The
Paddy Field, the ecosystem and the sick man.
I never bothered to work out the ecosystem built around the paddy
field.
My first impression is that they are vanishing fast due to wrong
agricultural practice and use of uncensored variety of chemicals and
fertilizers.
I used to release my excess load of guppy fish to the streams and
paddy fields but have stopped doing that since, my gut feeling is
that they would not survive.
Interestingly only water loving plant not in my water garden is
paddy.
I dismiss paddy as a highly customized and manipulated plant for
commercial use and has no value to nature except pollution and more
pollution.
It is not a natural plant in a giant ecosystem.
I natural pant does not need any human intervention.
My neighbourhood is a good example of what is happenning to the paddy fields.
There was a stretch of paddy land between the road and the railway
line.
Now there is line of newly built houses where most of the paddy
fields were.
It an offence to fill up paddy fields and built houses according
to the law but with Chinthanaya holding its forte, every little law
related to paddy cultivation was violated over the last 10 years.
In actual fact over the last 25 years.
If you neglect a paddy field it does not regenerate its ecosystem
and blossom into a water garden with water lillies all over the
place.
If there is no water it goes into a utterly useless wasteland.
One cannot make it to a proper and viable vegetable garden.
The in between is worse, they become breeding ground for various
mosquitoes not only dengue.
When we move into our present location, the mosquito menace was
immense.
We could not sleep without mosquito nets.
Then we went abroad for few years and when we returned, I made a
resolve to make our current location 80% mosquito free.
I have listed them elsewhere from education to simple techniques
(no need any repetition here) and we have achieved it.
Suffice is to say, the filling up of the paddy lands did help a
lot but now we are left with dengue.
Dengue mosquitoes thrive on urban on semi-urban environment.
My bone of contention was and is even toady is that most of the
mosquitoes breed in the cesspit.
Coming back to the paddy lands that are presently cultivated,
there are only two left.
One looked after by a woman.
The other looked after by a man who worked in the university.
I was very friendly with him and he followed a somewhat scientific
approach and the woman followed the traditional method.
The paddy land of the woman is above the paddy land of the man and
it gets the water first but this clever guy always beats her and
always cultivate paddy a few weeks before the woman.
This I have observed and was very careful not to raise my eyes and
pose a question knowing there was subtle competition.
The other subtle point is the guy gets the benefit of the
fertilizer seepage towards the latter half of the growth and it is
almost free.
These are little things one has to observe but no detective work
should be carried out.
Mind your business attitude.
This week I noticed she for the first time beat the guy up well
and truly.
So I paused a bit and went into pensive mode.
I pretended to be observing the two king fishers on the power
line.
There were two almost flightless birds (who nest on marshland left
by uncultivated paddy lands) on the paddy field that has being prepared.
I came home and decided list the animals.
The fish (hardly any), crabs, king fisher trail was obvious.
Water snakes, frogs, toads and insects was the other trail.
Mind you all the toads and frogs visit my fish tanks not civered.
I do not interfere.
This is something I missed in my little piece my contribution to the ecosystem.
But then I remembered this guy telling me that there are little
mice that damage the plant when young and also when the seeding
begins.
The fact I did not know was that this was the mouse or the rat
that spread leptospirosis.
I did not see him for few weeks.
Is he down with leptospirosis?
Is he having kidney ailment?
Those were the questions that spontaneously ran through my mind.
