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Posts Tagged ‘india’

Monkey Wallah

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on August 4, 2014| 2 Comments »

If you have the right skills, you can meet some very peculiar employer needs. In India, for example, people who can imitate macaque monkeys’ enemies are currently in demand.

Sean McLain and Aditi Malhotra sent a report to the Wall Street Journal about Mahesh Nath. His “assignment last week: Imitating monkey hoots and barks to scare other primates away from the bungalow of a member of parliament. …

“The calls mimic the warning noises of a territorial alpha-male gray langur monkey — a natural enemy of the smaller macaque monkey that has infested the leafy heart of New Delhi.

“Mr. Nath, a slightly built 40-year-old with a broken arm, calls himself a ‘monkey wallah,’ a South Asian term that loosely translates to ‘monkey man.’ He is part of a team of 40 men hired by municipal authorities to shoo pesky macaques away from prominent places where they don’t belong.

“ ‘It’s not a bad way to earn my bread and butter, and it is all I’ve got to look after my three daughters,’ says Mr. Nath…

“Macaques are a real nuisance. They uproot vegetables, strip fruit trees bare, overturn garbage cans and raid garden parties. …

“Until last summer, the capital’s streets were patrolled by actual langurs. Monkey wallahs and their male primate partners manned posh neighborhoods … But the Indian government decided a year ago to enforce a rule against keeping langurs, which are protected under India’s wildlife law, in captivity.

“Without their langur partners, many monkey men swung into other professions. Those like Mr. Nath, who stuck with it, had to perfect their langur impersonations and come up with other tactics. …

“The biggest threat Mr. Nath faces, other than the monkey horde, is a sore throat from all the grunting. He gargles with a traditional remedy of alum and water to avoid losing his voice. I have to take care of my throat, it’s critical to my job,’ he says.”

More here.

Photo: Junho Kim
Mahesh Nath is a ‘monkey wallah,’ a South Asian term that loosely translates to ‘monkey man.’

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Glorious Paper Light Boxes

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 20, 2014| 2 Comments »

An early stage in the creation of a Hari & Deepti light box

Do you ever click on the links to the right, in my blog roll? My Dad’s Records, for example, has old blues recordings you’d be hard-pressed to find anywhere else.

And This Is Colossal is a constant wonder. Today the art and visual-culture site posted illuminated paper light boxes that have to be seen to be believed.

Says Colossal: “Deepti Nair and Harikrishnan Panicker (known collectively as Hari & Deepti) are an artist couple [originally from India] who create paper cut light boxes. Each diorama is made from layers of cut watercolor paper placed inside a shadow box and is lit from behind with flexible LED light strips. The small visual narratives depicted in each work often play off aspects of light including stars, flames, fireflies, and planets. The couple shares about their work …

‘What amazes us about the paper cut light boxes is the dichotomy of the piece in its lit and unlit state, the contrast is so stark that it has this mystical effect on the viewers.’ ”

More.

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Giant Nets, Floating

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on March 3, 2014| 4 Comments »

Another good one from This Is Colossal: Janet Echelman’s suspended net creations.

According to This Is Colossal, “In the late 1990s artist Janet Echelman traveled to India as a Fulbright Scholar with the intention of giving painting exhibitions around the country.

“She shipped her painting supplies ahead of time and landed in the fishing village of Mahabalipuram to begin her exhibitions with one major hitch: the painting supplies never arrived.

“While walking through the village Echelman was struck by the quality and variety of nets used by the local fisherman and questioned what it might look like if such nets were hung and illuminated in the air. Could it be a new approach to sculpture? …

“Echelman is currently embarking on her largest piece ever, a 700-foot-long sculpture that will be suspended over Vancouver … In collaboration with the Burrard Arts Foundation, she’s seeking funding via Kickstarter to make it happen. There’s all kinds of great prints, postcards, and shirts available so check it out.”

More here, at This Is Colossal, where you can see lots more nets. They will make you feel happy.

Art installation by Janet Echelman

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A Restaurant Founded on Gratitude

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on November 13, 2013| 4 Comments »

Pavithra Mehta writes at Yes! Magazine about a network of restaurants where guests are asked to “pay it forward.”

Mehta’s explanation is a little far out for me, but I know I wouldn’t mind eating at one of these places. They sound cheerful. And I would be happy to pay it forward.

“In Berkeley, Calif.,” Mehta writes, “the Karma Kitchen restaurant bases its business on the concept of gratitude. Each visitor can pay nothing or voluntarily pay for a meal for a future guest. …

“The bill comes with a note that explains their meal was a gift from someone who came before them. If they wish to pay it forward, they can make a contribution for someone who comes after them …

“More than six years [after its founding], Karma Kitchen is still going strong. It has served more than 30,000 meals and now has chapters in half-a-dozen cities around the world. And it is all sustained by gratitude.

“Karma Kitchen works on the deceptively simple premise that the heart that fills, spills. The nature of gratitude is to overflow its banks and circulate. It does not stand still. But remove that ineffable quality from the equation, and the virtuous cycle breaks down.

“The sociologist Georg Simmel called gratitude ‘the moral memory of mankind.’ It serves to connect us to each other in small, real, and human ways. Remove it from the fabric of our lives, and all relationship becomes an endless series of soulless transactions.”

More at Yes! here.

Video: Seva Café , Gujarat, India

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Crowd Planners Learn from Hindu Festival

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on September 30, 2013| Leave a Comment »

At Smithsonian magazine, Tom Downey explains why urban planners could learn a thing or two from a Hindu religious festival that occurs every 12 years.

“I arrived by taxi at the Kumbh [in India] at sunset, expecting throngs of cars, cows and human beings blocking all access points. Instead I glided comfortably into my camp, which sat on a hilltop. I looked out over the fleeting city before me: makeshift shelters constructed on the floodplain of a river that was sure to overflow again in a few months. …

“I’d come to witness the spectacle for myself, but also to meet a group of Harvard researchers from the university’s Graduate School of Design. Led by Rahul Mehrotra, an architect from Mumbai before he went stateside to teach, they would closely analyze this unparalleled feat of spontaneous urban organization.

“ ‘We call this a pop-up megacity,’ said Mehrotra, a bearded 54-year-old. ‘It’s a real city, but it’s built in just a few weeks to instantly accommodate tens of millions of residents and visitors. It’s fascinating in its own right, of course. But our main interest is in what can we learn from this city that we can then apply to designing and building all kinds of other pop-up megacities like it. Can what we see here teach us something that will help the next time the world has to build refugee camps or emergency settlements?’ …

“The Kumbh Mela works in a way that most other Indian cities do not in part because everyone is on their best behavior: Civil servants know that their careers will be defined by these few weeks in the national spotlight; members of the public arrive with a sense of purpose and community.” More here.

I think it goes to show that when large numbers of people are basically on the same page about the importance of something, miracles happen. Loaves and fishes get shared. People pick up their litter. Everyone feels they’ve been part of something big.

Photo: Alfred Yaghobzadeh
Cooks at the Hindu festival worked to feed millions.

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The Grandma Effect

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 14, 2013| 4 Comments »

John sent two articles about roles that grandparents are playing in children’s lives — in this case, grandmas.

The blog Microtask details Professor Sugata Mitra’s cool insights about the Grandma Effect.

“The theory is that grandmas are good at encouraging kids. They praise them and say things like: ‘Now that is clever dear, I’d never have been able to analyze the molecular structure of DNA all by myself!’ Supervising village children, Indian grandmothers got some impressive results: test scores almost doubled in two months …

“And the next step? The ‘Granny Cloud.’ While working at Newcastle University, Professor Mitra recruited over 200 UK grandmothers as volunteers. Broadcasting via webcam each ‘grandmother’ spends at least an hour a week encouraging classes of Indian school children. Some of the Indian locations are so remote that the Granny Cloud is the only access kids have to education.” More.

The second link that John sent has more on the Granny Cloud. Jane Wakefield writes for the BBC: “Jackie Barrow isn’t a granny yet but as a retired teacher she felt she might qualify for an advert in The Guardian newspaper calling for volunteers to help teach children in India.

“She did, and today, three years on, she is reading ‘Not Now Bernard’ via Skype to a small group of children in the Indian city of Pune.

“They love it and are engaged in the experience as she holds up an Easter egg to show them how children in the UK celebrated the recent holiday.” More.

Good work, Prof. Mitra! (Or as my grandson would say when I manage to attach the bike helmet properly, “Good work, Grandma!”) Everyone knows grandmas are cheerleaders, but Prof. Mitra took it to the next step.

Photo: Three-year-old photographer
Grandma saying, “Very creative camera work, Dear!”

grandma-art-photo

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Solar Technology Powers Poor Schools

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 18, 2013| Leave a Comment »

Global Envision is part of an effort at the nonprofit Mercy Corps “to foster a richer conversation about global poverty.”

Last fall, Global Envision’s Erin Butler set off to investigate technologies that help schools in impoverished parts of of the world.

“For some students, hopping on the school bus is hopping into the classroom. Four communities are using solar-powered mobile classrooms to overcome inaccessibility to the power grid.

“Last week,” writes Butler, “we looked at a bus in Chitradurga, India, that brought modern computer technology to students in energy-poor rural schools through solar power. SELCO, a private energy company, engineered the bus with 400 watts of solar modules, 10 laptops, fans, and lights.

“Circumventing the area’s erratic power supply with its solar panels, this bus provides much-needed modern computer education and exposure to the advantages of solar energy. Motoring through rural villages in Chitradurga since January 2012, the bus has reached ’60 schools and 2,081 children,’ the New Indian Express reported in early September. …

“Where there’s more water than land, boats replace buses, and with rising sea levels, low-income Bangladeshi students have difficulty getting to school altogether.

“Pushed to inaccessible riverside settlements that lack basic infrastructure, students often can’t get to school due to monsoon flooding. Shidhulai Swanirvar Sangstha, a nonprofit organization started by Mohammed Rezwan, rides the rising tides with his solar-powered floating schools.

“Trained as an architect and personally experienced with soggy school disruptions in Bangladesh, Rezwan rode a brainwave that led him to floating schools. Combining the best of traditional boat design and modern sustainable practices, the organization’s 54 boats have been operating since 2002 and have served over 90,000 families.”

Read about the other solar-powered schools here.

Photograph: Jayanta Shaw/Reuters/File
Students in Kolkata, India, check out their solar sunglasses as they prepare to watch the transit of Venus across the sun. The sun is being harnessed in India and Africa to power mobile solar classrooms for students.

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Hole in the Wall Education

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 1, 2012| 2 Comments »

John knows a good blog topic when he sees it. This tip he gave me is about minimally invasive education, which brings learning to the poorest of the poor.

According to wikipedia, “Dr. Sugata Mitra, Chief Scientist at NIIT, is credited with the discovery of Hole-in-the-Wall [HiWEL]. As early as 1982, he had been toying with the idea of unsupervised learning and computers.

“Finally, in 1999, he decided to test his ideas in the field. On 26th January, Dr. Mitra’s team carved a ‘hole in the wall’ that separated the NIIT premises from the adjoining slum in Kalkaji, New Delhi. Through this hole, a freely accessible computer was put up for use.

“This computer proved to be an instant hit among the slum dwellers, especially the children. With no prior experience, the children learned to use the computer on their own. This prompted Dr. Mitra to propose the following hypothesis: ‘The acquisition of basic computing skills by any set of children can be achieved through incidental learning provided the learners are given access to a suitable computing facility, with entertaining and motivating content and some minimal (human) guidance.’ ”

More at Hole-in-the-Wall.com. Also at the Christian Science Monitor.

And of course, I have to say a word about the program’s appearance in Bhutan, since Suzanne loves Bhutan.

“One of the major projects that HiWEL is in the process of executing is for the Royal Government of Bhutan. The project is part of a large Indo-Bhutan project formally known as the Chiphen Rigpel (broadly meaning ‘Enabling a society, Empowering a nation’). Chiphen Rigpel is an ambitious project designed to empower Bhutan to become a Knowledge-based society.” Read more.

Photograph: HiWEL
Playground Learning Stations in Dewathang Gewog of Samdrup Jongkhar District in Eastern Bhutan.

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Traveling Tellers in India

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Recently the Economist magazine offered a pretty comprehensive summary of efforts that government entities, nonprofits, and banks have made to get people who do not use banks (the unbanked) into the banking system. The push is not only because banks want customers. In fact, many of the new programs for reaching the unbanked require banks to make big concessions.

The bigger concern is that low-income people and immigrants  get taken advantage of by payday lenders, check cashers, and the like.

One program that is now in several U.S. cities actually started with the innovative Bank On San Francisco. Bank On San Francisco emerged to meet a need. First, a broad range of stakeholder groups evaluated why low-income people often preferred using payday lenders. Having found that the customers liked the hours, locations, and apparent clarity about costs, the groups developed a system that could meet more needs. (In New Haven the police were involved in a similar effort because too many immigrants carried all their cash on their persons, and that led to too many muggings.)

I’m interested in this issue, and so I was intrigued by a NY Times story on traveling tellers rural India.

“Swati Yashwant, a 29-year-old mother of one, is part of a growing legion of roving tellers intent on providing bank accounts to the nearly 50 percent of India’s 300 million households that do not have them. Using a laptop computer, wireless modem and fingerprint scanner, Ms. Yashwant opens accounts, takes deposits and processes money transfers for farmers and migrant workers in this small town 70 miles south of Mumbai, India’s financial capital.

“To reduce the risk of robbery or theft, no transaction by law may exceed 10,000 rupees (about $212). And in practice, many amount to no more than a dollar or two. But with the bulk of India’s population living in villages that have never had a bank branch, Ms. Yashwant, with her electronic devices, is a missionary of financial modernity.” Read more here.

The Indian idea looks like one that might be gainfully imported to the United States.

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