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I've been busy building a system theoretic ontology in OWL - I doubt if that'll make sense to many people - I'll explain another time - but below is a very uplifting story I came upon on the net here - it's also a great metaphor for many things.

Hope in the midst of loss

[This is the story of] the river Arvari - which till the early Nineties had dried up. Today, it flows quietly in the scorching heat, despite scanty rainfall during the past three years.

How the people of Rajasthan, which has no perennial river running through the State, brought back dead rivers - Rupa, Sarsa and Arvari in Alwar districts - to life for their own benefit is a story that needs to be told and retold, as a lesson to others in practising simple traditional wisdom.

It is a story of people who did not give up facing the environmental problems in their area - chronic drought, degraded land, distress migration and poverty. Neither did they get bogged down by the administration.

The ecosystem of the Aravalli range, which earlier sustained the region, has been ravaged since the Seventies. Monsoon run-off washed away the top soil, crops failed regularly, women trudged long distances to fetch a mere pot-ful of water, not a single blade of grass could be seen for grazing cattle, aquifers emptied. Through the Seventies and Eighties, Aravalli lost 40 per cent of its forest cover and each year, four per cent of the Aravallis was becoming a wasteland, according to reports.

The fate of the entire region was such that, recall old-timers, the richest and the poorest of the villages were the same as far as their economic condition was concerned. Ecological destruction had caused economic and social degradation. Yet nothing was more dramatic than the transformation of the villages along the banks of the dried up Arvari in the following years.

It was in October 1985, when five young men arrived from Jaipur to Kishori village in Thanagazi Block in Alwar district - declared a "dark zone" by the State then, owing to lack of water. They belonged to Tarun Bharat Sangh (TBS), and NGO. Though not quite realising it the men had actually come to the right place at the right time.  More >