Virtual Residency Day Twelve; Indian Water

Ravi, Rohini and Hemant and I have been in a dialog over the top page image that will be used this week on my site to represent Khoj International. The issue was what did the drawing I made of traditional women drawing water from a well vs. the phtograph Hemant sent me, which I will use, of delivery of water in trucks to modern New Delhi evoke either for Indians or Westerners. When I master the next step in my software learning curve, I will insert the provocative drawing.

Meanwhile, the discussions in private emails have been fascinating. I wrote Ravi today:

What interests me are the mechanics of how indigenous and traditional peoples negotiate scarce resources and how to apply that knowledge to our modern world. Too often, as modern cultures scramble for competitive market edge, those techniques get lost. I’d like to explore this further about Indian water resources. The advantage of traditional means, is that it usually is sustainable, doesn’t create more carbon emissions. The caveat is that when you try to interface traditional and modern systems, that’s when you get into more intransigent human problems.

What Ravi had written that evoked that response was:

"tradition ... has many problems of equality and power relationships between women - men , class and caste......but we seem to think that a machine can change us, while actually we must change inside ourselves, and no machine can help, in fact often machines only serve the more powerful, such as large corporations...and the very rich.

"
Just back from a meeting which was on the banks of the mighty Ganges in the hill town of Rishikesh. Here the river just decends into the plains from the hills, and is a very mighty torrent. Especially now, with the snows melting and the monsoon in the upper reaches, it is like a roar of a torrential flow of water, which will finally meet the ocean 2500 km away in the Bay of Bengal. On its way it will feed millions of people, and also wreck havoc on those in its way. It is the lifeline of north India and mythologically its cultural sustenance. It is also the planet in action, as for millions of years water has circulated through condensation and the monsoon, into snow ice, glaciers and our lifeline of water, for irrigation and food.

yet many of us, especially the disadvantaged are unable to find water when we need it for drinking, bathing or irrigating. We also pollute what we have. Or are totally unaware of the fact that water is key to this planet's ecology, life and systems. This is man. Can see what he/she needs, but not aware of its vulnerability. So most people will not know that water comes from a river, or from the snow and ice, that it has done a massive journey to come to ones table in a glass. We only want to use it. It is not differnt from living as if we will never die, that life will go on forever. Caught in our own needs and in fulfilling them at the expense of anyone else's we seem to forget our larger truths.

While we are ecological beings, depandant on water - air, nature for our survival, we have lost our ecological connections, believing ourselves to be isolated and unconnected. In times when people drew water from the wells, water was still precious, not it just comes from a tap. maybe the loss of the well, and the loss of knowing that food grows in fields and not in supermarkets, shows that while we progress in technological terms, we are not necessarily more aware human beings. Water in trucks comes from our groundwater, like it did in our wells, only this time we can suck up more, much more.

I am not for tradionalism, for it has many problem, but our progress must be measured more in terms of terms like 'respect, awareness, consiousness, I think, and not in only terms of technology and its inherant politics.... cannot get the river out of my mind!" - Ravi Agarwal