“A backbencher was one day introduced to a teacher who spoke of farmers, caste, democracy, rural India, education, Dalits – words that were selectively erased from most city bred students. Instead daily life distractions would conveniently substitute the deeper realities. After being used to having everything done for you, you just stop looking, hearing, thinking, feeling…comfortably NUMB!”

This teacher, P. Sainath was recently named as a Ramon Magsaysay awardee, for Journalism, Literature, and Creative Communication Arts, August 2007. Ekta Mittal, a former student of P. Sainath reminisces his lectures at Sophia's, Mumbai.

“One fine day the tables turned around. Getting to class a little early than usual, not bunking, penning down his perspectives, referring to them time and again, unable to move sometimes, after his lectures. Slowly thinking.

They were stories from not so far away. Droughts for some and floods for the others. Globalization. Farmers dying in debt. Mac Donald’s. Dalits burnt alive. Air conditioning. Death over land disputes. Malls. Chemicals and fertilizers. Imported food. Temples, mosques, churches. Caste. Numbing juxtapositions. It was almost impossible to find the pieces of those rose tinted glasses. There were broken. Forever. He had opened our eyes to something that was staring at our face. It was hard not to feel for this.

It was about making a choice between comfortably Numb and consciously aware. However hard the choice was, the struggle was necessary. His perspectives were sharp in its all encompassing factual explanations. Someone who was never tired of talking even after the bell went off. Someone who took his own photographs for every single article he wrote.

Another day, he recited Dalit poetry in class with a voice that still resonates with the same intensity, the expression of his eyes tightly pressed to convey what he saw, the words that he carried from there to here and now. The class had almost frozen. But we slowly tread on paths we chose.

I walked to seek all that made me consciously aware.

Did it end with the classroom? He used white space to imprint the other side of India. In one of his articles titled “So near to God, so far from Heaven,” and several others in the Wayanad series, which reported about how farmers in Wayanad, Kerala committed suicide over dispute, in debt, under pressure and out of sheer frustration.

It was one of these articles that prompted TBY to start spice tours amongst farmers in North Kerala three years before. In an attempt to promote socially responsible tourism, TBY initiated spice tours to provide an alternative source of income for small scale farmers and planters in Wayanad.