Graphic Reflections

A heart beat perhaps best describes being alive and if you ‘look’ at it closely (or symbolically), being alive means facing or experiencing the continuous ups and downs of life

The above graphic looks at a typical north / north-west Indian city from the perspective of water availability and depicts four scenarios: 1. The current or past scenario wherein rainwater falling over a limited area and collected in nearby lake/s is distributed to the city. Here, water for the entire city is essentially accumulated at one location. 2. An ideal scenario wherein water collection is widespread and each property collects rainwater for domestic use and enough water is also collected in nearby lake/s. So rainwater falling over a much wider area is utilised. 3. This scenario depicts the foolish and alarming reality of today and tomorrow, wherein owing to erratic rainfall and destruction of catchment areas, enough water is not collected in lake/s that supply municipal water, city dwellers ignore precious rainwater and let it go to waste, depending instead on sub-standard water pumped out of deep borewells. Many are forced to buy expensive water the quality of which can be questionable. 4. This scenario depicts what we should be doing or what we will ultimately be forced to do, wherein almost all properties (spread over a much larger area) collect rainwater, use it for domestic purposes and ease off pressure on already stressed lakes and groundwater reserves, which could also be recharged by chanelling excess rainwater back into the ground.

If you are one of those rare Indian city dwellers who collect rainwater in your property, then you will probably know how much water a single rooftop can collect in a large tank from just one day’s good rain, often it can be judiciously used for months! If you are not one of them, it’s time you at least started thinking about it! Usually, rainwater collection system costs less than a deep borewell and in terms of water quality, there can be no comparison to rainwater!

This graphic attempts to illustrate the correlation between urban development process in India and falling availability of water, groundwater in particular. Construction of buildings and infrastructure requires heavy use of water, most of which is pumped out of the ground. Water is then used intensively by people who reside / work in the buildings with little or no attempt to recharge the groundwater or to harvest or store rainwater. Moreover, nearby lakes or ponds that are some of the most efficient means of recharging groundwater, are filled up and the ‘new’ land used for more buildings. Once the groundwater depletes or becomes unfit for consumption, many residents are forced to leave and those who stay have to buy expensive commercial water and in many cases the value and usefulness of ‘developed’ properties declines. If you look at the current urban development trend in India from the perspective of water (the liquid critical for sustenance of life), that it is about short-term gains and long-term loss is not difficult to see..

One raisin, that I could have dropped out of a box of dry fruits without noticing, turned out to be a mountain of food when it was presented to a typically hardworking group of red ants who decided to explore my kitchen. An incision was made on top of the raisin and morsels were eaten and taken away with great care and at ant’s pace

This graphic attempts to illustrate the life span of a littered PET bottle, as inspired by the shape of the bottle itself. With a substantial time spent in production, shipping and shelf display, its usage time is usually the shortest, often just a few minutes and if not disposed properly (like this one which I found in the midst of vegetation at Central Park, Jaipur), it can lie for months, sometimes years and decades, as nothing but waste…

Above is a random set of phrases that I found myself and some people uttering. Nitpicking (looking for small or unimportant faults in others, especially in order to criticize unnecessarily), seems to be a widespread human trait at the base of which, perhaps, lie the delusions of self being superior to other/s and of the world being a perfect place. How much time, energy and very often anger we waste (and sometimes spoil our relationships) over trivial matters is amusing, to say the least.

While walking through the Jaipur walled city one evening, I came across a very small, dimly lit, one-man shop that specialised in repairing sewing machines. Some of the machines with him were very old, pieces of antiques in their own right. A walk through the old part of most big cities in India should reveal small repair shops / repair men who would fix anything from old blenders to radios to the oldest model of scooters. The not-so-well-to-do, the poor and many others in India do not (or can not) embrace the ‘throwaway’ or ‘upgrade’ culture.

As Indian cities go through a supermarket revolution, chances of you frequently coming home with cash register bills would be high The back side of most such bills is plain and makes for great reminder/handy notes.

These photographs were taken a couple of years ago in the city of Jaipur (Rajasthan) India. The one on left shows a wall from the historic walled city (also known as the Pink City). The one on the right shows a conglomerate rock located inside a city park. One major difference between these two is that the wall is less than 300 years old whereas the rock is estimated to be about 1600 million years old (yes!). Many (man-made) walls and structures in the Jaipur walled city are in a state of decay, some have crumbled, yet the rocks in the nearby Aravalli hills look as good as new! Isn’t nature’s ability to ‘maintain’ itself amazing?

This graphic shows the area in which a kitten born in our house lived for a couple of months, before consuming a dead rat and dying. In her brief life, this was her ‘world’, the only world she saw or knew.