Z-Blogs

One of the inequalities of life is that children may not be allowed for many theatre productions...but adults can certainly go and enjoy children’s theatre. The enjoyment is all the more, when one goes with one’s own child...or grandchildren, because there are then multiple layers to the experience. There was a fairly large audience of children, accompanied by their parents or relatives,  to watch “How Cow Now Cow” by the Sandbox Collective a group that has just crossed its second birthday.   I have not watched the work of this young theatre group before, and I am always interested in…

I've been visiting a few schools lately, and I am rather disturbed by some of the things I see on the campuses. One school has no playground at all. Pointing to a tiny handkerchief of space, the  person talking to me says, "That is enough for our children." Another campus of the same school has a few small ornamental trees near the entrance gate. The entire campus is covered in concrete and the green of the trees are those which are in the neighbouring apartment buildiings. One school has very professional loops of  barbed wire on its compound wall.  …

I've been writing code for a while now. I first learned to program at age nine, and can now write an entire app on my own. The thing I've noticed, though, is that a lot of my friends seem to have a bit of a phobia of writing code.  The US may be pushing code in a big way, but in India, computer science still seems to be the realm of precious few. I take computer science in school, and there are only 7 others taking it out of a class of 40. There isn't a single girl in our…

In December 2016, a workshop on ‘Trees, Culture & Urban design’ was held in Bangalore as part of CEPT University’s Summer Winter School program. The focus of this 10-day winter school was to study the practice of tree worship in the city. Specifically, it looked at how people generate and sustain community spaces through worshipping the Peepul tree (Ficus Religiosa) shrine with its serpent stones and the raised platform around it, locally called the Ashwath katte. This workshop was based on previous research. The paper can be accessed here: The practice of tree worship and the territorial production of urban…

More than six years ago, when I was living at Brigade Millennium, there were rumours that the neighbourhood Chunchaghatta/ Chunchughatta Lake was going to be drained and would become a bus stand. This lake is one of the three erstwhile connected lakes in Puttenahalli, and being involved with the small Puttenahalli Lake, it was of particular interest. I went to the lake area to check out what was happening, and subsequently, Citizen Matters did a story that woke up the authorities. Recklessness choking pretty Chunchaghatta Lake can be read here.  The past year has seen renewed activity at Chunchaghatta Lake.…

There are two strong points of view about stray dogs in our city. One is that they are living beings, and deserve to live like many other creatures who share our living space. The other is that they are pests that must be removed. This view is especially held by those, and those whose children, have been bitten, sometimes fatally, by some of these animals. The method of removal most advocated is to sterlize the dogs, and BBMP, is not doing much about it. The numbers of the stray dogs on our roads is inversely proportional to the political will…

I got this photo of a stray dog, with a plastic juice or shake container in its mouth.     We have now conditioned even the animals around us to like processed food, lots of sugar. They have learnt to try and ingest plastic in a bid to get that food. I wonder where we are headed....

The EMPRI office at Doresanipalya Forest Campus was abuzz from 8 a.m. on Tuesday, 14th March 2017. EMPRI staff, researchers, citizen activists, representatives from BBMP, Hasiru Dala,  workers and rag pickers, all wearing black Tee shirts waited for the signal to start off a procession. The message was simple but vital -  Say no to Plastic.    Roping in a few residents from the area, we from PNLIT were also a part of the procession shouting slogans and walking from EMPRI Office towards our Puttenahalli Lake. It drizzled. People on the road took shelter and listened to our slogans as…

Padma Bhushan Sudha Ragunathan's concert on 25th February at MLR Convention Centre kept us enthralled from the first varnam. About a couple of hours into the concert, she gave a short speech appreciating our effort in restoring the lake and promising whatever help she could render to us and to the environment. This of course made the audience applaud but her next statement won us over completely. The day before the concert, she'd contacted a friend, Gayathri Gurumurthy who writes under the pen name of "Saraswathi" and got her to write a song celebrating lakes! Being a composer as well, Smt…

We are, according to the traditional calendar,only in Vasant Ritu. But in Bangalore, this is the hot season. The temperature is rising steadily, and so, too, is the demand for water. Sitting on a plateau, having depleted our water-table alarmingly, we are facing tremendous difficulties for water, and the fact was brought home to me by the sight of these women (it's still a sad fact of life that you will hardly find men queueing up with pots) sharing a water source, on this occasion, for washing.   How are we going to fare during Grishma Ritu, I wonder?