Record of Column Writing

Moreshwar Bhalchandra Joshi’s column

 
published uninterruptedly for 750 days, and continuing

Pune-based senior journalist Moreshwar Bhalchandra Joshi has created a record of sorts. He is about 74 and has retired as special correspondent of Marathi daily Tarun Bharat years ago. As a freelance journalist, he has been writing a daily column for the last 26 months published by Sandhyanand, a newspaper belonging to the Aaj ka Anand group of newspapers. As of today, his column has appeared 750 times, without fail. (The number of today’s article is 750. It is actually close to 800 as the first 40 articles are not numbered as serial.)

So what is so special about it? It is the topic he covers. He writes only on cows. Are there enough subjects to write every day? Obviously, yes. Otherwise, Managing  Editor Anand Agarwal would not continue his column uninterruptedly and the readers would not continue to read the column. Joshi’s byline at the end of the article carries his email address mbjoshi31@yahoo.com and his mobile number 988177855. His mobile phone does not stop ringing for hours every morning after newspaper copies are delivered every where. The readers speak to him about types of cows the world over, quality of milk, use of gomutra (cow's urine), cow dung, their medicinal properties, increase in crop yield using cow dung manure and gomutra as pesticide and insecticide and so on. He has documented these in his articles. Feedback from his readers offers him new insights for his articles because many of them are Ayurved practitioners who have tried these for medicines and for inputs for farming.

His column in the Sandhyanad is a dialogue with farmers in Maharashtra. He took up this subject when he realised that the farmers use chemical fertilizers spending Rs 20.000 to 40,000  per acre for sugarcane and such other cash crops and less for dry farming or semi-dry farming. Thus, almost every village spends Rs two crores to Rs four crores per year for this harmful farming. As against this, the use of desi cow dung and gomutra has been proven to be a healthy way of producing crops and at negligible cost.

Moreshwar has taken up the cause of spreading the message of using the manure prepared as follows: Use ten kilos of cow dung  (of Indian desi cow, internationally called Zebu) for a one-acre farm. Add half a kilo of honey and a quarter of kilo of zebu ghee in it. Put these three elements in one hundred litres of water and spray it on one-acre crop field after the sowing and the crop has just come up. He explains that this mixture is known as amrutpani. The farmer should repeat the same dose every two months to cash crop is like sugarcane. There are other two or three requirements for such cultivation.  

Farmers of one hundred villages have followed Moreshwar Joshi’s Sandhyanand column in, there are where this type of cultivation is done on large scale using amrutpani. Almost not a single village is left in the area where this method is not practised.

He has written almost one thousand articles on zebu cow. Of these, two hundred articles are of 1000 to 2000 words besides these and 800 articles of 250 to 300 words. His experience is that the farmers find smaller articles are easy to read.

Moreshwar, a village boy from Masur in Satara district, was my classmate at the Department of Communication and Journalism, the University of Pune which we joined on July 15 in 1969. We became journalists in Pune thereafter, and have been next-door neighbours for the last four decades. Yet I was not aware that he has become such an authority on cow till he was felicitated by the Vasantrao Naik Krushi Sanshodhan Pratishthan carrying a cash award of Rs 21,000 and a citation for his documentation and journalistic writing on the cow.

Very modestly he gives credit for his newfound readership to Anand Agarwal who has asked him to limit his column to about 250 to 300 words plus a photograph. This has led to ever-increasing fan following for Moreshwar. The Managing Editor is obviously right as proved by the ABC-certified circulation figure of  2,78,839. Such a high sale is significant because the cover price is Rs seven per copy, the highest among the dailies in Pune.

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Kiran Thakur

20.07.2010