India, May 31 -- "It was a hard slap in the face," says entrepreneur Manjula Gandhi Rooban.

Her start-up, MangoPoint, works to improve mango supply chains. The "slap" came at Fruit Logistica, the world's premier produce trade fair, in Berlin.

"A representative of one of Europe's top food merchants visited our stall and said, 'India has some of the best-tasting mangoes in the world. There is no doubt about that. But what you're giving your population is just poison'," Rooban says. He was alluding to the vast amounts of pesticide applied to mango trees, often with dubious benefit.

We need the slap, because few Indians - past and present - are untouched by the mango. Think of the chaos unleashed in Lord Shiva's household, when the divine ...