Rice Field Paddy Field Quotes

Working really hard is what successful people do, and the genius of the culture formed in the rice paddies is that hard work gave those in the fields a way to find meaning in the midst of great uncertainty and poverty.

They don't believe in anything either. You and your like are trying to make a war with the help of people who just aren't interested." "They don't want communism." "They want enough rice," I said. "They don't want to be shot at. They want one day to be much the same as another. They don't want our white skins around telling them what they want." "If Indochina goes--" "I know that record. Siam goes. Malaya goes. Indonesia goes. What does 'go' mean? If I believed in your God and another life, I'd bet my future harp against your golden crown that in five hundred years there may be no New York or London, but they'll be growing paddy in these fields, they'll be carrying their produce to market on long poles, wearing their pointed hats. The small boys will be sitting on the buffaloes. I like the buffaloes, they don't like our smell, the smell of Europeans.

I seemed to be walking on and on forever through a peaceful, languid garden of rice paddies. This was no longer the territory of savages, but of an ancient and high civilization. Here and there farmers were plowing their fields, using water buffaloes. As a buffalo started to move, snowy herons would fly down and perch on its back and horns. But they flew away again in fright whenever a buffalo reached the edge of the field the farmer turned his plow. Once, as I was walking along, a moist wind began to blow and the sky quickly filled with black clouds. Herons were tossing in the wind like downy feathers. Soon the rain came. Rainfall in Burma is violent. Before I knew it, I was shut in by a thick spray. I could hardly breathe--I felt as if I were swimming. After a while the rain stopped and the sky cleared. All at once the landscape brightened and a vast rainbow hung across the sky. The mist was gone, as if a curtain had been lifted. And there, under the rainbow, the farmers were singing and plowing again.

But first, rice diversified and spread around the world. It is a water-loving grass that reaches up to sixteen feet in flooded fields. However, it does not have to grow in standing water. Its peculiar method of cultivation in rice paddies probably came about when people noticed healthy rice plants growing in flooded fields during the monsoon season. The

Vietnam is still, as it was thirty years ago, a poor country of rice paddy farms and sandy harbors, where fishermen cast nets from boats with eyes painted on the bows. It is overcrowded, prey to floods and sweatshops, dotted by modern cities and tiny hamlets of thatched huts with TV antennae. It is not a great capital of industry, or an international oil field or bread basket. There is nothing in Vietnam, now, that America truly needs. And there was even less thirty years ago. This country, these people, posed no real threat to us. It was a strange place to send our youth - not to learn a new culture or to enjoy the beaches, but to kill and be killed, to be maimed and to patch up the maimed. I am convinced that, to our government, Vietnam really, truly Didn't Mean Nothing.

The truth of the matter was, that whether a person did good or committed evil was rarely ever due to their inherent nature. Each person was like a plot of farmland; some were lucky, their fields sprinkled with seeds of grains, bearing an abundant harvest come autumn, paddies wafting with the soft fragrance of rice and fields of wheat dancing in the wind like waves, and everything would be good and praise-worthy. But some were not so lucky. Their fields were planted with the seeds of poppy flowers, and the spring breeze brought only the sin of intoxicated dissipation and euphoric decadence, filling the skies and covering the lands with that vile, bloody red and gold. The people abhorred it, cursed it, feared it, even as they indulged in its blissful stupor, rotted away in its filthy stench.

In other words, money isn’t a material reality – it is a psychological construct. It works by converting matter into mind. But why does it succeed? Why should anyone be willing to exchange a fertile rice paddy for a handful of useless cowry shells? Why are you willing to flip hamburgers, sell health insurance or babysit three obnoxious brats when all you get for your exertions is a few pieces of coloured paper? People are willing to do such things when they trust the figments of their collective imagination. Trust is the raw material from which all types of money are minted. When a wealthy farmer sold his possessions for a sack of cowry shells and travelled with them to another province, he trusted that upon reaching his destination other people would be willing to sell him rice, houses and fields in exchange for the shells. Money is accordingly a system of mutual trust, and not just any system of mutual trust: money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised. What created this trust was a very complex and long-term network of political, social and economic relations. Why do I believe in the cowry shell or gold coin or dollar bill? Because my neighbours believe in them. And my neighbours believe in them because I believe in them. And we all believe in them because our king believes in them and demands them in taxes, and because our priest believes in them and demands them in tithes. Take a dollar bill and look at it carefully. You will see that it is simply a colourful piece of paper with the signature of the US secretary of the treasury on one side, and the slogan ‘In God We Trust’ on the other. We accept the dollar in payment, because we trust in God and the US secretary of the treasury. The crucial role of trust explains why our financial systems are so tightly bound up with our political, social and ideological systems, why financial crises are often triggered by political developments, and why the stock market can rise or fall depending on the way traders feel on a particular morning.

In the nineteen sixties and early seventies students wore buttons and headbands demanding equal rights for women, blacks, Native Americans and all oppressed minorities, an end to the war in Vietnam, the salvation of the rain forests and the planet in general. [...] College students boycotted class, taught in, rioted everywhere, dodged the draft, fled to Canada or Scandinavia. High school students came to school fresh from images of war on television news, men blown to bits in rice paddies, helicopters hovering, tentative soldiers of the Viet Cong blasted out of their tunnels, their hands behind their heads, lucky for the moment they weren’t blasted back in again, images of anger back home, marches, demonstrations, hell no we won’t go, sit-ins, teachins, students falling before the guns of the National Guard, blacks recoiling from Bull Connor’s dogs, burn baby burn, black is beautiful, trust no one over thirty, I have a dream and, at the end of it all, your President is not a crook. [...]Mechanics and plumbers had to fight while college students shook indignant fists, fornicated in the fields of Woodstock and sat in.

Cowry shells and dollars have value only in our common imagination. Their worth is not inherent in the chemical structure of the shells and paper, or their colour, or their shape. In other words, money isn’t a material reality – it is a psychological construct. It works by converting matter into mind. But why does it succeed? Why should anyone be willing to exchange a fertile rice paddy for a handful of useless cowry shells? Why are you willing to flip hamburgers, sell health insurance or babysit three obnoxious brats when all you get for your exertions is a few pieces of coloured paper? People are willing to do such things when they trust the figments of their collective imagination. Trust is the raw material from which all types of money are minted. When a wealthy farmer sold his possessions for a sack of cowry shells and travelled with them to another province, he trusted that upon reaching his destination other people would be willing to sell him rice, houses and fields in exchange for the shells. Money is accordingly a system of mutual trust, and not just any system of mutual trust: money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised.

Masters are under no cosmic compulsion to limit their residence.” My companion glanced at me quizzically. “The Himalayas in India and Tibet have no monopoly on saints. What one does not trouble to find within will not be discovered by transporting the body hither and yon. As soon as the devotee is willing to go even to the ends of the earth for spiritual enlightenment, his guru appears nearby.” I silently agreed, recalling my prayer in the Benares hermitage, followed by the meeting with Sri Yukteswar in a crowded lane. “Are you able to have a little room where you can close the door and be alone?” “Yes.” I reflected that this saint descended from the general to the particular with disconcerting speed. “That is your cave.” The yogi bestowed on me a gaze of illumination which I have never forgotten. “That is your sacred mountain. That is where you will find the kingdom of God.” His simple words instantaneously banished my life-long obsession for the Himalayas. In a burning paddy field I awoke from the monticolous dreams of eternal snows. “Young sir, your divine thirst is laudable. I feel great love for you.” Ram Gopal took my hand and led me to a quaint hamlet. The adobe houses were covered with coconut leaves and adorned with rustic entrances. The saint seated me on the umbrageous bamboo platform of his small cottage. After giving me sweetened lime juice and a piece of rock candy, he entered his patio and assumed the lotus posture. In about four hours, I opened my meditative eyes and saw that the moonlit figure of the yogi was still motionless. As I was sternly reminding my stomach that man does not live by bread alone, Ram Gopal approached me. “I see you are famished; food will be ready soon.” A fire was kindled under a clay oven on the patio; rice and dal were quickly served on large banana leaves. My host courteously refused my aid in all cooking chores. ‘The guest is God,’ a Hindu proverb, has commanded devout observance from time immemorial. In my later world travels, I was charmed to see that a similar respect for visitors is manifested in rural sections of many countries. The city dweller finds the keen edge of hospitality blunted by superabundance of strange faces.

Shanghai, my home, my city, was no longer mine after a plague of wars; it belonged to the foreigners from many countries. The British, having defeated us a century ago, controlled the rich and prosperous Settlement with the Americans, and the French built their villas in the Concession. The Japanese, armed with terrifying fighter planes and rifles, were the newly minted victors. They had established their own domain for many years in the Hongkou district, north of the Huangpu River, where they played baseball in the park and staffed hospitals with their women and soldiers from Japan, and now they marched on our streets and slept in the homes they’d seized. We Shanghainese, the conquered, were powerless. Many lost their homes in the Old City, south of the Settlement; only a few lucky ones, like my family, got to keep their ancestral homes, and many others crowded under the shadows of the art deco buildings or scattered around the rice paddies and mosquito-infested fields in the north and west. Segregation

To my amusement, a traffic sign prohibited ox carts from passing by revolutionary sites, out of fear that the oxen would defecate close to these venerated monuments. These strong, resilient, and patient animals weren’t merely shuffling goods along roads, but because of the limited mechanization and shortage of fuel they also plowed rice paddy fields. I got the impression that, unlike in China and Vietnam where every year is the year of a different animal, in North Korea every year was the Year of the Oxen.

On my second trip to Việt Nam, right after I graduated college, I visited my cousin, one of Aunt #1's many sons, who had a rice paddy. My new red leather New Balance sneakers got a little muddy as I squatted down to pull a thin green blade of grass from the earth. At the bottom was a very tiny grain of rice. No wonder Bà Ngoại would lose her shit every time I didn't finish my bowl. It was literal backbreaking work to get it from the field to the dinner table.

In the early 1900s, Soviet agronomist Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov discovered a strange phenomenon: weeds in crop fields sometimes begin to look like the crop themselves. Original rye plants, he realized, looked nothing like the plump grain that by then was a staple crop in Russia. It was a scraggly, inedible weed. Rye, he realized, had performed an incredible trick of mimicry. Early wheat farmers, weeding by hand, pulled out and discarded the rye-weed to keep their planted crops healthy. So, to survive, a few rye plants took on a form more similar to wheat. Farmers still extricated the pesky rye, when they could spot it. This selective pressure molded the rye to evolve to trick a farmer’s discerning eye. In this case, only the best impressionists survived. Eventually, the rye became so excellent a mimic that it became a crop itself. “Vavilovian mimicry” is now a basic fact of agriculture.* Oats are a product of the same process; they also got their start mimicking wheat. In rice paddies, the weed known as barnyard grass is indistinguishable from the rice at the seedling stage. Recent genetic analysis found that this weed began to change its architecture to match the rice about a thousand years ago, when rice cultivation in Asia was well underway. In lentil fields, common vetch is a ubiquitous weed that masterfully redesigned its previously spherical seeds to be the same flat, round disc shape as lentils themselves. In that case, the plant needed not to trick a farmer’s eye but rather make itself impossible to eliminate from the mechanical threshing process. Winnowing machines simply could not tell the difference between a vetch and a lentil. Weed genomicist Scott McElroy argues that modern herbicide-resistant plants are actually just engaging in Vavilovian mimicry at the biochemical level; they are mimicking the crop plants that have been conveniently engineered to tolerate the herbicide.

I put my phone away and stare out the window at Japan's countryside, watching the scenery zip by at 320 kilometers per hour. Mount Fuji has come and gone, as have laundry on metal merry-go-racks, houses plastered with party signs, weathered baseball diamonds, an ostrich farm, and now, miles of rice paddy fields tended by people wearing conical hats and straw coats. Japan is dressed in her best this morning, sunny and breezy, with few clouds in the sky as accessories. It's the first official day of spring. Cherry blossoms have disappeared in twists of wind or trampled into the ground. Takenoko, bamboo season, will begin soon.

Iran was the glamour and glitz of Tehran, Shiraz, Esfahan. (...) she was struck by the high fashion and opulence of the cities. Parties overflowing with champagne. Women dressed in the latest Paris haute couture. But when Louise left Iran in search of horses, the landscape quickly changed from high rises to the high peaks of the Alborz Mountains, and overflowing rice paddies replaced champagne parties. (...) This was Persia. Roads that ended in orchards. Mountains rising and rivers tumbling in white and blue. All shades of green contouring farming fields and jagged peaks. (...) Iran was politics; Persia was poetry.

your paddy ridden field in baishak is my soul’s stamp – not the heart’s in the winter fog i exhale smoke - not a cigarette's in bed bereft of a woman i masturbate early in the morning in whose tummy will my child arrive one for which i will provide two morsels of rice? without a party flag i have been surviving without the love of a woman i have been surviving in order to listen to rabindranath’s songs at twelve thirty in the afternoon sun i have been surviving no i never wanted to be rabindranath never ever i have never wanted to love sumita never ever had never wanted her body have never wanted mita’s body had only wanted her love but nothing happened to me but of course the khan army in bangladesh the US mines from the coast of tonkin and the CRPF hiding behind the sand bags in kolkata have left the china nixon treaty has been signed white black America has sent

Marita doesn't need a brand-new school with acres of playing fields and gleaming facilities. She doesn't need a laptop, a smaller class, a teacher with a PhD, or a bigger apartment. She doesn't need a hight IQ or a mind as quick as Chris Langan's. All those things would be nice, of course. But they miss the point. Marita just need a chance. And look at the chance she was given! Someone brought a little bit of the rice paddy to the South Bronx and explained to her the miracle of meaningful work.