perhaps right when he wrote “Life really does begin at forty. Up until then, you are just doing research.”
I feel incredibly blessed to live an obstinate life where I do things that are deeply meaningful to me and some where magically, a livelihood gets made out of it and all that I desire gets manifested. Few days ago, I wanted the community whom I serve to fund a very good systems change fellowship I wanted to enroll. And the community happily obliged.
That I’ve managed to play this strange entrepreneurial game over the past six years feels like an incredible miracle. A blessing perhaps. Although I’ve used identity wrappers like “entrepreneur”, “solopreneur” to make sense of what I am doing, truth be told, these convenient wrappers don’t reveal the truth. I’ve simply done things that deeply matter to me.
That’s the essential truth. Everything else is a fiction.
Few days ago, I was narrating the story of the post-sangam era poet Nakeerar to my son. He was enraptured for the story is dearest to my heart. In all these years, thanks to my adventures in acting during my childhood, this famous dialogue between Lord Shiva and Poet Nakkeerar is engraved in my memory.
Nakkeerar's story is deeply meaningful to me. He was the poet who dared to question Lord Shiva for grammatical accuracy. This was perhaps the earliest instance (2nd century CE) of speaking truth to power.
At one point, Lord Shiva reminds him that he is indeed the Lord whom he prays everyday and he better watch out whom he is criticizing. Poet Nakkeerar bravely stood his ground. Nakeerar insisted that fault was a fault even if the Lord opened his third eye and lynched him alive.
Legend goes that he was torched alive by the Lord ( as an essential part of his divine games) and was reborn at Golden Lotus lake in Madurai Meenakshi Temple. He went on to compose the famous verse called "The Gift of Anger".
Clay Shirky once famously said “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution". Influenced heavily by Jiddu Krishnamurti, I had decided not to create an institution that could compromise my ability to speak the truth about food and agriculture systems.
In my work, there is no distinction between what I do for myself and what I do for the community. Every thing I have been doing at Agribusiness Matters (be it the content I write , the community I am stewarding and consulting projects I do) is aligned towards larger system goals of improving food and agriculture systems in an age of runaway climate change. I deliberately decided to not start another company (and be an ecosystem enabler) for this reason.
In all these years at Agribusiness Matters, thanks to the independence I've earned in my work, I've strived to speak the truth no one has dared to spell out. I have earned this and I'm happy with the price I’ve paid. To live the life one dreamt of is a blessing and I can’t thank you deeply enough for enabling this adventure.
Cheers
Venky