The Muralidharan Residence

Incredible people, the Muralidharan are, very generous and I still am not close to understanding them. They have South Indian eating habits, though their mother was raised in Northeast India. They are a resilient, caring, hard-working, intelligent and open-minded family. Tata (Aruna's grandfather) has hundreds of publications in his name as a researcher on limnology and sustainalby fisheries. He likes to eat oatmeal for dinner and make his own filtered coffee. Uncle (Aruna's father) is a well-read physics-reluctantly-turned-banker who is against eating raw vegetables and also eats oatmeal for dinner. He has an excellent memory, especially when it comes to cricket stats. And, Auntie is the one who knows who wants oatmeal and when, cooks and runs the household. She is an official cancer-survivor and has an amazing ability of admitting when she is wrong.

Ok, enough about them, their flat is amazing. It is a 3 bedroom place in Walkeshwar and the best part is they have windows on either sides of the house and they keep them all open all the time to let the sea breezes cross-ventilate the flat. Household electronics have shorter lives, but they say its still worth it.

Aruna enjoying the window breeze.

Uncle and Auntie at the table. Auntie is showing me how to choo choo and blow a train horn with my hand. I was not a successful student though I put in the effort. (photo credit: Aruna)

In South India, wearing a lungi (wrapper around waist) is common. Aditya, the Northern Indian son-in-law has picked up the lungi habits. Sweeping, however, is no easy task in lungi (photo credit: Aruna)

The Muralidharan residence served as our workspace for discussing in much more depth, learning from each others' experiences, and brainstorming ideas around this urban workshop idea. People can say similar sounding things, but only with time do you realize that you are actually sounding similar but meaning different. We also had some help for Anil, a local friend of Aditya and Aruna's.

On the Roof

Here are a couple views of Bombay on the night of Holi from the roof of the Muralidharan (Arundati's parents' flat).

Towers around and a party below in the biggest one-family garden you will find in this side of town. The chairman of the State Bank of India is retiring on April 1, so apparently he is set to have some parties, the first one starting on Holi. That mass of lights represent his garden, behind his house.

Looking out at the bay, towers, then water, then lights.

Pabal - a 1 year science boarding school

About 6 hours outside of Mumbai is a place where I've been wanting to go for awhile. The point of the visit was to observe how an often touted 'successful' rural tech development center runs, and what community it engages in what stages of the design process.

Vigyan Ashram means something like 'science community' after the Ghandian ashram concept. It brings in 40 students (grade 8-10) from around rural India for a 1 year program to 'learn by doing'. I visited for 4 days to absorb their approach to engaging communities with technology. In their case community is students (and this batch is all male). They treat their campus as a lab and then replicate what works with the students in a network of 72 rural schools through a program they have been developing over many years. They started in 1983.

Here students are learning measurement by quantifying the difference between cabbage that is grown with a special covering for the first 3 months and cabbage that is grown normally.

The students wake up at 6am to take care of the goats, chickens, and cows. Some of them are raising chicks for sale in the nearby community to earn some money and learn a bit of accounting.

This place is famous (at least in MIT development circles) for its FabLab. Fablabs are criticized widely for being MIT's parachuted lab sent round the world stocked with inappropriate tools (cnc routers, laser cutters) that inevitably break down and repairs are expensive and imported. This happens to be one of the highlighted successful ones, because it has a committed and handy manager, Vinayak. Vinayak is an electrical engineer who codes and soders the day away. They don't use much more than their circuit making tools, which is far under the aim of the FabLab (where you can make almost anything, most importantly machines that make almost anything themselves)

Vigyan Ashram did some work on displaced person housing and as a result ended up with a bunch of ferrocement geodesic domes used for staff housing, storage, and classes. This one houses the Energy and Environment 'subject' which is one of 4 subjects.

In these rural labs, look what they've made! a massive automatic solar concentrator for passive water heating! No, not actually. They bought the concentrator and water heater design was existent. But they did take a water heater design and convert it into a chicken egg incubator. They have a couple other solar cookers they bought and it seems they had some money given to develop a solar cooker village concept, where villagers can centralize the cooking of things like boiled potatoes for the entire village. Hmm...but the concentrator is cool - except when you put your hand in front of the focal point - then its burning hot.

This is a view from the vigyan ashram campus, which is just outside of the village Pabal. Below is some space where the students and staff go play cricket - almost every day unless the ball is lost.

Space is nice, and vigyan ashram has given its 5 acre, government-granted plot of land a history and tradition that speaks for itself. It's founder set out to revolutionize rural education in India and his organization has continued to be at the center of that long after he has gone. They certainly engage youth in technology and their 'community' is this year-long group of students as well as their wider school network. They focus on education rather than design or technology or innovation - which is an important lesson for what we want to do. In addition, Vigyan Ashram has tested some basic ways of connecting their hands-on education with communities. First, the communities are required to pay Rs.40,000 to have their school participate in the program with the understanding that their school will be offering services and basic tools that will be offered to the community at modest cost and the government then agrees to fund a teacher-trainer to be assigned to that school. How can a workshop in a community replicate some of these things? If you were able to set up multiple workshops in multiple communities tied by similar mission and values then maybe you could have exchanges of students at the 8-10th standard, but how can you offer them a certified education? Maybe Vigyan Ashram could help train us to offer a certified sort of program, but then we have become structured and exclusive.

In speaking with Vigyan them they expressed interest in expanding their labs, and were interested in setting up a more developed water, sanitation, and hygiene lab. An interesting idea, with a home to house, and a network to scale it. But the issue is finding the right people to do things like this, who can connect culturally and linguistically, who share the values of the location and are passion-driven rather than money-driven. But be careful with passion - a true Hindu might disapprove.

Aspiring contrasts

In Mumbai, I was introduced to the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, who is famous for his writings and efforts to connecting culture to development. He was fundamental to founding Pukar, which is a local organization mentioned 2 blogs earlier. In the little that I have read of Appadurai, his concept of development viewed rather as 'the capacity to aspire' is going to be churning in my head for a long while.

India Calling is a book that my parents sent my sister for christmas. Its a book that is sometimes scoffed at because of its optimistic picture it paints of India. Before going to Bombay, my thought was that anyone who says that India's youth are aspiring across caste boundaries has to be seeing a different India. Bombay is a different India.

From diversity in architecture to walkable streetscapes, even down to guys wearing shorts and breezes gusting over the hilly landscape Bombay is a pleasant place. More than all that, however, the people on the streets have a public culture of showing respect to each other, and seem to be reflective before reactive.

I took very few pictures, as I spent most of my time selfishly soaking it in for myself - but I left most of it intact for you to check out on your own.

Here are a couple contrasts:

Delhi historical downtown Victoria Terminus (VT) and the New Mumbai suburban rail station (Vashi). The link has a map to help visualize. In Bombay, there are 3 rail lines that act as above ground transport and are great because their doors are perennially open and you get a thrilling ride - safely inside but mostly out.)

My trip started at the Victoria Terminus. This is a side shot and does not do it justice (see link above).

And ended at the Vashi rail station. This station is called the International InfoTech Park and it was made to make profitable use of the land of a station by building office buildings up above it. I'm not sure what money goes where, but its certainly profitable on paper for the government I'm sure. Talk to Aditya, he knows these things.

Vashi station is below the massive white structure that is InfoTech Park

Across from the rail station is a mall with all the works. It was flooded with well-off people my age, many of them in groups happily enjoying the AC and smells of the mall.

Here is another set of contrasts from near the coast of Southern Mumbai in Walkeshvar where we were staying.

In this picture you can see a little worship temple with residential towers in the background. The land just beyond the temple is actually a burial ground for sadhus, or Hindu wandering holy men - note that most Hindus are burnt after death. This spot has not yet been displaced by developers, the right people have yet to say the right things into the right ears.

A bonus contrast comes alive when you zoom in on the icons on the worship temple. Ganesha (Hindu - wealth) is at the 90, Shiva (Hindu - destroyer, fertility) at the 180, a muslim icon* at 270, Christ is at the 360, and a sadhu in the middle. Take your pick is one response. Another is respect diverse religions. Or maybe expand your horizons.

*Since Muslims don't worship images, I assume this is probably Mecca depicted.

A breath of fresh air

Riding through Delhi, crossing the new Bandra Sea Link bridge, Aditya and Aruna were surprised by the haziness of the skyscrapers across the bay. Pollution may be up, but as far as I'm concerned 2 weeks in Bombay was a breath of fresh air.

Our train to Delhi was great. It was nice traveling with friends, especially friends that pick up Chacha Chaudhuri comic books for me to practice reading Hindi, not to mention bring food that is not deep-fried in oil.

Our visit to Mumbai was mainly to look into the possibilities of collaborating with Pukar (Partners for Urban Knowledge Action and Research), an organization that Aditya had worked with before going to MIT. We were also interested in meeting other people in various organizations that might have perspectives on the questions we are asking.

Pukar really began as a platform for people in Mumbai to do research in the city of Mumbai. The day we arrived was a book release of a book called Why Loiter which was interesting but long. The space it was in, however, was fascinating - Studio X, which is Mumbai's new chapter of a new network of spaces across major cities in the world. It is clearly well-funded given their space is in a very expensive area, and very large. And after an hour or so of listening to some audio visual exhibits they had it became clear that it was out of my league, and out of the league of any other poor people I know.

If you take the studio x concept and scale it down and then rehash it to the context of the urban poor rather than the "best minds of the world" it gives an idea of what we are thinking for our workshop space. But more with a focus on making things that are practical, makeable, and beneficial to the poor. As much as we are looking to put it in the most needy area, Studio X's are put in the 'liveliest historic downtowns', so for them maybe you just need to have the right amoung of rent money (and maybe know a few people), our entry into a community is much more about gradual trust and relationship building with the locals - the users of the space.

A picture from the book release at Mumbai's studio x.

After the book release we went on a street food forage. Aditya and Aruna have talked up the street food here enough and since Delhi and Agra had little more than deep-fried treats, I was certainly up for it. We had bhel puri, sev puri, sandwiches (a la bombay), grabbed a pao from the Yazdani bakery as it closed, had some chicken rolls, and cocunut water. Not bad. This exercise was also excellent for gauging the general rise in prices in Bombay. Food aside, the rent prices I was hearing were ridiculous - flats over New York rates.

Aditya remembering what Bombay tastes like from a street cocunut water vendor. (that is my camera case, actually just an old sock, making its appearance at the bottom of the picture.)

Delhi to Mumbai

From Agra it Aditya, Aruna, and I concluded that though we had good community connections there, the amount of work needed to set up a workshop there was more than we could commit to with our given capacity (me). We agreed that there is a lot of room for new approaches to development in Agra and that a co-creation design-build workshop model aimed at community youth would be worthwhile if we were able to build off of other organizations in the area. Unfortunately, those are too busy.

So we decided on a plan to visit some more organizations in Delhi and began planning a trip to Mumbai (aka Bombay) as well as a nearby rural area called Pabal. We gathered a list of people we'd like to get in touch with in these different locations and began meeting them while meanwhile discussing more and more how Aditya and Aruna's current situation might allow them to accompany me in this process of learning from other organizations' approaches to engaging communities with technologies that are meant to improve community health. Organizations on the list include, WSP, GIZ (formely GTZ), WaterAid, Chintan, Safe Water Network, and a few others including some individuals.

We had some luck in Delhi and got one field trip to see how a corporation was partnering with a non-profit to place a small-scale reverse osmosis (and soda ash and chlorine) water treatment plant in a rural area outside of Delhi. What we saw and heard was a bit shocking as far as how uninvolved community was and how they were trying to force-sell containers to the locals and get them to buy the water coming out. Questions of power, and appropriateness of technology aside, the water tasted great. And who's to say what is appropriate?

Next we were off to Mumbai, thanks to Aditya's train-purchasing skills. Here is where I learned that IRCTC's website makes for a much smoother ticket purchase than going in person. Catch is you need an Indian-accepted credit card.

Aditya and Aruna go to Agra

Aditya Pant and Arundati Muralidharan, who have been involved with Panch ever since its conception, returned to India in January after Aditya had completed his Masters in City Planning from MIT. Arundati (Aruna for short) is doing a PhD at Boston University. They are in the midst of discovering what to do next and agreed to come to Agra to discuss how we could imagine setting up a workshop space in the community I was at. We met a local organization, got caught up on each other's lives, and spoke with community members.

Here we are discussing outside the local tea stall. (Photo Credit: Aditya)

They speak flawless Hindi, so they were able to learn some new things about my community right away. For instance, they found out that my 'Bhabi' (or brother's sister of the family I have been adopted into) did not know that she had twins until she had them via C-section. In her drowsy state she heard the doctors discussing if they could just sell one of the babies since they were both boys and thus valuable - the mother would never know. She motioned 'no'. But her sterile relative later offered her a sum for one of them. She declined. Prompted by Arundati's skills for talking health, she explained that her boys were malnourished and have costed a total of 2 lakhs Rupees (~$4000 US) in health bills so far including the birth complications which accounted for about 40% of that. Aruna suggested she feed them dal (beans) every day, but she said, 'yeah, that's what doc said, but they just like chips and biscuits.'

Clothes are just a hindrance. Bhabi's twins at play. (photo credit: Arundati)

Of course, leave it to the nationals who have been to the Taj before to play tourists.

Aditya found a ladder climbing the truss of the old rail bridge crossing the Yamuna. He decided to climb up and admire the view, much to the chagrin of Aruna who stayed on the footpath citing balance complications. The sunsetting was nice, but all around us was a river polluted with faeces and trash of all kinds, much of it from Delhi I hear since the river connects the two cities.