ELP site up

Just finished the skeleton site for the Organisation for Early Literacy Promotion (ELP) . . an organisation founded by my mother to address the special educational needs of children coming from backgrounds where reading and writing is not prevalent at home. The division of the hindi alphabet into five stages makes it far easier to grasp. There is also an emphasis on sound symbol relationships, meanings and context. The child is taught 5 characters, then he makes words with them and poems with the words. Thus without having to rote learn the entire alphabet, the mystery that script conceals slowly starts to reveal itself and the joy of learning is established. A far cry from the standard curriculum, which is catered to a very different social setting. The program has been developing over the last five years, and studies already show decreases in the drop out rate at rural schools in Rajasthan. With the help of a teaching kit designed to facilitate the teacher to implement the methodology in the classroom ELP really breathes some fresh air into a system so rusted one almost feels scared to push!

Check out the page . . and do donate to mom if you have some spare cash . . :)

some go
some stay
live on the fringes
just make way
heed the flow
take the day
sweat it out
disarray
constant twinges
rock my world
niggles bends
torn unfurled

trouble

Trouble by emni

follow my website

just got down to learning enough dream weaver to get a site online . . watch it emerge :)

watch it froth and glow

Analyse the bitterness

See if from within

Shapeless till withdrawn 

Formed when forsaken

Seldom is there clarity

To live within ones means

Wasted hope seeds freedom

Ticking through the seams

Take time for compassion

Redirect the punch

Pay heed to the emptiness

It never meant that much

Seeking nothing seemingly

Beating through the bone

There’s simply no denying that

The heart is always home

Twitching restlessly the tongue

Wants no more to know

Bitter bitterer bitterest

Yearning for the glow

Sweet nothing then is far beyond

What ails and weathers men

Tangy sour and tasteless blend

What’s now is never then

Thinking through the bitterness

Re tasting thick and thin

Reminiscing the bold embrace

The glow takes me within

School for Democracy

The School for Democracy/लोकतंत्र शाला 

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.