Common unwell th

Today - here we stand,

Our hands bowed in shame-

What else can we do?

We have no one else to blame!

For it is we who have elected,

These inept leaders to fame;

Can they even not,

Host a simple game-

Without corruption,

For sake of the nation's good name?

A bridge came crashing,

& only shreds of our reputation remain.

Unkempt our hospitality

& incomplete our stadium -

None ready to step up

To resolve this delirium.

For a people who pride,

Their guests above everyone,

We have aptly demonstrated

When it comes to corruption-

We can sell out

Even our nation!

This is the darkest blot

& generations to come have been maimed,

India - the land of so many virtues

Sadly, couldn't present itself properly

When the right time came!

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Lavasa

05 June, 2010

World Environemnt Day! A morning with Pune weekend traffic, which was actually not so bad. Pune traffic seemed graceful in many ways - silent (no horns aka Ahmedabad) and mostly disciplined - a breeze compared to the aggressive ness one faces in Ahmedabad. Post lunch we planned a trip to Lavasa - one of India's latest private hill station. Located near the Mulshi Dam, it occupies an entire valley between two hills in the Sahyadris. As one stood at the gateway to Lavasa- Dasve on the ridge, one could see the entire valley bustling with construction activity. How does one start comprehending such a humongous private leisure space? To me, this is the epitome of capitalist greed - land grabbing has never been done in a more stylist manner! Lavasa can be rightly termed as the SEZ of townships: a land bank for the rich to get richer, only this provides the cover of a home-stay rather than some 'industry' for the betterment of the country. It never gets more shameless than this - Amby valley was a privately held and privately managed space, not like an SEZ. Lavasa, on the other hand, is promoted as a management of Govt. held enterprise. Since when does the government, and especially one that doesn't even acknowledge the right to a house, invest itself in luxury hill stations for the rich. The last government that India saw indulge in such activities was when it was a slave to the mighty British empire - the white sahibs in their summer hideouts in the hills commanding the common man below. How different is this picture than that - houses that cost an arm and a leg, around an artificial water body, in a private valley - albeit all funded by the government coffers!!! There is hardly anything to bring home about the architecture or the masterplan - except for the features of the water body and the valley - both being natural gifts the region does not have any dearth of. So, as a commercial project, what are they selling? Nothing at all - there is no USP - there is just a simple transfer of land from the common land bank to the private elite, and control over one very important future resource - part of the water that is supplied to Pune city. That seems to be the hidden USP of the project when one sees increasing water shortage in our country. 

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AMD-BOM Trip travellogues 01

03.06.2010 AMD-BOM

The day was largely uneventful, except for Bombay traffic. We started around 5.30am, and there was nothing noticeable about the trip or landscape till we hit Maharashtra border. One has to see the industrial 'corridor' from Baroda to Vapi in order to grasp its scale - a myriad expanse of factories insterspersed in the agricultural-urban complex. We hit a wave of heavy vehicle traffic on this corridor, and even a 6-lane highway seems to wear out before the mind-boggling train of transport. Not surprisingly, the traffic turned to a trickle as one left Vapi, the last town of Gujarat. The highway enters the western ghats at the Maharashtra border, and the impending rainstorm brought  hopes of seeing a waterfall or two. Unfortunately it didn't rain as expected the whole way, as we later came to know that the storm had veered off towards Oman from the Saurashtra coast.

The western ghats part of the highway is a winding road will moderate slopes through scenic forested areas. TheVasai creek announces the arrival of Mumbai, and we took the Ghodbandar road towards Thane to meet a friend. Looking out from the 22nd floor of Hiranandani estate provides the quintessential view of Mumbai - skyscrapers clamouring for a footing with the traditional village houses and slums and a piece of the sky with the hills of the Sahyadris - all stuck along the border of Sanjay Gandhi National Park.

The way onwards to Dombivali is a challenge for any driver. Weaving through peak Thane Traffic in the core of the city, one navigates towards the Bhiwandi bypass, which itself is choc-a-block with heavy vehicles trying to escape the urban chaos. One crosses back to the other side of the Vasai creek towards the satellite towns of Bhiwandi- Kalyan. Another turn took us to Kalyan - which is surprisingly huge, and equally unorganized. Mumbai is a dream only for those who live in the main town, this place was completely godforsaken - like an oversized village shying away from its size, in fact trying to hide it with a mirage of small lanes and bye lanes along the bypass. However, it continued for a good 10-12 kms along the bypass, which essentially meant it could be the size of Gandhinagar town, or even larger! Make no mistakes, these towns are Municipal Corporations, larger than most capitals and cities in the country, but do not get their due only because they are located in the shadow of the behemoth expanse of Mumbai. As one enters Dombivali (after a garangutan effort), the quintessential stress between Mumbai and its surrounds comes into view. One sees the traditionally farming and fishing locals overwhelmed by the money, crowds, cosmopolitan lifestyle and speed of the neighbouring giant that has now been imposed on their previously simple and frugal lifestyle. The trouble starts with this fact - the locals used to an impoverished lifestyle are suddenly flooded with immeasurable amounts of money from their land combined with a loss of livelihood creating a capital rich person with nothing to do and no capability to do anything in the new lifestyle. This is surmounted by the fact that the new immigrants are the lower-middle class who cannot afford a place in mainland Mumbai. However cosmopolitan this new lifestyle is, it still doesn't solve the problem of the locals - who would have done best to follow the examples of investment from those who do - which the struggling immigrants fail to provide for. 

A peek into a local bar provides many answers to this confustion - hundreds of people, overwhelmingly males, drinking away in each of the hundreds of bars in Dombivali - every single evening. The bars are strategically located between the railway station - the transit backbone to Mumbai - and the residential district. So, each evening the immigrants looking to forget their worldly struggle in this city and the locals with nothing better to do meet at the bars - never to befriend, always to end in brawls. 

And that is why one would pray for a dry state - however wet it is behind closed doors. What kind of civil administration would expect to reap official dividends by sending its citizens into a drunken stupor each night, leading to domestic stress, street fights, etc? I would rather live in a state that looks away from one's drinking habits behind closed doors, stops all official access to intoxication, and does not believe in looking for tax income from alochol - even if the officials get rich in the illicit trade behind doors - only the desperate ones spend, and they should pay a price. Associated taboos that discourage a person would be no access to hospitals if something goes wrong, dealing with the police and courts under prohibition act, and the same. 

Dombivali is the place where the immigrants work round the clock - leaving at 6 and returning at 10, only to sleep with a roof on their heads. Weekends are washed away in completing the week's domestic chores. It is also the place where the locals hang about all day in empty streets, trying to comprehend the changes and fit in. It leaves both in discomfort - no sense of acceptance or security for the immigrants and no sense of acceptance or direction of life for the locals, a very dangerous mix that may fall either way. Only one certainty prevails - nobody goes to sleep with a content mind.

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The idea of order

"Heavy rains disrupt life in Andhra & Tamil Nadu..." reads the headline in a newspaper. 

How easily we declare the aberration in 'natural' pattern of life due to a natural event! Little do we realize that it is we who have become unnatural through our lifestyles. Never has nature been regular - that is the property of machines, & even they need repair. Our understanding of nature is limited to the last 200 years or so of data collection that has started with the industrial age. It is defined as highly erratic, with broad order manifested in the cycle of seasons, sunrise-sunset, moon phases - all connected to the rotation of heavenly bodies. The apparently disorderly event that the newspaper has described is actually micro-scale aberration for the earth, too small to even register. Such aberration could be found in any machine or mechanism. To present an analogy, we are like ants on the back of the blue whale - any change in its surface due to changes in breathing cycle, or manouvring in the oceans brings our lives to a halt.

We do know now that a small solar flare can bring down all of our communications and satellites,a small meteor can destroy areas as large as Siberia, a small cyclone can hold the whole East Indian seaboard to ransom, a tremor in the earth's bed lead to earthquakes or tsunamis. And there is nothing on earth that we - the great human race - 6 billion strong, can do about it other than run for our lives.

Yet, we are arrogant to to point of obvious self-destruction - mining deeper & deeper without understanding its long term / large scale impacts, stopping the mighty rivers without knowing when they will avenge themselves, changing the atmospheric balance without thinking of the changes in temperature, pressure, global wind cycle it will bring about. Our arrogance and greed blinds us from the simple understanding that the whole earth is one interconnected system - clip the nose and the mouth will open. The already waterfall effect of our destructive greed is apparent in the large scale (for us) changes around the globe. 

What's in it for the earth? Like i said, its just a case of lice infestation for the earth - the lice being us. First there will be light brushing, if that doesn't work, some vigorous shaking and finally a strong medicine to counter the mischief mongers. We may go back to stone age - or even cease to exist, but life shall go on in some other form, in some other way - maybe after a few million years again - a time that is just a moment's pause for the earth.

We pride ourselves in being great thinkers - the greatest of all among all living organisms. Yet how oblivious we are to the long term impacts of our momentary greed to accumulate. These theories of capitalism, democracy, economics - none provide a view beyond one human lifetime. In our 1,00,000 year history, this is the amount of foresight we have - conscious or unconscious ONE HUNDRED YEARS! That is why all economics fails to explain the true value of natural resources - its computations fail beyond this limit of foresight - its calculations of inflation, scarcity, demand and supply cannot last beyond a lifetime. We speculate in oil, metals, stocks. But we are forgetting the fast reducing supply of water, biomass, land - can we even gear ourselves to speculate for that?

Any local municipality in India charges about Rs. 7 - 20 ($ 0.15 - 0.5) per kilo liter (1000 liters), while a bottle of packaged drinking water sells for Rs. 12 per liter (Rs. 12,000 per kilo liter). However, put in perspective of human population increase and demand with respect to availability of water, its easy to see that very soon we'll be paying Rs. 12 per liter for municipal supply and packaged drinking water will sell at the cost of a permium bottle of wine! But that will happen before the actual scarcity hits us - capitalists will start speculating soon enough and inflate the prices!

Looking at the history of oil prices, we have learnt that any amount of increase does not lead to a decrease in demand. We can however, start looking at alternative fuels and supplement / replace oil with these over the next century. But can we find a replacement for drinking water? 

The point - natural resources are sustained only in a sense of balance controlled by the earth. Any activity - human or otherwise that disturbs this balance leads to disastrous results - the scale or timeline of which we have no way for forseeing or forecasting. Its better to prevent than to cure - but as far as our natural gifts are concerned - we haven't learnt our lessons yet.This is the idea of order that we need to understand - the natural order - where we are just one of the gears in the system, we don't dominate it, we cannot control it - we can only follow. This order will soon turn into disorder and the only rusty bolt responsible is us!

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Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeoning of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul!

- William Ernest Henley

Ps: Thanks Rohan for forwarding me this...

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And the book shall kill the stone...

"& the book shall kill the stone...." goes the phrase in Count of Monte Cristo... I first heard it in Ar. Prem Chandvarkar's lecture on the design of a design...

Architecture was one of the highest regarded arts because cultures imbibed their history (& prowess) in the built form before the invention of printing. The written word was a scarce commodity, and one difficult to preserve... Buildings, by comparison, were easier to maintain, and more mighty (seemingly).

As the written word spread (thanks to Gutenberg), architecture lost its place as a representative of the cultural idiom, and there began its search for the inner soul... what did architecture stand for? what would it show the world? ... leading to the birth of so called design ideals...

Put that in our lives, and we are shocked by the rude awakening.. why are we here? what is our purpose? is wealth, health, material comfort our sole aim? will we live as a lost soul, or will our names be etched in stone? what defines us? what drives us?

It is, has and will be the most pertinent question any human could / should / would ask oneself.. 

it is the darkest question of all, for it scares us into obsolescence.. 

are you up to the challenge?

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