Stories - Millet Revival Project

6 min

Stories

How to Catch Luck in a Pot

Mukta Patil, Shirin Mehrotra, Smit Zaveri, and Taiyaba Ali

What can make a day luminous? What can make millets fun, easy even? Friendships, and a little bit of faith, it seems. Mukta Patil, editor at the Millet Revival Project gathers some girlfriends, and perspectives, at this joyous millet-centric potluck in Delhi.

12 min

A Slow-moving Crisis Below the Threshold of Disaster

Bhrigupati Singh

How do tastes and desires, social hierarchies, access to resources, and public policy intersect to create complicated lived realities? Dr. Bhrigupati Singh explores some of these questions in the context of wheat and millets through his ethnographic research in Shahabad, Rajasthan.

9 min

Stories

“What makes society, agriculture, and everything resilient is diversity”

Manasa V and Mukta Patil

Professor and scientist Dr. Ruth DeFries talks to the Millet Revival Project about the irony of millets becoming all the rage in urban areas in India, while being non-aspirational and stigmatised in rural pockets, and why farmers are still not reaping the benefits of growing them.

7 min

Stories

Demystifying Millets: A Beginner’s Glossary

Climate and Policy Lab, MRP

With the onslaught of online and offline content, we are inundated with words that we might be familiar with, but do not always understand the context in which they are used. This glossary attempts to demystify some of these terms used around millets.

6 min

‘It Tastes Like Earth, with a Bit of Tartness’

Throvnica Chandrasekar

A fermented, porridge-like ragi drink offers more than just succour on a hot summer’s day. For most communities in Tamil Nadu, it is a means of sustenance. For Valli, it tastes best when had with leftover fish curry.

4 min

Stories

Reimagining the Future of Food, Comic-style

Quicksand and University of Dundee

Future of Food, a comic produced in English and Kannada, is set in 2035. An exercise in imagination, it asks what hopeful, localised futures look like for communities—especially rural and indigenous farmers in India—who are often excluded from these imaginations because of the nature of innovation and technology.

7 min

‘अभी भी, मैं आँखें बंद करता हूँ तो मुझे लगता है कि मैं ज्वार की आत्मा को देख रहा हूँ।’

Mukta Patil

किसान और फ़िल्म निर्देशक लक्ष्मीनारायण देवड़ा मुक्ता पाटील से बातचीत करते हुए बताते है कि उनकी दादी ज्वार कैसे बनाती थी, अच्छी फिल्मों का बोली और बेझिझक होने से क्या रिश्ता हैं, और ज्वार का पॉपकॉर्न लोगों को कैसे एकजुट करता है।

7 min

‘Even now, when I close my eyes, I feel like I can see the soul of jowar’

Mukta Patil

Farmer and filmmaker Laxminarayan Devda talks to Mukta Patil about his memories of eating jowar with his grandmother, the place language and comfort have in good filmmaking, and how popped jowar corn brings people together.

5 min

Books on Food

Flour Power: Women-led Millet Value Chains Improve Local Nutrition

Saahil Parekh, Karan Shinghal, Nandini Agarwal, and Shuva Raha

Flour Power, an excerpt from ‘Millet Mantra’, narrates the story of tenacious women entrepreneurs and collectives, and how processing ragi into flour paved the way for their independence, and that of the district's to better nutrition.

8 min

Stories

‘Kutki Gets Ready Just with Dew’

Shirin Mehrotra

Travelling through Chhindwara district in India’s central peninsula, Shirin Mehrotra learns about why kutki (little millet) needs little water to grow, the most common way it is eaten, and why it has disappeared from the diets of Adivasi communities here.

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