Tag: sustainability

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Stories

Space Matters

3D architectural site plan as a wall display from Somaya Sampat's Studio

For the past few years we’ve been looking to buy a home, and we’ve looked at numerous fancy flyers by builders. But nothing has ever caught our imagination. Year after year, all we’ve seen are towers of concrete, embellished with heat-trapping glass. These so-called modern constructions conveniently ignore the realities of climate change. The prospective home buyers are effectively going to live in ovens, necessitating the use of air conditioning, further compounding the problem.

We love open, airy spaces with ample natural light, and yet, these townships pack houses like sardines. Projects these days claim to include rainwater harvesting, just to hop on the green bandwagon. But few even venture close to recycling grey water from kitchen sinks. With every house invariably keeping RO water purifiers, it makes sense to collect the waste water from these appliances for sanitation use. There is also immense opportunity to use rooftops for solar energy. None of these ideas are earth-shattering. Indeed, many of them have been implemented in other parts of the country. But the big builders of Delhi-NCR seem to lack inspiration to truly innovate.

If only they’d hired (or taken inspiration from) the architects of the calibre featured in the Samatva pavilion of IAADB23.

The Sustainable Eco-Literate Architect

Revathi Kamath’s treatise on the sustainable eco-literate architect.

The pioneer of mud architecture, Revathi Kamath wrote in her treatise on the sustainable eco-literate architect:

The architectural mind needs to be aware of the mathematics of complexity and geometries of nature—Mandelbrot sets, Julia sets, Berkhoff’s bagel, Koch curves, Buddhist and Hindu Mandalas—the list is constantly growing. The immense beauty that is latent in the use of these conceptual tools needs to be appreciated and replace the simplistic dogmas of the “cleanlineists,” the functional packaging of commercial space in boxes, the squares and rectangles on Vaastu and Feng-Shui pandits, layouts of military camps and cantonments, imperial palaces, administrative centres and corporate parks.”

Humanity must seek inspiration from nature and build to sustain, instead of merely using and dumping resources indiscriminately.

Take Kankana Narayan Dev, for example. Hailing from Assam, the architect takes inspiration from traditional, sustainable methods of construction in her work.

Furniture and building blocks that incorporate bamboo.
One of Kangana’s homes made with bamboo.

While Kankana works primarily with bamboo, Goa-based Tallulah D’Silva‘s material of choice is mud.

Tallulah D’Silva’s homestay that incorporates mud for construction
Revathi Kamath’s studio featuring a hand-crafted mud wall.

Sustainability wasn’t the only theme of Samatva. So was social inclusion and designing with empathy—something commercial builders could learn from.

One project that caught my eye was Sandhya Naidu Janardhan’s slum redevelopment work.

Building With Empathy

Sandhya Naidu Janardhan’s design process while working on slum redevelopment.

While on our home hunting spree, we visited dozens of construction sites. We sat in lavish sales offices, browsed through glossy brochures, walked inside heavily decorated sample flats and watched the brokers point at realistic scaled model of the buildings. The sheer amount of marketing glitter around these projects was mind-boggling.

But when you’re redeveloping a slum, it’s not as glamourous. You likely won’t have access to the kinds of resources the builders have. It would have been easy for Sandhya to have just drawn some cookie-cutter plans and got them approved without anyone batting an eyelid. But she chose to involve the community in her design process. The hallmark of a good designer is to understand the needs of the user—in this case, the people who would eventually live in the spaces she’d design.

Low fidelity models made with paper and wooden blocks.

By far my favourite exhibit was the small models made with paper and wooden blocks. Proof that one doesn’t need fancy photorealistic models to communicate a vision. What is needed, though, is the willingness to perform sound user research.

Would any big construction company ever care for their customers as much? We’re yet to find one that does.

The image at the top is a display from Somaya Sampat, formerly Somaya & Kalappa Consultants (SNK), at the Samatva Pavilion of IAADB23.

This post is a part of a long-ish series on the India Art, Architecture and Design Biennale 2023.

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Musings

One More Thing…

In our quest to capture virtual memories, we've built physical spaces to be Instagrammable.

How do you do it?

How do you manage to read all those tweets, post comments on YouTube, react to Instagram stories, finish the long reads on Medium and WordPress and catch up with emails? All while having a day job, socialising with friends, managing a decent workout and being up to date with current affairs and pop-culture.

I know I can’t.

I was a very, very late adopter of social media, primarily because I felt it was meant for lesser mortals, those who indulged in gossip. The narcissist that I am, I didn’t quite care about what other people did around me. I only wanted to write and share my thoughts to as wide an audience as I could.

I sceptically joined Facebook in mid 2013. And it wasn’t till 2017 that I joined Instagram. These occasions were so significant, that I wrote blog posts to confess about these mis-adventures. The only reason I have a Twitter account (I don’t care what they call it now, but I refuse to call it by any other name) is because my employer demanded I create one. Without that coercion, I would probably not have created it in 2014.

Then there’s LinkedIn, Flickr, Pinterest, YouTube, Behance… the list is far, far too long.

Over the years, I have tried to keep up with these services in patches and failed. I wonder how other people do it. And it bothers me that I am so digitally incompetent. I am everywhere, and yet, nowhere. At any given point of time, I can keep up with only one service. Everyone else is active everywhere.

When I think about all the different services that aim to ‘connect’ us in the world, all I see is this relentless barrage of information, and how miserable it makes me feel.

One More Thing

In 2019, I tried an experiment. I called it, the “Reverse Social Media.” I wanted to stop using social media, and instead focus on creating a community. I’d send out emails to people so that we could start one-on-one conversations. Needless to say, that experiment failed. I had ended up creating yet another digital footprint that I couldn’t manage. If you’re interested, you can find the archives of this experiment on Design Tuesdays.

In these first two decades of the twenty-first century, a certain Mr. Jobs made a catchphrase his own. “One more thing…” he’d say, at the end of his keynote, and announce something new. Steve Jobs’ characteristic style of delivering keynotes even has a name: Stevenote!

A side note: To me, those words will always belong to Uncle from Jackie Chan Adventures. The series aired during a time when information wasn’t as free-flowing as it is today, and when tech was only for geeks. What use was a business presentation to a teenager? So please allow me to indulge myself with TV memories from the early 2000s.

Source: Imgur

With the newsletters, I had created Uncle’s one more thing. More recently, that one more thing is Threads, from Meta. Sure, I’ve ‘created’ the ghost account, but it holds no meaning for me. To me, it’s just another username that’s gathering virtual dust.

The Digital Cobwebs

Remember the old days when we had hard disks and had backups of folders and backups of backups? Ah, those were simpler times. Those hard disks are gathering dust in a shelf somewhere.

Our digital clutter, on the other hand, is invisible, but several times worse. This digital clutter that we’ve chosen to create haunts me. Over the past few years, I’ve lost very close loved ones. But their profiles show up in recommendation feeds on social media. I don’t want to tell these behemoth companies that those are my dead relatives. The large tech companies have no business knowing this private information. But, at the same time, I don’t want their click-hungry algorithms to be so insensitive.

In my curiosity to explore the internet, I wonder how far my own footprint has landed. Who has my email address? Which database has a username attached to me?

Entrance to a cafe with yellow-coloured walls and black and white murals showing a coffee table and bar stools.
In our quest to share virtual memories, we’ve built physical spaces to be Instagrammable. How many people would have half-squatted to “sit” on the painted chairs on this pretty yellow wall? Guilty as charged. Location: Puducherry, India

Worse still are the chains I’ve tied around myself. Those accounts that I do know about, I find it hard to let go. It was easy to delete my Facebook (now Meta) account over three years ago. But Twitter is giving me a hard time. Not because I use it. I don’t. But because once I delete the account, my username will be available for use by someone else. And I shudder to think someone else will take on my identity. So much for me championing reuse and recycle.

There’s so much digital waste we’ve generated. All that waste is sitting on some server. Consuming electricity. Generating heat. And consuming more electricity to cool down. Every little piece of digital information I leave unattended reeks of a hypocritical sustainability advocate.

The Way Forward

I don’t have an easy answer to this mess. In this virtual chaos we’ve created, it’s a daily struggle to decide what to keep and what to discard. Which memories to hold on to, and which to let go.

A couple of months ago, out of sheer frustration, I embarked on a virtual housekeeping project. The task looked insurmountable, but I had to begin somewhere.

So, I looked for low-hanging fruits. I located those physical hard disks. I thought to myself, if I haven’t needed it in the last ten years, I won’t need it again. First, I transferred them to my Dropbox folder, so that everything was in one place, and then I began reviewing them.

So many duplicate photographs. Old portfolio files that I was once proud of, but now find ghastly. And those legacy file formats that I can neither open, nor have had the need to edit. I began hitting the delete key.

As Dropbox later informed me, I had deleted about 15000 files in the span of a week. It was a statistic I didn’t know I needed to hear. And it was so cathartic.

This was just the tip of the iceberg. There are several more files and photographs to go through. I’ve hit pause on that activity because, as I’ve now learned, I can’t focus on one thing constantly. Plus, frustration and adrenaline can fuel such binge-deleting sprees for only so long. But I hope to pick it up in patches.

My current project is to clear up the cobwebs of my blog drafts. Several of my last few posts have indeed been 3 – 4 year old drafts (this one included!) I’m still only 10% in, but seeing some virtual dust being cleaned up is helping me mentally.

I don’t know how far I’ll get. But I’m going to try. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. And the only way to tackle it is to take it one thing at a time.

On an unrelated note, how would you like me to narrate these stories via a podcast?

Categories
Musings

The Universe in My Palm


An astrophysicist, a Vedic scholar and an earthworm walk into a room.

Before I complete the story, here’s a question for you:

Do you believe in a higher power? A celestial being that’s constantly keeping a watch over us?

I used to, but now, I believe that we delude ourselves into thinking the universe cares about us. Stars don’t align for us. They just go about their lives, and we simply get caught in their world. We are, but mere cogs in their grand scheme.

Men In Black Movie ending sequence where the universe is revealed to be a marble in the hands of an alien.

The moon revolves around the earth, and it sways our mighty oceans with its movement. We, too, are just bags of warm water. Surely, the moon must have some impact on us. We get life-sustaining energy from the sun. And it’s such a long way from home. Surely, other stars must have their secret powers.

Ancient Indian astrologers had probably cracked some of the codes of the universe. But like much of our wisdom in other disciplines, it has been tossed out in our English-medium world that’s out to make some money off our ignorance.

What I lost in ancient wisdom, an American TV personality packaged into a shareable quote:

The four most common chemically active elements in the universe—hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen—are the four most common elements of life on Earth. We are not simply in the universe. The universe is in us.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier

This quote reminded of two types of universes: the more observable physical one, and the abstract, spiritual one that’s hidden within.

The Observable Universe: My Compost Pile

I started composting some seven years ago, and it has been the most rewarding, meditative experience. Composting gave me a glimpse into an entire self-sustaining ecosystem. At times, I felt like God, overseeing a world, controlling what goes in, and when it’s ready to harvest. But most of the time, it made me realise that we too are tiny insects in the compost pile of a higher force. We’re all transient creatures taking part in a grand spectacle called nature.

My compost pile is made up of organic material. The brown stuff has a lot of Carbon, the green stuff is rich in Nitrogen, and since kitchen waste tends to have a lot of water content, the other two components of Hydrogen and Oxygen complete the quartet. With each harvest, I see the universe in action.

I took whatever I learned and turned it into a small online workshop. Here’s a recording of a session done during the initial pandemic lockdown. I hope you enjoy.

The Hidden Universe Within: Aham Brahmasmi

The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, one of the first Upanishads dated to 7th century BC, has a popular phrase, Aham Brahmasmi. It translates to “I am the Brahman.” The Brahman here is an abstract concept that may be interpreted as being the universal truth, cosmic energy, perhaps even God.

Side Note: This Brahman is not to be confused with the caste, which is pronounced differently. One’s caste is defined by one’s profession—and is neither discriminatory not hereditary. But that’s a different misconception to be dealt with by more learned scholars.

Aham Brahmasmi is a phrase that’s close to my heart because it instills a feeling of being complete, without relying on any external validation for our existence. We hold immense potential within us. If we channel it well enough, we can accomplish anything.

I love this Mahavakya (phrase) so much, that I even have a ring with the phrase written in Devanagari calligraphy.

So what happened to our astrophysicist, Vedic scholar and the earthworm? The two humans spent the whole time arguing over who was right, while the earthworm just chewed its way around the room till there was nothing left except life-sustaining matter.

The featured image at the top is of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose Island, where nature has reclaimed man-made buildings, creating the most stunning root displays. Location: Andaman and Nicobar Islands, India.

Categories
Musings

A Ray of Hope


I took out the sketchbook from my cupboard, and began drawing. I don’t quite remember, why. I didn’t set out to draw anything in particular. Perhaps, I had just wanted to rediscover what it felt like, to put pencil on paper.

After about an hour, I felt happy with what I had drawn. I wrote down the date and time below the drawing, 27 November 2019, 9:30 PM – 10:30 PM. And then I went to sleep.

Pencil drawing
Setting the mind and body free

For several years, my sketchbook has been gathering dust in our cupboard. Why? Because I was afraid. Afraid that I would ruin a perfectly clean sheet of A3 drawing paper. That I’d draw something that was not worth showing to anyone.

That November night, I felt that I had achieved something. I had drawn something that looked half decent, and not ruined the sheet. And I slept soundly.

What I didn’t realise then, was that I slept happy, because I had let myself loose and enjoyed the process. I just wanted to draw. And the outcome, just happened to look nice to me.

This realisation hit me earlier this month, when I enrolled for an online sketching class.

For five days, I studied one-point perspective, drawing lines that vanished into the horizon. I spent several hours a day, trying to complete each of the assignments in time. Initially, I fretted over getting each of the lines neat and straight. By the time I had completed my twenty-fifth drawing assignment, I began worrying less about what the final outcome looked like. Completing the assignment, was far more important, than making it look perfect. And so, I just began enjoying the process by drawing freehand. I traced over the pencil lines with my pen, without using a scale.

I had removed the weight of expectation off my shoulder, and that left me feeling deeply relaxed.

With this newfound realisation, I reopened my sketchbook over the weekend, flipped over to that November sketch, and then did something I have never done in my life. I began erasing my drawing.

I erased the dark lines and the shading in between. But I left the faint outlines of the original in place.

I chose colour pencils from my kit — colours to represent nature: sun, fire, trees, wind and water. Then I slid open the blade of the cutter, and began shaving away the wood at the edges of my colour pencils. Each stroke peeling away years of dirt, negligence, and guilt.

And then, I let my hand run free. I ran a damp brush over the coloured areas of the drawing. A pastel shade drenched parts of the paper. A few blobs of water dried in place without blending in. I dipped the pencil tips in water, and let them run deep and dark, revealing each stroke. With each dip, the colour ran for a centimetre or two. In no time, the pencil tips shrunk. Another round under the cutter, and more of the colour lay exposed.

A few hours late into the night, and then a few more the next morning, and my drawing was complete.


I shared this picture on social media, and asked friends to provide a caption. Here’s a list of all the suggestions I received.

  • Sukriti (beautiful creation)
  • There is a rainbow of hope, life, vitality on our way…
  • Vapusa (nature, beauty)
  • Emerging path
  • Jeevan chakra (circle of life)
  • Ray of hope (suggested twice!)
  • The happy sun
  • Break the cycle
  • Circuit breaker
  • Liberation at any step

What surprised me, was that each of the suggestions revolved around nature, beauty, life, and hope.

These are the themes that we are collectively experiencing these days.

For perhaps the first time in our lives, we are living in uncertainty. All these years, we have been taking our lives for granted. We have tortured and exploited nature past its limits.

Now that large section of people are forced indoors, I am happy that nature has got a break from us. It had barely been a few days into the lockdown, that we all breathed clean air, saw blue skies, and even saw stars at night.

Clear blue skies and clean air, that prompted some stories on Instagram on 28 March 2020

Earlier today, a weaver bird began building a nest in the balcony of my parents’ apartment! And what a day for this to happen.

Today is the 50th anniversary of World Earth Day.

Yes, our planet is a mess right now. Scientists have been ringing the alarm bells on climate change for years now, predicting that we are already too late to turn things around and make amends.

But, if there’s one thing I’ve learnt over the past few weeks, is that we have hope. Given a chance, nature can recover (and perhaps forgive us).

Here’s hoping you are safe and healthy.

Here’s hoping our planet remains safe and healthy.

More stories from other publications

Here are some stories I’ve written for different publications over the past few weeks, all related to the current Covid-19 Pandemic, how it’s impacted our life, and what we can learn about how to live sustainably in the future.

Design Tuesdays

The Virus Within

I’ve been looking at this scenario as an opportunity for companies to go fully remote. Most freelancers, including me, have not had to change our lifestyles much, as we’re used to working remotely. We’re already using technology all around us. If we could reduce our commute to work, we’d significantly reduce the fuel emissions from transportation…

Read More

Basicolans

When Everything Comes to a Halt

In our hyper connected world, and the ease with which we can now travel, it seems difficult to be confined to a small area. Yet, it is some of the technology behind this hyper connectedness, that makes it possible to remain connected, while being distant…

Read more

Travel Tales

The Marooned Traveller

So here we are, in 2020. Quarantined due to a pandemic. Travel, as we knew it for the last few years, and to a large extent, took for granted, has come to a grinding halt.

I can’t help but think that this is some grand cosmic conspiracy, to put us in our place — literally. To slow us down. 

Read More
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Hobbies Musings Stories

A whole new world


(Continued from “We’ll draw a green thumb”)

I watched my father-in-law poke a few holes into the bag with the screwdriver. He left it in the corner, and turned around to find me in a happy daze.

Here I was fretting about the lack of an actual ground. ‘One can’t possibly compost without a hole in the ground,’ I thought to myself. And there he was, coolly collecting all the kitchen waste into a plastic bag to make a compost bag in our tiny apartment balcony.

After my in-laws returned to their home, we continued to add kitchen waste to this make-shift compost bag, excited about harvesting compost.

But something wasn’t quite right.

For starters, it smelt bad. Very, very bad.

And it was super soggy – dripping brown smelly liquid wherever we kept it.

And then there were the maggots. Lots of them.

I was sure that I wanted to compost waste, and was determined to do so. But was it to be as yucky as this? Neither of us had any idea. And so we shot the question out into the electrical void – the internet.

The internet informed us what was going wrong. The short answer: our compost was out of ‘balance’ and had too much moisture*.

To solve our immediate composting crisis, we added shredded newspaper, and left the bag slightly open, in the furthest corner of our balcony. Next step: we decided to get a proper composter.

Fast-forward a couple of months, and we welcomed our Kambha.

The Kambha is a terracotta composter made by a Bengaluru based NGO, Daily Dump. There really isn’t much to it: three earthen pots with holes on the sides. While the top two had a rope mesh at the bottom, the third one was closed at the bottom. They stacked up neatly. I marvelled at the simplicity of its design.

We watched the instructional video and transferred our (now utterly disgusting) waste and added some of the ‘remix’ material supplied by the organisation. The ‘remix’ material and the terracotta absorbed the excess moisture, and within a couple of days the compost stopped smelling.

As I learnt soon enough, the compost pile is as much a living organism as you and me. Needing a well balanced diet, breathing in oxygen, and exhaling carbon dioxide. And if it is malnourished or there is something wrong with its digestion, it emits a foul smell.

As for the maggots, they stopped bothering me. The composter was now a self enclosed eco-system. The compost pile was its earth. And a host of creatures grazed on its lands. With the plastic bag out of the way, the air around the compost became more breathable, and the fruit flies joined the maggots. Soon the land sprung shoots of large fungi, and even a sapling here and there. And the fungus gnats appeared. The maggots slowly reduced in number, as the competition for food grew. And then came the spiders – the top of the food chain, preying upon the insects.

All the while the kitchen waste continued to reduce. What was first green, yellow and purple slowly turned a rich, dark brown colour, and it smelt sweet – like Mother Nature.

* For the long answer, here’s me explaining the science in an Instagram live:

Categories
Hobbies Stories

“We’ll draw a green thumb”


“Why can’t I have green fingers?” I asked my unsuspecting friend, one day.

“It seems everything I plant just refuses to grow. Everyone in my family has green thumbs. Why am I not able to grow even the easiest of plants?”

“Oh, is that all?” said my friend. “Don’t worry. One day, you and I will sit together and draw a big green thumb!”

I eventually married my reassuring friend. And sure enough, we began growing a few plants, most of which survived! One of my wishes had been fulfilled. But in my heart, I knew there was only one way my garden could be complete. If only we had a real garden.

A real garden, to me, was what my grandmother had at their house on the outskirts of Chennai – a lawn in the front, with three hibiscus trees, a car shed with a guava tree as a roof. Papaya on one side of the house, bananas on the other. The mango and lemon trees were in the backyard. There was even a pineapple plant, and two coconut palms – my father had brought coconut sprouts all the way from the Andaman Islands. There were numerous flowering plants and cacti too.

Almost every time that we’d visit, we’d carry a pineapple, mango, coconut or some lemons back home. Once, I saw my grandfather climb up a tall stool to harvest a bunch of bananas, while I stood nervously on the ground praying for his safety.

Having lived in apartments all my life, I had made peace with the fact that we probably wouldn’t be able to have that sort of an area for growing plants. But the one thing that completed the garden, was a compost pile.

At a very early age, we were initiated into composting by my grandmother. There was always a separate bin for kitchen waste, which she’d dump into the pit in the backyard, near the fence.

Back home, my mother did what she could, to use the kitchen waste for the flowerpots – the coffee grounds and tea leaves almost always ended up going to the flowerpots in the balcony. And that was the closest, I thought, that we could get to reusing kitchen waste. Up until recently, that is.

“What are you doing?” I asked my father-in-law. He looked mischievously at me, and picked up the screw driver from the kitchen.

My father-in-law, I found out soon after I got married, loved plants. Our garden was minuscule compared to his large terrace garden. And when he first saw the small take-out containers I had re-purposed into planters, he remarked. “They need a bigger area to grow roots! These are too small!”

Perhaps he saw potential in the garden, or recognised our shared love for plants – he quickly warmed up to the idea of a small garden. He procured a few more plants and helped grow the garden – even helping me repurpose more food containers!

It wasn’t unusual for him to tinker around with the plants. But on this particular day, he busied himself with something new.

I followed him to our tiny balcony.

“I am making compost,” he declared.

Read part 2: A whole new world