The life of Kasturi Desai – who died last year at the age of 55 – is worth writing about because it edifies. She lived most of her professional life in the town of Ponda (Goa) and also taught at a local college there for several years, far from the bright lights and recognition of Panjim, or Goa university. But among the community of environmentalists, she was one of its significant pillars.

Most people who become environmentalists or naturalists or nature lovers do not enter that calling because of any special qualification or discipline associated with ecology. Kasturi Desai was different. She came into the profession as a trained botanist. She was able to provide depth of field. But that qualification was not her distinguishing trait. There are hundreds of botanists but only a few who are really remembered for being exceptional. Like M.K. Janardhanam – with whom she worked as a colleague a few years – Kasturi brought her knowledge of plants and expertise to the service of the environmental movements of Goa and thereby vastly enriched them. She greatly improved our knowledge and awareness of Goa’s flora and biodiversity. She dedicated her entire life to doing so. For this alone, she should be blessed and remembered by her generation and by generations to come.

Sometimes, I think that the fate of people who live is often worse than the fate of people who pass away.

In 1978, I wrote a long article in the then newly published design magazine called Inside Outside at the instigation of its editor. The article was about the future of Goa, its fatal embrace of “development” and the dire consequences for the environment of industrialising the small union territory. I predicted then that “Goa would be finished in ten years.”

So I was completely wrong: Goa still exists today in the year 2013, but perhaps no more than an alluring historical idea. The things we associate with Goa are now increasingly in tatters: beaches, paddy fields, forests, rivers, majestic estuaries and awesome ghats: nothing has been spared. The coral reefs are damaged by mining silt. Even the once bountiful fish has disappeared from our plates. The character of the population has also dramatically changed, putting our unique identity in jeopardy. And the most painful discovery we have been grudgingly left with in recent years is how bereft we truly are of the intellectual and political leadership that could get us out of this despairing future and forever protect this land.

So I for one am glad that Kasturi Desai was at least fortunate not to have to contemplate or face this inevitable collapse of our environmental dreams.

Kasturi was a symbol of the way in which Goa attracted people and turned them into its passionate devotees (even when people who were fortunate to be born in Goa were leaving and going to other shores, not just for livelihood but often to adopt another country for life). Kasturi came from West Bengal. By the time she died, she was indistinguishable from other Goan women who walked its fields, streets and markets. She spoke Konkani fluently, but that was the external expression of her commitment to the Goan she married. In fact, she successfully translated Mahasweta Devi’s Bengali novel “Aranyer Adhikar” (The Right of the Forest) into Konkani and was awarded a Sahitya Academi prize for the translation in 2010.

Kasturi’s passion for her profession was astonishing and often when I recall my encounters with her and her work, I am forced to wonder why this passion is not found in more human beings – or their work – not just in Goa, but in other parts of the country and world as well. Without passion, work and life both have no meaning, no substance. There is nothing that Kasturi did which was not infected with passion – from collecting plastic litter in Ponda town to writing scientific reports in defence of the forests in Ponda or sand dunes on the beach. Was she inherently passionate, endowed by birth to immerse herself in the things she did or did she grow passionate as she saw the increasing clamour from builders and developers to take down Goa’s priceless natural heritage for the sake of building their own personal wealth?

To all the people who knew her outwardly, Kasturi was an academic, a college professor, a teacher first and last, who took her teaching and research so seriously she never apparently tired of it. Twenty years is a long time for someone to be teaching others about plants. I am not able to indicate, however, whether her students were able to take advantage of a committed lecturer who saw the world of knowledge within a framework that wandered far beyond the margins of the text book.

She was a botanist, trained in taxonomy. She knew plants like we might know the back of our own hands. She was some sort of an authority on the poisonous plants of the Goa region and produced studies on them. She also worked on medicinal plants. She wrote about biological warfare and about household medicines. She was fascinated by the matoli – that unique contribution from the common people who lovingly place their biodiversity at the feet of Lord Ganesha every year in thanksgiving.

My own personal encounter with Kasturi, however, was not as an academic, but as a fellow-environmentalist and a social activist. I was given the task of putting together the Goa Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan together with Goa’s Forest Department. I requested Kasturi to be part of the team. She joined without any hesitation or hang-ups and poured herself into the effort, attending meetings, taking up assignments, writing up report sections. No report or study is too difficult to write or assemble if you had people like her on the team.

Earlier, she had joined the movement to protect the Western Ghats. She participated heartily in the Western Ghats Peace March. She became a member of the Western Ghats Biodiversity Conservation Foundation.

Increasingly she became critical of conventional industry or State-inspired development strategies, especially when it involved the mass extermination of trees and vegetation. It must have been difficult for her – in those twenty years she taught people about plants – to see the same plants, trees and forests disappearing right before her eyes.

Not many people know that she was one of few academics who joined the fierce and successful agitation against the DuPont Nylon 6,6 project as well.

Kasturi assisted in several environmental litigation cases. If the Goa Foundation needed an expert opinion on the environmental impact of a project, it had only to approach her. She never said no. In all the years I knew her, she never came up with any excuse or pretended she had no time or was too busy or anything like that.

Nowadays, academics simply refuse to join debates on issues of public interest. They have allowed themselves to become “sarkari” servants, subject to all the limitations imposed on slaves tied to wages and authority. Timidity and silence – not courage – are the qualities we have come to associate with the academic world for some decades now.

Kasturi tried to convince people that this need not happen. She stimulated her students with her compelling nature, forcing them to respond, to take interest. If she was able to breach the wall of apathy and irrelevance, it is because she had the confidence and the determination to follow her own path and conviction. Nowadays, we rue the fact that we do not have people to imitate. We look for models, but these are invariably from outside the country or worse, the film industry. But Kasturi was an excellent model of what people become when they follow the dictates of the heart.

I saw Kasturi last on the day her daughter was married, at the wedding reception in Ponda. She was resplendent, happy, solicitous of her guests. There was no pomp, no show, no unnecessary embellishment or role playing. In some mysterious way, she appeared to know she had fulfilled herself. Now when I think of her, I am glad it is that last image that remains with me and which I will always treasure and keep.