Metaphorically, I was a child of the Green Revolution, born as I was during its first decade and a witness to a homestead blossoming from a centre of sheep wool trading – the occupation before the canals arrived – to a date palm research centre, to a citrus research centre. This land serves as a fountainhead of memories involving new plantation crops featuring citrus, grapes, almonds pears, peaches, better-yielding cotton, grains and different varieties that soon became common. Even the colour of the wheat that we ate changed from dark to golden. Our diets evolved from purely milk and gram-flour-based diets, as we diversified to new vegetables and fruits that could be grown and bought. Tomatoes were unknown till a hundred years ago; white sugar and tea arrived and were later followed by aerated drinks. Yet, it is milk that epitomises home; memories of the drink that was the first and the final item consumed over the day. The smell and taste of buffalo milk still brighten the day, as it did my grandfather’s, who drank his glass of milk every night till the day he could sip no more.

The diet of produce grown locally changed seasonally. As we moved to more diversified diets, we started to eat the same food every day of the year, trucked in from thousands of miles away. That is evolution, constant evolution that I experience, as I walk around my more than a hundred-year-old house in village Panjkosi, teeming with nostalgia of a generation past; the bewilderment of the entire community getting together to hear the first radio in the village, first tractors that roared, from the black and white televisions to coloured TV sets.

Before my eyes, circular satellite TV dish antennas mushroomed on rooftops, changing the sleeping habits of millions in rural India. Those who slept soon after the sun set kept awake late into the night to watch soap operas. That generation is now parents, who frequently complain about the addictive algorithms of social media bedevilling this generation. A ban on social media platforms for those below 16, like in Australia and Denmark, is the call of the hour. The only thing that has stayed constant is the cow dung / gobar gas-powered cooking gas first installed at home in 1972.

This is the home of my childhood; of nights when we slept on the roof; of ferocious dust storms in the summer months that sent us scurrying under the cover of cotton sheets. Such dust storms come barely once in a decade now but the size of the grain is much finer and it gets through the fabric of the sheet. From hand-drawn ceiling fans to electric fans, to coolers, to air conditioners, change is constant. This is also the land that was horrifically scarred by partition; experiences that are rarely discussed in front of children but who could stop me from witnessing a dog fight between Indian and Pakistani jets? This was my home, in a village bordering Pakistan.

The mechanisation on the farm has left this generation with less muscular mass, given the reduced need for physical labour. Meanwhile, cheap, ultra-processed food packets add to obesity to the point that the second-highest-selling medication in India is for countering it. The unrestricted availability of narcotics on street corners and in village lanes, coupled with social media, are gnawing at the next generation’s core.

Most of all, home is family, where my parents and family live and farm. Only the most blessed get to live in a joint family of five generations. My son took up the baton to farm the ancestral land a few years back. Having lived through 50 years of the sustained progress under the green revolution, how could we anticipate the disaster that had been decades in the making? It is called “climate change”.

Last year, there were three extreme events in a matter of four months: a bitter frost attack in January destroyed fruits and plants, followed by an unseasonal heat wave in February. It limited the size of wheat kernels and yield and also disrupted the flowering of the next year’s citrus crop. This was followed by unseasonably heavy rains in April, damaging the wheat harvest. At the time, we thought this was once in a lifetime event, not witnessed before. How wrong could we be? This year, the area where the biggest worry had been accessing drinking water and failed monsoons for hundreds of years, was swamped by torrential downpour and the rise in groundwater level that flooded thousands of acres of arable land. Orchards of 20-25 years withered in standing water and had to be removed.

How did people react? The devastation would have broken ordinary men. Not the farmers, though, who surprisingly took it in their stride. I wonder if resilience comes from habits that we inculcate or if it is influenced by genes evolved over thousands of years of uncertainty of grazing and farming. My father, who managed the farm in his time, turns 83 this month. He had one question for my son: What are you going to grow now – will you replant the orchard or seek another crop? Sadly, the accumulated experience of generations and the knowledge from the books have not prepared my son for what will follow. He has to find the way forward with his wife. As parents, we pray that they find the path to keep the home a home, the family joint, the farm a farm, haven of warm hospitality for kith and kin. That is what differentiates a house from a home.

In our home, we still pray to our ‘kul-devta’ or family deities and worship our ancestors, lighting a earthen lamp / diya of hand-woven cotton wicks soaked in ghee in empty alcoves in the walls. Yet those that we pray to have also evolved. Old gods and forms of worship are slowly being relegated to historical narratives. TV serials of Ramayan and Mahabharat changed all that. Like our attire – a pant and a shirt – even the visualisation and narratives of Gods have become standardised, though in the midst of the continuum of change.

The question that occasionally crosses my mind is whether there will be anyone to tell our tales when we are long gone. One can either reconcile that one’s fate is preordained in the stars or, like me, believe it is the sum of our choices and sacrifices that we decide to make.