down the drain

where does our water come from? where does it go? can the Yamuna ever be a river again? These are some of the questions which led me to explore traditional water systems in the country as well as looking at a direction for our metropolises of the day. Focussing on Delhi, the pretext is that we actually get enough rain water to meet our needs, yet ever increasing large scale projects are endlessly under construction, I smelt a rat . . . decentralised solutions, which are small scale, community managed and cater to the immediate locality obviate the need for transportation and drastically reduce the footprint of a community, but there is little scope for large scale corruption . . thus the saying we need a 1000 1000$ projects, not a million $ one!

the new delhi graffiti

teeming with uncertainty
the point sharp yet unsteady
no more than eternity
palms will weld the soul to me

shock so gentle bullet proof
mean to mingle be va koof!

The space I inhabit is wide and free

flipping from sunny to desultory

encased in caring possibility

makes me wonder dream then be

if space needs bounds just to exist

and infinity lies in my closed fist

what shackles then do i resist

for this is one train that just can't be missed

nose to the grind

punctual swift

help me unwind

get on my drift

time out of mind

sands gently shift

oscillate slow

three one two three

up the tempo

and its melody

minds eye window

have a look see

of them paths breaking through my wall

muddle my world engage it all

singed finger tips sculpted rationale

some call it mayhem others gall

time it will tell as i enthrall

rock or rocket fly or fall

we won

no biggie . . it actually felt thataway . . but it was some grit there . . crazy . . :)

we DID

kudos to dhoni for coming up the order. just what the doctor ordered!

will we or won't we

on the brink of inking in the 2011 deep into the psyche of a nation. the team selection seems spot on. we're batting second, that's a good thing. love to see india chasing, even though the record isn't so great. but they say the ball will swing a bit. go msd!

i know its trouble
when i fall
from frenzied race
to steady crawl
the urgency
which should have stilled
seems just to age
and strike a chill
make not that urge
still not emerge
distant traces
fabled word
dream in fragments
shatter proof
maybe madness
coming through

the cajon in action

Cajon jam with assorted grinders and drills by emni

cajon making at asim's workshop

purring didj's

This whole vibratory deal may be specific to neuron health and as possessors of a few billion of the suckers humans might be well disposed to 'purr' occasionally. What better way to do so than with a Didge. It's a thought.

dawn

the first day of the rest of my life
dawns so crisp and chill
my sixth sense it brought it on
was never one to dwell
idly on coincidence or thoughts so jumbled that
they come at you in saw tooth waves
and test the mettle well
clinging yet to sliding scree
i guess its just who's me
i can't no more though
play the game
nor run this farce till free
a day of joy
illumination
the union of true love
makes good back ground to test the tale
of one clearly unsound
the rest though shines
it makes my path
it draws my every curve
the algebra, or the quirks they play
moments jump time stills
obsessive yet a mellow me
wants to fight stability
no longer for the fear it holds
but for the misery
beats will save me tune will kill
the melody instills . . .

resonance

ever since i started playing a didj the significance of resonance has suddenly become a striking reality for me. I have played instruments ever since i found my first . . probably a pot, or my dad's guitar. Maybe a dhol at some wedding or at a lok utsav at tilonia . . a colourful childhood i have had the fortune of having . . but resonance it took an aboriginee instrument to make it real for me . . not to mention a new york busker who introduced me to the concept. didjeridoos i have known for some time . . having frequented the israeli destinations (read tourist spots) of india . . out of lack of option trust me . . i have seen them for quite some time . . but not being well versed in wind instruments, the flute being the only one i had flirted with previously . . . i guess i thought it was outside my domain. also hanging around hippy tourists playing the didj never really felt attractive. though amar would vouch that it gets you laid ;) none the less . . when i actually made the cylinder resound and that bass boom reveerberated the room to its roots, i knew i ha hit on a discovery . . not an invention, a discovery . . that's for me the essence of the beauty of the didjeridoo. at asim's installation, amar suggested that we should make a didj as fate would have it mike arrived to couch surf, i got my tabla skins changed after like more than a decade so musically inclined, we hollowed out a bamboo at the installation (it was a bamboo installation, so there was a wide selection) and he blew it and my life changed . . that's the beauty of life :) so resonance . . .
. . googling it led me to this interesting counter word . .

Sonorant

apparently vowels, l and m sounds are sonorant, this means there is no interference in the airflow through te mouth. so they are pure resonant sounds modulated with the mouth cavity and the positioning of the tongue . . i guess i am rediscovering or discovering for the first time that i have a mouth cavity . . no actually, i click and whistle, so i figure i k=have played with it before but the didj really makes it so much louder :)

so . . . resonance . . i know from playnig the guitar that the length of the string is the wavelength of the sound wave and you can make harmonics which correspond to octave shifts as well as a couple of other ones which don't really fit into the western division of the octave. so i figure that the frequency with which my lips buzz (that is pfff's per second or hz) is the same as the length of my didj . . well not the frequency, the wavelength, but they must have something to do with each other . . let me break it down . . you have an amplittude, a wave length and a frequency . . . ok this is now going to need research which dhoni is preventing me from doing as india seems set to make 400!! so next up :)

how much rain do we have anyway?

We have one of the rainiest countries in the world, even in the arid part where delhi lies, it rains just over 2 feet a year. The catch is that it comes all at one time of the year. But if we stored this water, is there enough? A simple calculation taking the area of the city and dividing by the number of people will give us the area per person. With 1483 sq km and a population of around 15 million. We get almost 100 sqm per person. At the annual rainfall this gives us 65,000l per person per year. at the dub norms of 135lpd the amount required is 49,275l . . so we're in the green with quite a margin.

bhopal 2011

Bhopal

February 11

By the banks of the motia talab looking onto the tajul masjid, the dhobi‘s furiously pounding away at the ghat, the constant sound of the horns varying ever so slightly in their tone when say a truck passes by can almost be likened to the drone of a tanpura over the fabric of the city as it cascades out of reach below to the new city of Bhopal. In the Benazir college building, an old old building complete with stained stained glass wooden floors and strangely indo Islamic cornices and brackets, is the perfect setting for a conference on Bhopal’s most persistent and serious urban issue. I talk of none other than the disastrous gas leak from the union carbide factory in 1984. I was five years old then and oblivious to both Bhopal and the gas tragedy, but its unthinkable that nothing has been done about the place even till today. The chemical plant still stands, or as much of it as has been able to hold out against the weather over the decades, poisonous chemicals leech into the ground, the people living near the site who lost many near and dear ones all those years ago are still living in toxic waste, breathing and drinking it in.

The disaster site is really a beautiful place, an oasis in a filthy crowded city. The lack of human access has created a haven for the plant and animal kingdom. An eerie kind of a silence, through which the occasional owl hoot competes with the distant locomotive, for the perfect resonant pitch. I did the unadvised and climbed the monstrous MIC tower, though the view and sound from the top was awesome, a swarm of bees decided that I was not a welcome guest. I have seldom run so fast or so purposefully out of a place before as far as my memory serves me. Not without the complimentary dozen or so stings which serve as a fitting reminder that the site has a life of its own!

The daily review is all set to start . . . now’s when I find out what’s happening in this quaint lakeside urban consortium . . . well they’re all a bit obsessed with the idea of a memorial, and stake holders seems to include DOW, its all a bit confusing, maybe I need to take a closer look. On the face of things though there is very little talk about much outside the site or any real involvement of the communities. There was however a talk by Jeet Iype who has designed the Sambhavana health care centre cum community centre just outside the factory, which I was to see today if it wasn’t for the dratted bees. The institution has taken on the role of community reconciliation and provides the locals health care, refuge from the crowded city as well as a green clean model for future building. Truly a ray of light in the darkness.

Set in the planned part of town the administrative hostel, where we were put up, is a sprawling complex, green and laid back as only a government institution can be. A longish auto rickshaw ride got me to the bada talab (big lake) after a sumptuous breakfast I found a lakeside promenade to walk along to the base of the old town. The lake is huge, a favourite with migratory birds, it being a Sunday there were several amateur fishermen trying their luck. I spotted a kingfisher of Malaya fame. As I circumvented the old city to find a different route to the conference, I kept coming across pond after pond. The city has a profusion of them ranging from the dirty puddle up to the big lakes which actually extend way out of town. The lake by the tajul masjid is like the highest lake, and there are lakes at every level of the undulating landscape, much like the cascading lakes of chittorgarh fort. Bhopal itself is quite a novel city. It’s not small by any stretch of imagination, but it retains a certain character, which only small towns have. There is also a disproportionate amount of planning and infrastructure by Indian standards. All in all it seems like the city doesn’t have to contend with a large rural influx, the only reason I can fathom is that the tribal population of the state is more than happy with their forests and have left the city to migrants from UP, Bihar, and the rest of India.

To get back to the problem of the Union carbide factory . . . I have been getting everyone’s opinion on what they think is the way forward. The overwhelming common factor is that the government needs to be greased into motion. The inertia of two and a half decades is something that makes it very easy for the status quo to remain and that is probably the biggest issue. I haven’t really heard any ideas for how to take that forward. Ballu seemed to think that its best to let things play their natural course and some time or the other the government would come around as it always does. Krishna had an interesting idea, sell off a part of the site for say apartments and use the proceeded to empower the community to do what they will with the remainder of the land. This brings us to the second important issue. The involvement of the communities around the site. I would personally like to err on the side of giving them too much power. Turning the site over to them perhaps and letting the indigenous social structure evolve its own answer to the trauma, the land and the obvious lack of basic civic amenities in the area.  But as Krishna rightly pointed out, what’s to prevent them from commercially exploiting the land to its maximum and ignoring the greater common good of the society. The rule of the fittest unfortunately is pretty much all the social structure that we really have left. That said there is bound to be a way to empower the different groups with say some major activists heading the council and a certain democratic order to keep things in the realm of the greater common good.

One thing that I think would be a good reference is the national rural employment guarantee act. Via this scheme employment is guaranteed to all rural folk for a hundred days a year. This has for the first time actually seen money percolate from the central government all the way down to the village household. As a system it is a revolution in India, but it lacks focus and much of the work undertaken is tangential and pointless. From my visits to the union carbide site the biggest issues are fresh water, sewage and garbage. Now the problem with finding solutions to these issues is that our governance is based on a top down approach. A landfill far away, a prohibitively expensive and impossible to maintain sewage line and tankers carrying water from presumable a deep bore. These are the solutions that form the standard set. Using the site and the revenue generated from land it seems to me very possible to take the current activity of recycling which forms the main business of the site surroundings and extend it to garbage and solid waste. By creating the infrastructure for waste recycling, the area could be turned into a profitable urban farm where the waste of the surrounding areas is transformed into a resource (food) and brings revenue to the people as well as employment. The key in Dr Bhawalkar’s words is to understand that what we call waste is actually a resource that we just don’t want to (or don’t know how to) deal with. This outlook would also turn the focus from the past to the future, instead of letting the factory stand and making a memorial that will always hold the weight of decades of inaction. The site could be a model for urban centres across the developing world, showcasing the resilience of a people willing to get up and resurrect themselves from what was possible the worst industrial disaster ever.

Coming back to the site, there is all this talk of the pollution that has never been cleaned up. Jayaram Ramesh came to the site, picked up a fistful of mud and declared it clean. And though this caused a tremendous uproar at the time, I am inclined to go along the same lines, instead of fighting over a way forward, let the earth return to the tiller and lets see what the pollution holds for us. Believe in nature and her eternal inexhaustible powers of healing, and move forward. What drives this seemingly insane thought process is nothing but the state of the settlements outside the factory premises. Dirty is not the word, there are stagnant puddles of filth everywhere, garbage over flows bins where the rare bin appears, children muck about playfully in the stench. In the factory there might be pollution, but on the face of it it’s way cleaner!

I just got back from the factory, or more accurately a parikrama of the factory I was really curious to see what was happening around the boundary of the famous union carbide plat. It was surprising to say the least. “Dig at least six feet to bury your children’ proclaimed a sign by a dirty nala leading from the site. Right next to what obviously was a garbage dump but now seemed to double as a child cemetery were lush vegetable gardens growing cauliflower. The factory itself is surrounded by dwellings on all sides. Ranging from the tiny shack to the modern concrete house, the aesthetic though is unmistakably characteristic to the region. The wall itself though mostly standing is punctured in strategic points to allow cattle to go in to graze. There is sufficient open are in patches, but it seems to be full of small mounds every where. After the children’s graveyard I couldn’t help but wonder what the story behind all those mounds was. All in all the fact that there was a deadly chemical plant in the neighbourhood which had many years ago caused a catastrophic loss of life seemed very distant. Life in the shanty towns seemed happy and normal. If there was any problem due to pollution, it most certainly stems from the garbage and sewage that they are is inundated in. I seriously doubt that anyone would be able to find some 25 year old pollution in the middle of all that muck and chaos.

Bhopal needs to send a message to the world. In the words of Kai Weise, the memorial started to take a shape I could finally comprehend. The disaster and the following decades of inaction are possibly the most public face of the city of Bhopal. The time has come for the city to take its image and propel it unquestionably into the future. The concluding session of the workshop was indeed a fun day. From shadow boxing with the issue to GPS driven paths across the site. The methods and ways forward were as interesting as they were varied. The most important thing that emerged in my opinion was the need for a management body solely in charge of the disaster and its myriad effects as well as the memorial.

Any industrial disaster that we have inherited from an alien imperialistic capitalistic (read evil western) system of thought should be countered with equal force by a indigenous solution based on the vast traditional knowledge base which has sustained us for centuries before we were conquered by Persian planning and European civil work.

           

            

tabla didjam

Didjam by emni

siang submersion

flooding of the Siang/Brahmaputra after the lower Siang hydro power project. the Yemne, Siom and Siang rivers will be flooded for over a hundred kilometers by a 86m high dam near Pasighat. Read more at Kalpavriksh . . by Neeraj Vagholikar.

if there is one thing which defines climate, it is change . . .

and aptly similar is the chase the scientific community is giving to the evil factors behind it. When I was in school, it was called global warming. James Lovelock had just discovered CFC's in the atmosphere, though no real harmful effects were identified till the ozone layer depletion hit. Compressors, Aerosols and what seemed to me to be all american things seemed to be teeming with this lethal flouro concoction. We slowly eased away, either by finding alternatives like in the case of the aerosols or by doing what we do best, sticking our head into a television and ignoring!

The Gaia hypothesis was around back then, proposing that the biosphere is a living system that actually controls the systems on the planet as in say a human body. Maintaining the delicate balance of temperature, gases in the atmosphere, complex hydrological cycles like currents this system of which we are just a minuscule part was not to be understood as a lab experiment. The famous swallow flapping its wings to cause a hurricane a continent away is the most poetic example of the complexity that we are the most arrogant part of.

What I found funny was an article in the hindu which claimed that the influx of cosmic rays were the main cause of global warming as clouds are formed with help from the rays, and the lesser the rays the lesser the clouds so the more the penetrating solar radiation! But that's not the funniest by a long shot. The methane that the billions (?) of cows fart was my favorite. Then there was the whole confusion with the coming and going of ice ages. the nina brothers and assorted chaos . . i love the climate debacle . . its just so much fun.

. . have to sympathise with meteorologists though ;)

religion

to mr Dawkins

animal husbandry along with agriculture gave us settled lifestyles . . but of for civilisation i think the domestication of human beings was the key . . . brute force is the obvious factor for subjugation, but the humans are a twisted bunch . . religion and blind faith have been so inherent in the subjugation and control of the majority by a minority hardly superior in anything save cunning and perhaps white skin; that i fear it is invisible to us . . . so in sticking to Douglas Adam's revelation, it is not the answer that we are seeking, it is the question!!

. . and mr Diamond

environmental education

the shit has obviously hit the proverbial fan if environmental education is now a mandatory course in school! Attending a panel discussion at at 'Quotes from the Earth', a toxics links film festival at IIC on whether environmental education is confined to moral relativism, i really got thinking . . . walking through the pristine jungles of Arunachal, watching first hand the tussle between instinct and rationale the striking similarities between a Heideger speech on the duality of thought and the development conundrum suddenly gleamed strikingly clear! Education, not just environmental education has suddenly taken on devil like proportions in my mind. With that on my mind, sitting through the panel discussion the nagging thought was that there is a nice fancy rug and sitting on top of it we discuss the state of the floor.

The focus of the discussion seemed to be on how exam oriented education is and that takes its tole on a sensitive subject like environment. Real experiences being invaluable in disseminating any meaningful environmental awareness. Now here I am wondering back to my school days where by class nine pretty much half my class was on full fledged IIT or Medical preparation, all set to don the professional jacket and go out into the world and join in the shining growth we glimmer in these days! As David Orr puts it, the sustainability of a person's life style is inversely proportional to their educational qualifications! Adding an environmental education syllabus to the whole shebang is nothing but a mild placebo at best. Not without its evils though as an engineer with a vague environmental consciousness is probably far better at disguising the impacts of development than his merrily oblivious brother.

Another thing which seemed strange to me is how lopsided the understanding of the word environment is. People just don't figure, nor do adapted environments like urban scapes. Its all wild life and forests, rivers and wetlands. If social disparity, human habitat and development is not seen as part of the environment in this day and age i fear we are cuddling up in an imaginary world.

Not to be defeatist, i feel that education really needs a revamp. The relevance of the schooling system and higher education should be thrashed around a bit . . . linguistic skills, basic mathematics and the like form an essential skill set with which you could say call someone literate. Why that requires a 12 year education beats me. I may be ignoring the need for an educated elite for the time being but that really has enough going for it anyway! A 3 year syllabus without the exams and competition, aimed at simply imparting literacy and basic education should really be made out. Now that it seems we might actually have a census of everyone in the country, Mr Sibal should make sure that all the kids have the opportunity to avail of this stripped down syllabus. Further education should like most first world countries be divided into academic and professional. Why are our masons not trained? Or our mechanics? Its sad to see great mechanics languishing in their old age when they could be teaching or researching . . . In not the disparity in pay scale directly linked to the undervaluation of manual professions . . . should this not be the goal? Rather than continually train armies of engineers who then need environmental education to rein them in from their inherently consumerist progress driven education! The last thing which I feel is really important is the localisation of education. Being an architect, it is probably in my field more than any other (apart from agriculture) that I see the disconnect with local knowledge having the most dire impacts. The concrete boom fuelled by the large corporates and government policy gives us a world we aspire towards. Now I can't take away the dream of a comfortable home free from the worry of the rain carrying away your roof or snakes hiding in the corners, but I know that a solution to local problems exists in every situation, maybe it is concrete maybe it isn't! Empowering the local knowledge base and integrating it with the present is the way forward. Strikingly, all the engineers I met in arunachal come from a rich tradition in bamboo craft, house building, the works . . but in one short generation with the aid of education they have lost all interest in the craft. It is all but alien to them. So instead of a promising tribal youth who has studied engineering working on innovative ways to take the bamboo craft further, he is simple alienated from it all together.

Sometimes the mind really needs a purge . . . cheerios for bearing :)