WHEN our designers sit down to make the year planner that comes with the year's first issue, they look through the issues of the magazine in the past year to draw some icons from the central themes. They have an unenviable task. At Down To Earth , we begin with a disadvantage. The business of media and communication demands a certain unwritten dictionary of popular references. Such a dictionary doesn't exist with regard to matters environmental. It is a bit like trying to describe smells in words. The English language doesn't have enough terms to describe what nature's olfactometer can sense.

Take another example, that of rain. Scientists have an elaborate classification system for clouds. India's folk culture has scores of terms for different types of clouds depending on their rain-delivering potential