Let's consider the gamut of logistics to painlessly avail of the flight from Makaibari to Tokyo. The breakdown reveals, a car ride to the airport from the garden on a tramac road. The airport infrastructure on entry, screens security checks, to the ticketing check in counter. One enters the boarding area, avails the flight to Kolkata. There is an intricate process of collection at the conveyor, take a car ride to the hotel to check in and freshen up for the next keg of the international flight.Another car ride to the international airport, followed by even more stringent checks for security, check in, immigration and boarding. Of course there is an entirely different set of logistics to circumvent on arrival at Tokyo to pass immigration/customs, followed by another car ride to the hotel.

What is mind boggling are number of personnel involved at every step, on the ground, inflight, on arrival and departures and hotels. Does one ever stop to ponder what has gone in making the car, licensing the chauffeur, pilot, building the roads, the airports, the screening machines and their operatives, et al. It is all taken for granted. Hence to make a flight, the social ramifications are very complex. An individual bestowed with intelligence and education is inadequately�equipped to understand the concepts of our social situation. This is an urban phenomena in India, which is rapidly spreading to suburbia, with rapid industrialization and swift improvement in all communication systems.

Mercifully, the rural scenario where the majority of people live is relatively unspoiled. This is because of our deep commitment to maintain an organic and natural way of growing tea in our estate, which is impacting greater and greater numbers with time. Makaibari, grows many crops for self-sufficiency, fruit, cereal, livestock etc., the surplus is the tea which we share with the world. It's a more than a single estate high end Darjeeling tea. In reality it is a magical, mystical Himalayan herb, encapsulating the spirit of Makaibari. It is a fact that the ideal elixir for all stressed urbanites in the global village today is to distress to instant bliss is with his magical cup of tea.


Prior to World War II, the vast majority of global farmlands were organic. Farmers relied on nature for their harvest, manure from their farmyard and farm livestock, and human labor to gather in the bounty. It was, hard, intense life, lived closed to the ground, and evolved over thousands of years of deep reverence and attention to the ebb and flow of natural rhythms of the natural world.

World War II dramatically�altered the face of farming in the western world. One of those ill-fated and rarely regarded influences was the desperate need for naphtha, which helped the explosives needed for armaments. Naphtha, is along chained carbon compound, which is a by-product of petroleum. Naphtha, created the atom bombs that were used over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The aftermath of the holocaust reverberates even today. It is only recently that tea areas like Yame, adjacent to Nagasaki were revived to health. The death and destruction brought an end to World War II.General Eisenhower, or Big Ike, as he was mandated popularly for his election campaign post World War II, was the supreme commander of the Allied Forces, and became the President elect/USA following his successful election campaign.

On cessation of hostilities of the war, American armament manufacturers, sitting on huge stocks of Naphtha, looked up to Big Ike for compensation, which were redundant stock, kept for manufacturing explosives. Unfortunately for all farmers, the industrialization of farmlands occurred, with the unabated use of fertilizers, pesticides, acaricides, weedicides, etc., as all agro-chemicals were all naphtha based. Bumper harvests resulted, with a tenth of the effort. In reality all farmers created their tiny Hiroshimas and Nagasakis, by bombing their farmlands indiscriminately with artificial agro-chemicals.

The myth of this GREEN REVOLUTION was blown by the publication of the Rachel Carson - book in 1957 - Silent Spring. This courageous and visionary book spawned an awareness, which took seed and gathered momentum with the organic/biodynamic movement, and eventually came to full bloom at Makaibari tea estates to pioneer these practices for the tropics in the late 1980s. The book created an awareness, that helped usher in�alternative, sustainable synergies as a counter to the unabated, conventionally oriented agricultural practices that had industrialized farming., aided and abetted by all the powerful petroleum lobby. To overcome this Petroleum Lobby's agenda needs superhuman effort and commitment. Hence it is an immense challenge to�the West as well as industrialized countries like Japan, which have�a very small percentage of its population�of farmers witch to sustainable growing methods.

Today, most developed nations have around 5% of its population directly involved in farming. In the Indian subcontinent 80% are farmers, and seventy percent harvests are rain dependent, so per se it is organic.However, these marginalized farmers are so poor they have no access of affordability for certification, and no avenues whatsoever to market their produce for a fair price.

There are 16,000 registered tea estates in India. This in contrast are organized farmlands that are affluent by contrast to their subcontinental brethren, enjoying a host of statutory�benefits for the garden residents.The pioneering efforts at Makaibari have already converted 70% of Darjeeling tea estates to organic practices, and this trend is now snowballing into Assam and the Nilgiris in South Indian tea estates. This is an excellent augury that bodes well for the marginalized farmers in their respective regions who go organic, as the mantra dawns that Eco agriculture is economically viable. This will have a great effect in neutralising the effects of global warming in the larger context.