John Elkington

Charcoal Richard, Amy, Azita, Rohini, me Selco awards Amy interviews Chitra Vishwanath at Biome Solutions My tent – the morning after Someone else on a journey as we leave

What a relief Bengaluru (Bangalore) is after Mumbai, with abundant signs of better urban management. We fly in on Jet Airways 2112, then make the long trip into town to see Rohini Nilekani – and learn more about her various initiatives, among them Arghyam, the India Water Portal and Pratham Books. Lovely to see her again and to see how her team is growing and her agenda evolving.

Next we headed over to another of my favourite social enterprises, SELCO, to see Harish Hande and his colleagues. I really like their pragmatic approach to appropriate solar energy. For more details, see here. Then we headed across in the dark to see Chatri Vishwanath at Biome Solutions, where we had a lovely informal supper with him and his team.

Afterwards, very late, we were driven into town to a top-flight hotel, only realising at the last moment – and after some 45 minutes of driving – that we were booked into a hotel near where we had started. So we retraced our steps, finally turning off onto a side road that became progressively more pot-holed, and where it seemed that the driver was having to steer around cows in their farmyards, while my heart progressively sank. Finally, we arrived at the Olde Bangalore Resort & Convention Centre, where it turned out that we our bookings had been switched to the original hotel we had arrived at an hour or so previously.

Too tired to retrace our steps yet again, we checked in – only to find that we were sleeping in tents, albeit ones appropriate to a very up-market African safari, with TVs (on which at least one of the team watched the World Cup ) and showers. I went to sleep with the sound of dogs howling, planes roaring overhead, and a rat or chipmunk gnawing at something under the platform on which my tent stood (I recalled my father saying that when he was in India in WWII he was kept awake by the sound of rats crunching their way through cockroaches).

The one thing to be said about it all was that the morning light gradually illuminating the fabric of the tent was lovely – and I prefer waking to the tropical dawn chorus rather than an alarm clock, even if it is several hours before I would normally fall out of bed. Compared to previous tented nights I have spent – including one with a grumbling appendix in Wales aged around 13 or 14, and another in France in 1970 where we pitched our tent atop a nest of the most vicious ants I have ever come across, that got inside our eyes and even more sensitive places – this was tented heaven. Biome Solutions had helped design the place, which is – or is next to – somewhere called Utopia. Hmmm.

Bandh clears the roads Bridge and skyline After the guests (or most of them) had gone

We are in India working on a new project with Bayer MaterialScience – and spend the morning at their Mumbai offices, hosted by Stefaan Gerlich. Later on, we do a teleconference with Kishor Chaukar of Tata Industries, who I know as a fellow member of the Board of the Global Reporting Initiative. We had intended to meet face-to-face, but the nation-wide strike (or Bandh) today makes travelling to some parts of the city difficult – or impossible.

In the evening, after the Bandh has wound down, we head across town to a dinner organised by Rajni (Bakshi) and hosted by Manjeet Kirpalani, who used to be the bureau chief of BusinessWeek, and is now co-founder of Gateway House, a fascinating new think-tank. Rajni’s new book, Bazaars, Conversations and Freedom, is available from Amazon, here.

Manjeet is on the far right in the final photograph above, while Richard Northcote and Azita Owlia of BMS, our companions on this trip are respectively far left and third from the left. Amy is in the pink – if I can trust my Leica. I’m looking rather formal. Outside, it was raining heavily. A wonderful welcome to this extraordinary city, happily at one remove from the agitations of today’s Bandh.

Glencot school photo, early 1960s

Was sent this photo today by Sam Hunt, who lives in Somerset, showing the denizens of Glencot preparatory school, near Wookey Hole, sometime early in the 1960s.  He is third from right, third row; my brother Gray, who would eventually become Head Boy, eightth from the left, front row; and I am seventh from right in the back row.

The school teetered between periods of intense learning (which I badly needed after weak schooling in Ireland and Cyprus) and, alternately, Harry Potter, Gormenghast and Lord of the Flies.

The headmaster, shown here with the adults, the Anthony Eden face and pocket handkerchief, was eventually committed to an asylum – which would have come as no great surprise to those of us who he routinely subjected to canings that wouldn’t have been out of place in a prisoner of war camp. But he also taught me a huge amount in key subjects, so I feel a considerable debt of gratitude to him, too. Complex.

Slum with a view – of how the elite lives Amanda and Amy Gate of India (detail) Equine illuminations  

Flew in to Mumbai today with Amy (Birchall) on flight 0199, bringing to mind the Beatles and Back in the USSR, though this was BOAC’s successor, the embattled BA. And Russia’s influence on India is way less these days than it was the Sixties. We are staying at the swish Renaissance Mumbai Conference Centre Hotel – where the view from my room, when I swish back the curtains, and fittingly perhaps, turns out to be of satellite dishes, skyscrapers and a somewhat cheek-by-jowl slum.

Delightful meeting with Rajni Bakshi, a long-standing friend, and then Amy and I head south by taxi to the Gate of India area, to see Amanda (Feldman), recently an intern with Volans – who also arrived this morning to start on internship with Tata. The Gate was the first landing point for many who came to India from Britain, but I found myself recalling the last British troops – the First Battalion of the Somerset Light Infantry – passing through the Gate from the landward side in 1948, the year before I was born. Despite the fact that I was born post Imperial India, I have always felt both a profound connection to – and responsibility for the state of – the country.

Indeed it does: hoarding Jaguar 1 Jaguar 2 Jaguar 3 Harrier, with feathering pattern on wings Feathering on Assyrian beast from Nimrud Nereids, I think Taking flight: Doug Miller 1 Taking flight: Doug Miller 2 Incoming: Kecia and Alex

Weird concatenation as I write this: our new neighbour is laughing her woefully irritating laugh and, at exactly the same time, a magpie is making its grating sound at the bottom of the garden. The two have a great deal in common, though on balance I infinitely prefer the magpie.

A fairly fractured week, ahead of flying to India this evening, involving a mixed bag of meetings and events, plus finishing off a range of writing tasks. Yesterday, though, I got to the end of a series of tasks and found I had nothing immediate, so Sam and I took off for the Tate Britain, to see the Henry Moore exhibition. Loved some of Moore’s notebook pages – and adored the final selection of four great reclining figures carved from elm.

On the way in to the Tate, we were very taken with the Harrier jump-jet suspended from the roof – and the Jaguar fighter burnished to a shine and up-ended on the floor. Astonishing sculptural effects achieved by the artist, Fiona Banner. Initially thought the patterning on the Harrier’s wings was the result of vortices in flight, but then seemed much more likely that they were painted on. Today, I was looking again at the giant Assyrian human-headed winged lion statues in the British Museum – and was struck by the similarity with their feathering.

This evening, Elaine and I took Alex and Kecia Barkawi at the Court Restaurant in the British Museum. Lovely evening, with choral concert under way alongside the Elgin Marbles. An opportunity to show Alex, who is half-Egyptian, the extraordinary Rosetta Stone. Found myself comparing the survival of what those long-ago Egyptian hieroglyphic carvers had achieved with the unintelligible scrawls that the Harrier and Jaguar would have left in the skies during their flying days.

Earlier in the day, I had headed across to SustainAbility, for a meeting with Geoff, Gary and Doug Miller of GlobeScan, to discuss various possible co-ventures. It has also been a very busy week at Volans, with a steady stream of visitors passing through, the sofas occupied much of the time. And an interesting moment more or less mid-week when the various elements of the work we are doing suddenly jumped to a different level in the collective brain. Pregnancy pressing in on two fronts at the moment, but considerable progress being made.

But have been reading the extraordinary book Poseidon’s Steed: The Story of Seahorses, by Helen Scales, as I have beetled around the city by Tube – with my cycle in for a major service these past two weeks. (The nereids I photographed in the British Museum were mythologically linked to Poseidon.) And the scale of the damage Helen Scales reports to the ecology of our oceans and seas has left me quite depressed about the prospects for anything like sustainability beneath the waves – with the appetite for marine life growing furiously and much of that demand in parts of the world where the broader environmental agenda has yet to strike root.

I remember my sister Caroline being given a dried and glazed seahorse mounted on a rock in Eilat in 1959, the only time I have visited Israel. At the time I was excited to see the creature; now it’s hard not to feel that the impending extinction of so many seahorse species is an ecological form of the writing on the walls at Belshazzar’s feast, foretelling the fall of the Babylonian Empire.