Now that the election is almost over, I must admit I am a bit of a fanatic. Not a big one, but a small one. I follow the tyranny of reason. But reason is bound by the prevalent state of knowledge. The lady of the house is not too happy at my raising three-eighths of an eyebrow at alternative medicine and was mightily pleased at scoring a point when a new e-based toy was introduced which uses “mind power” to move things. Now on rivers, I believe I was largely right. I was very unhappy when the mighty Narmada was to be dammed with crude principles and bad data. So we modelled ten daily flows in four reservoirs and modelled groundwater aquifers. One of the modellers is now the director of an IIM. I was able to get the project the dhobi mark of my boss the late Rajiv Gandhi, a techie if ever there was one, who just couldn’t resist the lure of computerised answers to the critics of the project, so the Excel sheets would be his on any date he wanted to lambast his underlings, namely us. Readings on the water levels of a hundred piezzometers in the Mahi Narmada Doab ten days earlier? That too.

The small (fanatic) mistake lay in the details, in which the devil resides. The mistake was not what the activists said. (They were all wet. If your hydrology is good and your aquifer modelling is good, which this was, you could make mincemeat of their quibbling. It doesn’t matter for they don’t look at reason, but that is another argument. Any reasonable person would be convinced.) The problem lay elsewhere. The modelling was so good that we very accurately used up all the water for the crops, the trees and for drinking. We all forgot the obvious. Rivers also need water.

... contd.