The purpose of building Palash Blossom Estate in the Ajodhya Hills was driven by my desire to find a way to escape the hustle and bustle and air pollution of Kolkata (where I am from and where I still have a house) and I was determined that as I grew older I would spend most of my time out of Kolkata, especially during the winter months when air pollution in Kolkata is at its worst. My father, who died in 2014, suffered from a number of lung related ailments during the last five years of his life like asthma, bronchitis and pneumonia and I wished to escape his fate. Though the problems of air pollution in urban India is now an internationally recognized problem and makes headline news both in India and abroad, even in 2014 the situation was not good and I could clearly see the way the trend was heading. My knowledge as a climate change and renewable energy researcher made me realize that the problem was likely get worse, rather than better, in the coming decades.
Palash Blossom Estate, as it now stands, is the product of that decision. I decided to set up a resort as a refuge for those (and that includes me) who wish to escape the travails of everyday life and find a quiet haven where they can recharge their mental batteries and recover their health, especially if afflicted by the problems of air pollution of urban India.
To know more about the subtle charms of Ajodhya Hills please look up the Tourism Information section on this website. Though the residential resort is not yet complete, I will be eventually offering four one-bedroom suites, one two-bedroom suite and a studio room for the general public. I call it an eco-resort since I am deeply committed to sustainability and wish to run Palash Blossom Estate to the maximum extent possible on solar generated electricity and rain water harvesting. This will minimize the ecological footprint of the estate.
However, I always viewed Palash Blossom Estate as more than just a haven and refuge from the stresses of urban life. My deep seated interest on the ecological crises afflicting mankind made me decide that the time had come to rethink our way of living. Even a cursory glance of the world around us will reveal that twenty-first century society is seriously threatened by various environmental and ecological problems, which include global warming, increasing pollution levels and diminishing non-renewable resources. And the greatest crisis of them all would include our sources of food. With global warming blanketing the world, many of our agricultural staples that we have relied upon for our daily diet since the beginning of the farming revolution in the Fertile Crescent around ten to fifteen thousand years ago may no longer be adequate to meet our nutritional needs. And that is when I began to realize that mushrooms may be our best friend and ally in tackling this monumental crisis. Mushrooms are the best example we can find of detritus agriculture, that is a form of agriculture which yields nutritional food from waste products, from dead, lignocellulosic material like straw or sawdust that would otherwise be burnt or throw away. Its demands on our environment are fairly minimal, requiring only a limited amount of land and water for its flourishing. To know more about mushroom and their benefits please look up the two articles, namely The Mahatma's Last Dream: Overview and Benefit of Mushrooms and Integrated Mushroom Programme at Palash Blossom Estate under the Mushroom Information section on this website. For those who wish to print out the article, there is a link to a PDF version at the bottom of these articles.
The only limitation that we face is our lack of knowledge on how to best consume these mushroom products and this is why I have I have set up the Palash Blossom Estate range of products and snacks (please look up our Food Products section on this website) which we will be first selling at Palash Blossom Shop on Palash Blossom Estate in the Ajodhya Hills and then elsewhere. As I have said elsewhere, our goal at Palash Blossom Estate is to make mushrooms an integral part of our nation's diet by opening up possibilities of using mushrooms in our everyday Indian cuisine.
Ultimately, the most important issue is to learn how to adapt to a changing world, especially a world facing three major problems, namely: (a) inadequate food supplies, (b) diminishing quality of health, and (c) increasing environmental deterioration. The critical problem facing mankind today is that the fundamental economic strategy employed over the last two centuries, namely the strategy of the Industrial Revolution, which relied on the use of fossil fuels and other exhaustible resources to make standardized and interchangeable products using mass production methods, is in its death-throes. This is caused by a faulty understanding of reality whereby humankind, or so to speak, has looked at the world around them from the wrong end of the telescope. This was most forcefully expressed by the Anglo-American economist, Kenneth Boulding in his 1966 article entitled The Economics of Coming Spaceship Earth where he talked about the need to transition from the 'cowboy economics' of the present day world to the 'spaceship economics' that would be required in the future. As he put it, "The closed economy of the future might be called the "spaceman" economy, in which the earth has become a single spaceship, without unlimited reservoirs of anything, either for extraction or for pollution, and in which, therefore, man must find his place in a cyclical ecological system which is capable of continuous reproduction of material form even though it cannot escape having inputs of energy."
To achieve this world what is needed is intelligence and compassion, leavened by pragmatism and a willingness to take on try-and-adapt methods in tackling the ecological crisis of civilization destroying proportions. For that we need, and this is what we have chosen as the motto or tag line expressing the philosophy behind Palash Blossom Estate, namely:
