TERRA INCOGNITA INDICA

People Energy

Soil Unknown-Undiscovered Indian

INDICA: I deliberately use the word ‘Indica’, a biological term, instead of ‘India’. It is precisely to indicate a ‘region’ and not political boundaries that associate with the State. In the historical time political boundaries have been subjected to change, anywhere.

 

TERRA: literally ‘soil’, which I refer to ‘Land and Waters and People, and Biotic and Abiotic Nature’. The biotic and abiotic nature is intrinsic in the life, therefore also in their culture, of the people – the daughters and the sons of the soil.

 

INCOGNITA: the literal meaning is ‘unknown – unexplored – unrecognized’ alike the medieval (European) map showed the known world encircled by ‘Terra incognita’ where monsters roam.

Indeed even in the twenty-first century, the ‘soil’, in my way of comprehensive meaning, still remains ‘unknown (to the world) – unexplored (by the pundits) – unrecognized (by the so-called Authority or the State)’, whom I fondly call my ‘anonymous’ kin, from whatever glimpse I have had through my six decade journey in the Third World India and the Fourth World India.

 

Social and Cultural Sub-groups of India

INDIA has almost a continental size. Broadly there are about 50 – 60 cultural and social sub-groups (as illustrated). No. We are not referring to the castes or cults or the creeds. We are not taking of, in American lingo, of the Class or 'the classless society'. We are speaking of the ethnic and adivasi – tribal – communities (that is the cohesive collectives), not the civilized advance societies (that is the fragmented collectives in the modern times).

She indeed is a thousand-petal lotus, our national flower. There have been as many topographic and climatic regions – bio-regions – that have great hand in shaping the culture, expressed in food, clothing, shelter (or architecture!), visual and performing arts and crafts, languages an folklore… and thus as a result a superior quality of sustainable living. I call it a model for the modern world, a world heritage, now facing a wipe-out.

 

Unfortunately in the global race to make India an industrial power by the petty imitators – the ruling minority – comes at cross-purposes with the survival of the agrarian society and the diverse bio-regions. The petty imitators are out to homogenize them with monoculture of industrial civilization. The industrialization here, so far, only helps the power mongers and profiteers through their invisible tentacles.

Indeed one lifetime is not enough to see and to assimilate and to understand this phenomenon for any person or even a group of persons. Any documentation, even a fraction, would reveal great treasures of wisdom and knowledge and skills, across these diverse bio-regions, accumulated over generations of anonymous People of India. 

India is such a vast country with diversity that it is impossible to manage even the welfare of the people (for the lack of understanding) for any centralized power, even with an iron hand. This is true of any region in the world which has been proved time to time. Decentralization of powers, down to earth in practice, (power in the hands of peasants) is the only answer to this malady; M. K. Gandhi came very close to it in his concept of Panchayati Raj – power to village self-rule.

 

(10-05-2009)

Note: Map- Social and cultural sub-groups of India, after the cover page of 'Seminar', Issue 226, 1978, New Delhi.

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© Remigius de Souza., all rights reserved.
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South Asian Jazz (Review)

South Asian Jazz in Architecture (Event Review)

Event: disContinuous Threads: Memory, Freedom and Architecture in Contemporary India, Conference at National Centre for Performing Arts [NCPA], Mumbai, December 10–12, 1997

Traditional Warli House, Thane Dist. Maharashtra, India

Warli hut built by self-help and community participation; it is truly green, organic and sustainable; its technology standards are unsurpassed any civilized society until now.

What is Architecture

Architecture is Mother of All Arts(!)

Proverb among Indie-architects

PEOPLE ENERGY

Key Words: Indian Westernized Architecture, Contemporary Western Architecture, Biodiversity, Culture

‘THREADS’ certainly bring to our mind Kabir the weaver and Namdeo the tailor, and others of Indian high culture. This is in contrast to the present Western and contemporary westernized Indian notion of wealth, consumption and market economy.

EMPERORS PASSED AWAY, but Kabir, Tukaram likewise other saint-poets continue to rule for centuries. However, history books made by the British-made Indian schooling, are crammed with wars, murders and murderers. Even an unassuming village traditional doctor is cautious to give away his formulas of traditional herbal medicines to guard, of course, against misuse, namely by moneymaking, desecration, exploitation… This is in contrast to western culture of ‘Intellectual Property Rights’. A question of morality!

THE ARCHITECTS who gathered for the conference came from India, Pakistan, Bangla Desh and Sri Lanka. They belong to the First World of minority. We are well aware the architecture, modern architecture, in the subcontinent is an extension, a tail end of western architecture.

IN MODERN ARCHITECTURE there is neither North nor South, nor West or East. It is a one-dimensional world where the world is flat for the architects who struggle to create two-dimensional images of three-dimensional space, unaware that they are being manipulated by the Super-strings of Corporate Powers.

The professional ladies and gentlemen here, gathering and splitting threads at the conference, were speaking alien language, and referring to Kant, Kahn… aesthetics, technology… cults and post-modern-cults, and reflecting western concepts mostly at a gross level of existence.

Some tried typically to capitalize on poverty in fashion. Language matters when one speak of regions. Language and culture are so intimately entwined; they are “almost one and the same thing” (Pagel) [1]. Yet when we dig the buried past (Harappa etc.) we try to read cultures of the bygone times from its artefacts, architecture irrespective of its being good or bad.

IN THE INDIAN SUBCONTINENT there are about fifty - sixty social and cultural sub-groups, a great warp and weft, and numerous mother tongues, many more times than the officially recognised and state-supported languages. As is said, the shades of languages change at ten miles.

As the ecologists have long known, that from the poles to the Equator the number of different species of flora and fauna increase… so also in the size of territory the species range over… both these ecological rules also apply to languages [2]. This is perfectly in harmony with rich biodiversity of land and waters of the sub-continent.

Now the folk languages, rich with traditional wisdom and knowledge accumulated over many lifetimes are on the way of extinction together with arts, crafts and indigenous architecture following the extinction of the plants, birds, animals, insects…following the extinction of indigenous food grains, replaced by hybrid culture.

“Languages began dying in droves from late 15th century onwards as the Europeans colonized the world. Some languages died because of mass killings of ethnic communities. Each time a language dies we lose something we do not even understand (Woodfield)…we loose a way of perceiving the world…a way of learning (Pagel) [3].

Only trade is global; culture and cultural expressions cannot be global. Even the currencies cannot be global. Then how could architecture be global? Architects may have to deliberately and constantly watch out how every point and line put on the paper or computer screen affects land and waters, and the people.

High on agenda of Western high culture of ‘development’ is to disintegrate and dis-empower the people and turn them into zombies – programmed robots of mono-culture of mass-type society for the greed of power and profit.

IS CREATIVITY A PREROGATIVE OF A FEW – Corbu, Kahn, Gehri…? Aesthetics for that matter is a clouded issue due to social-cultural-economic issues, geography, urbanism, high culture, mass culture, and Environment-Ecology-Energy crisis. Centuries ago Kabir – Tukaram – Chokhamela challenged the gross concept of aesthetics by giving examples of plants – sandalwood, clove, sugarcane etc.

Beauty – Truth – Bliss – Love is not the opposite of ugly – lie – pain – hate. But to speak of this area is a taboo. It is so, for simple reason that this area cannot be institutionalized. Discourses by gurus though are institutionalized.

Somewhere in the development process we have lost ‘rt’ – good – the noun was replaced by adjective. However ‘rt’ is beyond definition, though science is not. Science continues to discover the ‘Frontiers of Ignorance’ [4].

Architects of the sub-continent are still chained to, caught up in and victims of orthodox view of modern architecture. “Development of modern architecture suggests it has taken us about four thousand years to progress from pyramid to a box’ says Papworth [5]. While modern architecture seems to have lost direction and people all over the world are facing identity crisis, it displays architect’s signature, sometimes that of the corporate client, hardly of the user.

Merely adopting effects and epithets of vernacular is not enough. It was Einstein who said that you couldn’t expect to solve a problem within the mind that created it [6] (quoted by Edward Goldsmith).

Architecture today is a goldfish in a glass bowl. It is time now to let loose the goldfish into the stream. Rest will take care of itself. But that demands morality, dignity and integrity. Do architects and scientists perceive that they are tools in the hands of empires of development, which control the access to the resources? In search of architecture the major task is to humanize and democratize the community … ‘but you cannot have morality without community. Without community morality becomes humbug’ (John Papworth) [7].

THE CONCLUDING SESSION was a deflated event like afterbirth. It did not reflect the preceding part of this grand South Asian Jazz, which was coupled with occasional Shahanai – Pakhavaj of Shubhendu Kaushik.

There were no issue/s at stake at the event.

It is understood that the participants had to put their perceptions, experiences and references within the limitation of period of time, words and visuals in their presentations, discussions (and this review, too) cannot cover entire gamut of the theme of the conference.

THE MAJOR CHALLENGE today in the context of the theme is to free both, land and waters and community, which are shattered and disintegrated in the cobweb of market and its allies. Let loose the goldfish of architecture from the glass bowl into the stream of community.

Remigius de Souza
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Referances and Notes

1 Vines, Gail. ‘Death of a mother tongue’ New Scientist, Jan 6, 1996, p.25
2 ibid. p 26
3 ibid. p.27
4 Theme of the 125th anniversary issue of Nature, 3.11.1994
5 Papworth, John. ‘Shut up and Listen – A new handbook for revolutionaries’, Academic Inn, London, 1997
6 ibid. Preface
7 ibid. p.4

[Published in Janata Weekly, Mumbai, March 15, 1998, P.11-14.]

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© Remigius de Souza।, all rights reserved।
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Sense and SenseAbility – 5: Taste

Sense and SenseAbility – 5: Taste

Illustration: Aesthetic Taste

Taj Mahal, India: precious/semiprecious stone studded fantasy mausoleum (in feudal era).
Bra: diamond studded fantasy (in democratic era).
Beijing Olympic Stadium and Inauguration: Technology gimmicks studded fantasy leisure (in autocratic state).
Qualitatively their taste ethics and aesthetics don’t differ much from one another.



We are thinking, here, of taste, a physical sense, the phenomenon that goes long way from mouth to the entire gamut of environment-ecology-energy of Terra Incognita Indica, for that matter, of entire globe. Taste, here, is a business of mouth: To eat, drink and chew – primarily to satisfy the Basic Need, besides to speak, and to sing, and perhaps abuse...
We are not talking about that taste in the abstract realm of fashions and styles, arts and artefacts; they are but transient in time-space and places.

A new born baby sucks nipples of mother’s breasts (or teat of feeding bottle). Thankfully, s/he is not to be or cannot be taught by any high culture / low culture, or by any civilisation, or by any power savvy authority that would at once jump at the first opportunity.

Oh, that cones in other areas. The onslaught on their taste starts from the day one. The new born are generally on the supplementary feeds – drugs, vitamins, vaccines etc. For various reasons prescribed by the specialists (of course, to those who can afford; 90 percent Indians can’t). So, their taste buds now start getting tuned to the modern social and economic development, in other words, they are baptised in the Dharma of Industrialisation.

The onslaught also comes from the omnipresent Market, the manufacturers, the show-biz – the pop stars farting on the TV screens every 10-15 minutes intervals, and so on. It comes with ready to serve canned and packed conveniences in attractive wrappings: That includes processed foods and drink – sweet – sour – pungent – salty (bitter and astringent excluded). The shelves are always full at the glitzy mall.

It could be so, because the mothers or parents or families are under constant pressure of time-crunch, that’s for one. Hence, the market is ready to serve. And other is knowledge-crunch. Because in the nuclear family raj, there probably is no grandma’s legacy left. They have spent their formative years (till 20 to 25) learning specialised courses – arts, sciences, commerce, ET-IT, engineering, business management etc at mass schooling. Their data bank is empty in this vital field of health about “when-where-why-who(m)-how” of right food to keep healthy. Well, some information filters through the print media, like guide books of their school days. But what is its reach?

In the cities, however, till now, the grocery shops and (vegetable) markets have number of varieties of great variety of grains, condiments, spices, dry and fresh fruits, tubers, rhizomes, leaves and roots in vegetables: I don’t know even the name of many. I wonder perhaps the medicos may know.

In the villages generally there should belocally grown grains, fruits and vegetables, and supplements from forests, woodlands and wetlands, if any still survive, and if accessible through the clutches of various departmental authorities. However, sooner or later the Market would take over to supply.... But why is there such a great exodus from the village to urban areas?

In Indic region there has been great natural biodiversity. In the Indic region there has been a great natural biodiversity. It has influenced all the aspects of culture, not only food and clothing, in short, the four aspects of our daily living: Work, Leisure, Education and Health.

Biodiversity in India has resulted in rich medical systems – Ayurveda, Siddhayoga etc. It is there in the occult cults – Tantra, Mantra, magic practices. However much of the knowledge is with the ethnic and tribal communities that remain incognito (perhaps under a cloud of modern day superstitions or prejudices), besides in the treatises. What’s the point in giving official recognition to the systems, but not its bearers, the people, who are treated as second class citizens?

Shamefully, the visible reality down to earth is the country’s most of the green cover, woodlands, forests and wetlands are either get pollute or are disappearing, consequently the loss of wild life, diminishing surface and subsoil water, and comes expanding desert. Another consequence is people’s knowledge and skills, preserved through generations. are vanishing. In the place of biodiversity there comes monoculture of plants and monoculture of mass society is being groomed through mass schooling. All this is for the delight of bureaucrats and the ruling powers for the easy control, and modern development of economic by regimentation.

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© Remigius de Souza. all rights reserved.
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Sense and sense-ability-2

Sense and sense-ability-2

OUIR FIVE SENSES are attributed to five body organs: touch to skin, hearing to ears, smell to nose, taste to mouth and vision to eyes; it’s a common knowledge. Where does ‘perception’ reside? Obviously it is in the brain, where thoughts occur and flow continuously, sometimes connected, sometimes disconnected or random. There also occur emotions, dreams, daydreams, ideas and concepts (creative and/or destructive)… If observed, there is, as if, infinite space without boundaries, identical to space outside.

The senses and organs do not work in compartments or in departments like manmade occupations and organisations for example, governments, corporations, institutions etc. they work in association or in coordination with other senses and body parts. Just mention a word “tamarind” while talking in a group and someone’s mouth starts watering. Even a memory of an event may raise hair in the skin, or give a vomiting sensation in the breath, or even miss a breath.

The whole body, not only the brain, is a most complex and intricate system; it is right with us to watch. It works smoothly except for our indulgencies (egocentric that we are) by committing various sins or crimes against its functioning. By our indulgencies, by going beyond moderation, we, perhaps, may boast that we patronise many manmade systems and organisations in the name of research and development and progress etc. which give job opportunity to many, including ourselves, and the state, whether monarch, democracy, totalitarian or fundamentalist.

The body, however, is far more superior and sacred than any manmade institution, or machinery – from kitchen gadget to a spaceship. Despite all great inventions and the great leaps in various branches of sciences, thereby technologies, in the context human body (and mind), they are still groping to understand it. The mystery deepens. To compare brain to a computer (artificial intelligence) is preposterous and arrogant.

Some time ago I read an article on senses, “Doors of Perceptions” by Bruce Durie (New scientist, 29 January 2005, p. 34-36), which give a table of several senses. It reports, the scientists have names and added five more senses in addition to the five known to us, which are called “conventional” senses. It may not be out of place to mention them here: Pain, Mechanoreception (balance), Temperature and Interoceptiors (blood pressure). All 10 are further divided into 21 “accepted” (by the scientists) senses, and they are further divided into 33 sub-sub-divisions called “radical”. The article is informative, and does not necessarily advocate them. Thankfully, he adds, ‘they are flawed… the table is incomplete… though in the end, it may not matter at all’.

It was amusing. It reminded me of Indian caste system: four ‘varna’s that that have turned into few hundred castes, sub-castes and sub-sub castes over centuries. And see what kind of mess we have been in!

In modern societies there are classes, occupations, specializations, careers and classes… In sciences alone the specialisations break into several divisions. Of course the division of labour is a basic characteristic of any civilised society (We don’t include any tribal – adivasi – aborigine communities, which still survive, though few, among them).

Hence my perception tells me, more advance a civilised society more the divisions of labour (you may call them varnas, castes, classes or occupations…) more divided (read fragmented / decadent) the society. Though the western society, which thinks itself superior to all societies on the globe, is not an exception; perhaps it’s the worst example (count the wars in the past two centuries; assess the plight of the underclass, which is rarely reported, and the racial and gender atrocities).

A body – human, animal or plant – would not function, not even survive, even to a span of breath, if it has to follow such a prototype of advance civilised society. May God help the clones, morons, zombies to die soon, if any amongst us!

Characteristically the western society (and the westernised) still continues to think in a linear and deductive ways, thus go haywire, as is evident from the “Doors of Perception”. I wonder would they ever complete a cycle – circle? Anyway, till then let them enjoy their adventures and enjoy spending dollars, a plenty that they have earned at the cost of the Earth’s resources as if they alone own her, for the survival of their institutions…

At one place Bruce Durie says, ‘When we talk of senses, what we really mean are feelings or perceptions. Otherwise we would be operating not much above the level of an amoeba or a plant’. This is indeed very sad.

First, our remote ancestor was bacteria from whom the plant and animal world was evolved, even before “pikaia” that swam in the seas long before hominid was born, which scientists agree.
If I have to believe, ‘bacteria live like a superorganism and collectively decide their actions by communication… [A]s with human language, bacteria possess a lexicon, or vocabulary…’ as says another author (Buchnan, Mark. “A billion brains are better than one: a single microbe won’t have much to say for itself. But put a lot of them together and it’s a different story.” New Scientist, Nov 20, 2004: p 34-38) then the statement by Bruce is either wrong or incomplete. Perhaps he operates in different division, which is hardly holistic.

Even before our desi scientist J C Bose (November 30, 1858 – November 23, 1937) discovered in his laboratory, what the Indian peasants have believed, that plants have feelings. Sir Jagdish Chandra Bose claims that plants can “feel pain, understand affection etc.," from the analysis of the nature of variation of the cell membrane potential of plants, under different circumstances. According to him a plant treated with care and affection gives out a different vibration compared to a plant subjected to torture. Perhaps Bruce did not pay attention to this past research and people’s belief.

But science, which exists from the time hominid existed, need not be condemned because no scientist can conclusively proclaim “truth”, and agree with others, and they may not, because they too are human. The entire human race is a miniscule part in the whole schema of Nature.
We shall dig more in the senses in the following posts.

P.S. I am not a scientist. My education in science is up to matriculation that was few decades ago. I am just an ordinary citizen and don’t claim any authority in any subject.

(Link to previous post: Sense and Sense-ability )
Remigius de Souza
09-06-2008
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© Remigius de Souza., all rights reserved.


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NATURAL HABITAT

NATURAL HABITAT

by Remigius de Souza

THE HABITAT OF MAN has taken several forms through time and places. Villages, towns, cities, squatters, slums, suburban colonies, tribal settlements, metropolis, shelters in cold mountain regions, oasis, igloos shelters in boats at lakeside, riverside, seaside, shelter under bridges, squatters on river banks which get washed off again and again...

Natural habitat is not house alone to live – work –grow – learn... but it also includes its neighbourhood, land and water, landscape and air, the other inhabitants of its surroundings – insects – birds – animals – plants, the day and the night, changing seasons, and the five Elements – Earth, Water, Light (and Heat), Air and Space that we are composed of – praised by Vedas.

With all advances of science at hand, natural habitat instead of harnessing its qualities and life has come under several assaults. At the turn of the last century with scientific inventions, man believed that he obtained the key to the Mystery of Nature. Scientific inventions were employed for mass production and industrialization. Industrialization was not limited to textiles alone; it moved in every possible direction - weapons of warfare, education, agriculture and food, medicine and pesticides, insecticides, water management, housing, communications, transport, entertainment etc. It employed every possible raw material: air, land, stone, water, hill, trees, minerals, animals, industrial waste and industrial by-products. Yet every new scientific invention proved previous invention inadequate. The Mystery of Nature continued to deepen.

The present (20th) century has shown that industrialization has assaulted not only nature and natural resources but also human resources preserved through centuries by tribal and other societies throughout the world without exception – without restraint – the process, which started in the earlier century or two. The last such assault was on Tibetan society. This had preserved through centuries a unique form of living in harmony with nature on a religious (Dharma) base. The natural conditions too are unique here. The assault on Tibetan society was a result of industrialization as much as Marxism; Existentialism etc. were by-products of industrialization. Assault on natural resources was as much a result of industrialization as metropolitan cities are its by-products.

On the one side, industry supported by science goes on degenerating the life of man, animal and plants – all living beings – by polluting economy, ecology, environment, regional and social balance, and exploiting natural resources. And on the other side it goes on developing new medicines, pesticides, insecticides, water supply systems etc to save and serve life, developing so-called lifesaving drugs and machinery to save life which has made not only natural living impossible but even natural dying impossible, the sole purpose of which is profit-making – business. The sole purpose of industry is profit-making out of everything under the sun possible for a person, or a group of persons called a company or a corporation or even a state, tentacles of which reach far beyond social, regional, religious, national frontiers – even beyond global frontiers.

The resources of the globe are being employed – capitalized – for preservation of industry to produce and multiply – for which new disciplines are being invented such as management, specializations etc. to “reduce time, increase speed and more work (output)” to “produce more”. This required streamlined operations – division of labour – standardization – automation – specialization – regimentation – centralization.

Amongst human settlements, city form in the shape of metropolis in the present time is an assault on natural habitat, which could be compared with the effect of nuclear explosion but without Bang. The effect is not instantaneous. In spite of all the advances at hand in technology, communications, transport and sciences, the city – the symbol of feudal power –
has continued to grow. The city in the form of metropolis is not only an assault on nature but also an assault on man himself, and is the enemy of democracy. City form is no more valid except as a means to serve the vested interest of a person or a group of persons in power – enormous centralization of power – whether the city is in the West or the East. The larger the city, the larger are its evils, hazards, crimes, wastes, chaos; the larger are its capacity to exploit; the larger its capacity to pollute and to destroy nature through its tentacles. There is no better comment on this phenomenon than the movie "Modern Times", made by Charlie Chaplin decades ago.

In India we still crave for such a "progress" which is misplaced, outdated, obsolete and at times criminal. The Indian village was unmindful of its exploitation for a century and half or two, and still retains some of its qualities. The progress and development that caused the exploitation was not its own choice. In commercial terms, the Indian village is called the "untapped rural market" of India. The rural population is migrating at a massive rate at the very step – at the feet of the "market seeker" – not just to the city of Bombay but to every town and city in the country. The villager who was a farmer with dignity is now being reduced to a market commodity. His settlement in the city is identified by the term "slum", meaning that it is illegal, unauthorized, and if the town is small, the slum is not identified in the Census Survey of India.

There are several offshoots of "development" which influence /affect villages. Some of them are the education system, government organisations (GOs) and non-government organizations (NGOs). The numbers of non-government organizations have increased over the last two or three decades. Earlier there were missionaries who came to India. All these have noble intentions for the welfare of the village and to pamper their own sense of superiority. Their orientations are urban (or western / westernized). Their roots are urban. All these (perhaps with some exceptions) fail to see and learn from Indian village; instead they try to inject urban concepts imported from the West. Some exhibited occasionally (like Jawaharlal Nehru) by wearing the turban or traditional shawl and dance with the villagers to camouflage the real difference. In reality GOs and NGOs survive at the cost of the village. India still has the opportunity with 5.6 lakhs villages to save natural habitat and reverse the process of its destructions.


(This paper was presented at the "Conference on Natural Living" hosted by Prakrati – an NGO – at Bordi in Maharashtra, and published by the "FOURTH WORLD REVIEW", Number Forty Nine in 1992.)
PS: After about two decades I feel this note, unfortunately, is still valid, by worsening the environmental conditions on the Earth and its Sphere.

© Remigius de Souza., all rights reserved.
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Water Parks in Wanting

1: Floods in Mumbai is a recurring feature


2. Water reservoir in the traditional city centre

SURSAGAR, the lake at the city centre of Vadodara, Gujarat, is an example of reservoirs as a typical element of Indian cities, towns and villages, before the British Raj, or of pre-industrial era. Vadodara City has many reservoirs besides the tanks attached to the villages that are added after the expansion of city limits. It should be a surprise if some of them are now in a neglected state. Yet they remain and function as vital public and community places. All the tanks of the villages could be turned into natural water parks with little planning action.


3. Traditional water tanks in tamilnadu villages

The extraordinary number of tanks (reservoirs) in Tamilnadu, India, is one of the most heavily modified environments in the per-industrial world. This, of course, must have been possible by ‘community participation, and not merely by the feudal powers.( Source: Spate O. H. K. 1967: “India, Pakistan and Ceylon: The Region” 3rd ed. London)


4. Rivers are mothers to Indic People
Children at play at River Narmada near Bharuch City. There are many dimesions to this play.

5. Paddy farmsare nearest good example of Natural Water Park

Rice paddy fields, though seasonal, are nearest to a good example of ‘water parks’. They are rich with flora and fauna, and are generally breeding places for fish. Some peasants dig ponds in the fields to conserve fish where they are assured of water even after the harvest.

Water Parks in Wanting
Remigius de Souza

“Sujalam. Sufalam.” (Plentiful water! Plentiful fruits!)

– Bankim Chandra Chatarjee

[Preamble: Civilizations have been following a number of Yoga practices, from Jnan Yoga – Vijnan Yoga to Karma Yoga – Bhakti Yoaga to Hatha Yoga – Tantra Yoga. People in the Vedic times, in the Garden of Eden were perhaps blessed with plentiful of water and fruits. It is only our wishful thinking that we sing “Sujalam, Sufalam”, which falls short of action. It is time now for ‘SRISHTI YOGA’ – union with Nature.]

Water: Elixir of Life

Water gives sustenance to life, and culture to man. It is precious and sacred. In this magnificent land there are innumerable rivers and lakes, a great coast, great volume of frozen water on the Himalayas. There is plenty of rain, but there are also draughts, famines and floods recurrently happening. There is pollution of waters, and of the land; both are synonymous. Are we managing water well?

Let us take, for example, City of Bombay (now Mumbai), said to be the financial capital of the country. Mumbai city was founded by the British. They also developed excellent natural harbour. They reclaimed the creeks around the original natural islands.

The land grabbing continued unabated since then by reclaiming the sea, lakes, and water bodies in the city and by expanding the jurisdiction of the city government by extending the boundaries beyond the island city. There are now one million people.

They continued to exclude water by paving the land with tar – concrete – stone to make it watertight and free of soil (spoil!), not only the roads, but also the open spaces around the building and estates. Most of the city’s open space is taken over by the car for roads and ‘Car Park’. There are no ‘Water Parks’ in the city.

Water is imprisoned in the pipelines, and in the concrete – iron – plastic water tanks, and on the top of the Malabar Hill. Even the rainwater is imprisoned. To compensate the loss of water absorbing soil and loss of water bodies due to reclamation, Mumbai now gets regularly flooded during monsoon (Ill. 1).

Let us take an example in contrast. Thirty kilometers away there is more ancient town of Panvel. In the old Panvel of 25,000 people there are seven built water tanks. Some of them are now in a derelict condition. The great Wadala Tank is partly bulldozed by the modern town planners while planning for the extended area of Panvel. The remaining part of the lake is now getting silted and infested by weeds. Perhaps the planning manuals do not write about ‘maintenance planning’!

Let us visualized for a while! Mumbai could have been the Oriental Venice, if the creeks were not bulldozed, and if the traditional waterways were not sealed by the British.

Following their footsteps the planners of Mumbai Metropolitan Regional Development Authority [MMRDA] have twice prepared 20-year plans for the Mumbai region. But they ignored or failed to notice that the people in the coastal area of Raigad and Thane Districts use the natural-inland watercourses as waterways for transport. Neither could they see the pollution of waters and land and the salt pans as an after effect of planning for development. The British, of course, had their goal/s, which is known, and for them the goals justified the means. Planning is not to coerce the people [Patrick Geddes] but demands vision with insight into that which is.

Our ancestors acknowledged the presence of water in life by sanctifying it and associating with it in the rituals from birth to death, and in the religious places. They built lakes and tanks within and around cities (Ill. 2) and tanks for the villages (Ill. 3). They built great Ghats along the rivers, and the rivers were sacred and mothers (Ill. 4) to the people. Rivers became places of pilgrimages. They brought people together, including those from the far away dry places in contact with water. People regularly took holy dip in the sea. It was a national policy for health, education and national integration, which no amount of preaching, coaching and slogans can ever achieve.

Modern developments of concrete jungles in the cities have created heat islands. The modern Indian City planner continued to ape western models and manuals instead of studying and learning from indigenous Indian habitat planning. Indigenous cities have city centers with lakes. The modern city centre displays ‘Car Parks’ The planners perhaps do not recognize water beyond its use for plumbing, sanitation, construction and aesthetics of hedonism.

But the worst of all draughts is that what is ‘known’ of the environment from virtual reality of books and multi-media, is hardly ‘witnessed’ and rarely ‘experienced’ in the daily personal and social life. The coming generations are successively and progressively draught- stricken, not only in urban areas but also in rural areas, waiting for some white angel to come with magic wand to solve their problems. We perhaps ‘know’ intellectually the worth of water, but are we intrinsically ‘aware’ of water beyond H2O? We have taken water too much for granted.

Water Parks as Public Open Places

The Indian society is caught up in the web of vertical and horizontal divisions. The vertical divisions of caste, which brought the society to the decadent state, once denied the access to the untouchables to water on community wells. The horizontal division is of the class and status, which was successfully grafted by the British Metropolitan Imperialism [David Canndine, ‘Ornamentalism’, Penguin] on the fertile soil of the feudal society. Now the class, the upper division is colonizing even the water in the name of common good.

Water – one of the five elements, instead of becoming unifying element for the society is a cause for conflict between class and the underclass. The sayings, such as, ‘One cannot draw a line on the water’; ‘River is afire’ [Kabir]; ‘Water goes to sleep. Water gets (wakes) up” [Indian farmers] can only be learnt from the water itself, not by discourses and treatises. In the cyber age of animated virtual reality it is not even a remote possibility to learn the lesson. It will only lead to aggravate the conflict, perhaps leading to annihilation of the underclass. To learn from water, however, there is no bar of gender, age, caste, creed, class and status.

We therefore need ‘Water Parks’ alike ‘Public Parks’ and ‘Play Grounds’. Perhaps they may be combined. Water Parks need to be developed as public open places in the cities and rural areas, both, in all regions.

Water Parks, perhaps, are not written in any known treatise or manual, ancient or modern, on architecture and planning. Every society, however, has to prepare its own treatise as expression of its own time. We may learn from the past, but cannot imitate it.

Water Park has three primary conditions

It must have water – sweet or salt water; it must have aquatic life – fishes, amphibians and plants; it must be accessible to any citizen to work with hands, basic tools and equipment and to develop, maintain and enjoy the fruits – the products of it.

What is Water Park?

We must clearly understand what is Water Park. Water Park is not a water–conditioned nightmare created by the corporate sector [or the class] in the metropolitan cities fashioned after Disney Land, Water Kingdom, for entertainment and profiteering, or rickety fountains peeing around artificial rookeries and statuaries, imprisoned by fencings, gating and ticketing. Water Park is not glass–conditioned aquarium. Water Park is not a water sports centre; though both could co-exist. Water Park is not a swimming pool, but both could be neighbours on strict conditions. For example, ‘Chlorine’ and such other poisons consumed by humans is the enemy of Water Park.

Rice paddy fields (Ill. 5), though seasonal, are nearest to a good example of ‘water parks’. They are rich with flora and fauna, and are generally breeding places for fish. Some peasants dig ponds in the fields to conserve fish where they are assured of water even after the harvest.

We can derive a broad outline about what should be Water Park?

1. Water Park must have a water body – sweet water or salt water, which is built with organic materials, where aquatic life – fishes, amphibians and plants – could live and grow in the natural and appropriate conditions. It should be designed for breeding, conserving and cultivation of all kinds of aquatic life forms, particularly the species that are on the verge of extinction

2. Water Park should have infrastructure according to its increasing complexity, such as, water testing equipment, laboratory, water recycling plants, water conservation models, various irrigation systems etc. in working conditions.

3. It should be provided by various working models of ‘water machines’, such as pumps, windmills, desalination plants, mini-turbines, even one where Archimedes exclaimed “Eureka! Eureka!”

4. Design, content and context should be appropriate to the region, land characteristics, climate etc. Local cultures and traditions should find appropriate place and featured at the water parks without the taboo of secularism.

5. Area of Water Park as a public open place could be of any size above one half acre.

6. Water Park as a public open place should be owned, developed, managed and maintained on participatory basis by the members of the local community who actually work with their own hands and should enjoy income from its proceeds.

7. It is anticipated that the Water Park has the educative as well as leisure value through creative efforts of the participants.

How Water Parks?

Industrialization destroyed the community and created ‘mass society’. It also created institutions, which take control of almost every aspect of life of individual and the collective, which has resulted in loosing their autonomy of decision and action. Thus there is want of identity, or the identity crisis.

Water Park is likely to get caught up in the spider’s web of natty-gritty of institutionalisation, i.e. ownership, funding, MoU, constitution, rules and regulations, office bearers, trustees, and many imaginable or unimaginable issues raised by the officialdom, and may even see the last drop of water lost in the heat…before it actually materializes.

It is time to counter the forces of the Class and the Status by the Community and Water as basic need. Therefore now in the changing times we need to change the mindset. We can learn a lot from the ethnic communities and their institutions, which still prevail. In Orissa and Bengal, for example, in the villages, almost every household has a pond. This practice must have been there for many thousand years. No building bye-laws, development control rules,, or no Indian Standards [IS], or National Building Code {NBC] are needed here. (The author regrets the mention here for fear of the zombies in the bureaucracy may come up with their axe to destroy this tradition.)

In the cities the cars and the ‘Car Parks’ are given thousand of acres of land for the moving and stationary cars by legal instrument. What is a big deal for the law making and law-abiding elite citizens to give equivalent of that area for the ‘Water Parks’ in the urban areas under the instrument of law?

Water Parks should be attached to, beginning from primary schools to colleges and universities to all educational institutions, along with playgrounds, as an instrument of non-formal education; to the public parks in the urban areas. Water Parks should be attached to all the government, judicial and legislative institutions, beginning from the President’s Palace, the Supreme Court, and the Parliament at New Delhi to the offices of Gram Panchayat, Talathi and Tahasildar at village and the Taluka levels, as an instrument of non-formal adult education; all the estates of corporate sector and NGO sector, and local self–government sector in proportion of their ‘land–buildings–cars’ holdings. In urban areas water parks should be part of the Compulsory Common Open Spaces or Recreation Grounds to all housing – mass housing – Real Estate Housing – development. If the Revenue Act could be implemented, why not the Water Park Act?

All the environmental activists and pundits can join in the building the Water Parks all over the country. The land required, 3,287,000 square kilometres is there. All that is needed is to “catch a drop”. Water Parks could at least provide work and livelihood to the under-privileged of the underclass, provided these are not hijacked by the class, or the elite class, or the corporate society under different garbs, such as ‘privatisation.

After all why do people build temples – with or without images – in the name of Creator? Water Park is the celebration of Life.

¬¬¬¬
Remigius de Souza
(9-4-1997, Revised 30-8-2001)
Mumbai

© Remigius de Souza., all rights reserved.
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The British-made education in India

The British-made education in India
by Remigius de Souza


A few educated persons read “Indian Schooling” (published in 1990). Their response prompted me to elaborate my 600-word article. I continued to work on the issue of education.

The British-made education, since its inception in India, has indeed made an impact upon its subjects, either to be aware of their subjugation by the British rule and rebel or to submit without a second thought and accept colonial masters then and now the neo-colonial.

Sixty years of Independence failed to bring any relevant change appropriated to her people in the literacy and education in the country. Though the British Empire collapsed in due times its education system has become global, with minor adjustments, though it’s neither universal nor relevant in the changing times.

There were merely ten percent educated people when the late G. K. Gokhale tried to bring his bill of Compulsory Primary Education in the Privy Council. Now it is claimed the literacy level is at 60 percent, though it varies from 100 to 4/5 percent in different places. Most of them do not practice or use literacy effectively.

The majority – the peasants – have stubbornly keeping away from the formal schooling for obvious and often repeated reason: It is irrelevant for their survival (Read: to live sanely), or in other words, it lacks imparting “life-supporting skills”. Eighteen years after writing this article I feel it is still valid.

I continue to post more on education.



© Remigius de Souza
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