Rurality rules

India has a guru -- an intriguing economic one. Professor Anil Gupta of the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedebad is one of the brains behind the Honeybee Network, “a vast repository of often clever rural inventions and village wisdom about plants and animals in danger of being forgotten in the new brand name-driven India”. The Network gives financial backing to the best ideas.

The knowledge os often collected by a Shodhyatra, a walk to find knowledge, and he is to come to Britain this spring to walk between the old industrial cities of Liverpool and Manchester.

Out of the blue

Beekeeping crops up in the most surprising places:

It's a slight metaphor in Syriana, the geopolitical thriller starring George Clooney, when wold be suicide bombers are shown to be beekeeping (carelessly). No bees starred in the film, but -- you guessed it -- a sting did.

And in Norman Mailer's new “nonsensical”, The Castle in the Forest, there are 60-odd pages (with an emphasis on odd) on beekeeping describing what happened when part of a colony mysteriously died and the rest had to be gassed in order to save the hive. Possibly a metaphor for the gas chambers, even Mailer hints that the reader might want to skip the pages. Sounds absurdist.