Schadenfreude and water

I'm considering becoming a lawn ornament. That way I can have a regular bath!

Someone wants to make a point and it's being made right now. Crisis has come very close on the heels of the warning. I'm amazed we have a warning system, not so much that it isn't an early warning one.

IISc has next to no water in the hostels, messes and the departments. They asked us to use fewer utensils this morning cause they didn't have any water to wash them with. Soon it will all be finger food. They were shouting at a kid for using drinking water to wash up, there was no water on the tap. We haven't had water in the hostel for two days, none in the lab now for one. Several depts haven't had any for days. IISc is considering (considering!) buying water I am told.

We've had four years of drought in Bangalore in my time here, between roughly 2001 and 2005 there were next to no rains. I lost the local population of my study animals to this drought, ask me I know. In those four years, there were maybe 10-15 days altogether that there was no water in my hostel, never a cut in the lab.

It just amazes me that theres a problem this year after its rained well two years in a row (Admittedly not in B'lore but elsewhere certainly and most of our water come from other catchments, I think, notably Kaveri which is kinda full right now). The problem is apparently at the 'corporation' level. So if they aren't sending us water right now, its either judicious preservation (yeah right!) or political need creation.

Whatever it is, it is fun, everyones already sprouting water bottles, hoarding. People are beginning look irritated, marginally dirtier and suddenly everyones interested in water. A few people are even giving the lawn waterers dirty looks. Maybe eventually someone will think of the very clever idea of hooking those perennially on lawn hoses (which get water from where? a borewell?) into underground sumps that go the rest of the institute and maybe it will tide us over a few days. If all else fails, see you on the lawns.

P.S. The block on blogspot and typepad seems to be here to stay. The guys at SERC never actually got back to me, which I suspect is code for 'Yes, it's blocked, whatcha gonna do about it?' Maybe I laughed too soon at my mates in NCBS and their incompatibility with Yahoo!

Access denied

I can't seem to access blogspot (or typepad) in IISc over some of last week and this one. So I hope those who read this site have feeds or know how to get around the block. Just google blogspot blocked and you'll get the cheats, posted when GOI decided to do the same.

I wonder whether it's the traffic watchers in SERC or the content watchers elsewhere....hmmm....Or off course technical glitches somewhere. IISc is not usually heavy-handed and blocks few things. Except off course images/files that have the words s*x, etc in them. Which is fun and games for reproductive biologists and people like me who work on cricket s*x! ('Long' distance foreplay actually.)

Water

They are all over campus, and get called by all kinds of names, herons, storks, cranes. Get it right people, they are Cattle egrets! And while they are closely related to those water-birds, they aren't actually that attached to water. Which is how they got to be on our relatively dry campus.

They get their names from the fact that they are seen following grazing cattle all over the countryside, picking up the insects kicked up from the grass. The downward bent head and intense stare, followed by a quick side to side bobbing of the head to judge distance by parallax, and then, wham, strike. A speared insect and a happy bird. But there are no cattle on campus and the birds needed to kick up their own prey.

Until they found a little trick. It probably began with wanting to cool off. They leave a little dish of water out for the birds in front of the library, I've seen them stand in it during the hot part of the day. Then I noticed the thing in the second picture. A bunch of them have learned to follow the gardener who waters the lawns everyday.

Maybe it was a cooling off instinct, and I was intrigued. So I watched them one afternoon, it was a cooler afternoon than many. They did follow the gardener around, not oblivious but not too wary of me. While they did seem to enjoy the water, the principal reason behind this activity seemed to be to pick up the insects the strong jet of water kicked up!

Now an aside and a rant, I watched them a while maybe an hour and half. The hose was running full blast the whole time, it was still running when I left. This lawn gets sprayed everyday. That night there was no water in my hostel, the previous day there was no water all day at my lab!

We got a mail a weekish ago asking us to conserve water and I believe this is a sensible thing to ask, we are very wasteful here. But the excesses are hardly happening in the labs, they are here. Spraying thousands of litres on a lawn in a year in which Bangalore has seen next to no rain!

I don't know how these things function, or actually I know. There is no regulation whatsoever of who does what! The nursery knows not or cares not of water shortages and no one will tell them. Its my pet peeve, this water business. A sump overflowed for three days before the same water dept turned up to fix it, I called thrice! Ah and calling! The folks who take civil/electrical complaints in this place will take complaints only in person! You can't email them or even call them. So you've to leave your lab during working hours and make a trip to their office to report a dripping tap which will maybe kinda get fixed. And working hours is very open you know, they turn up at 10:30, leave for coffee, lunch till two...indian govt office! So guess how many people actually report leaking taps? And then theres the leaking overheads, don't get me started...

So yes, I'll conserve water and for every drop I save, theres a tanker flowing down the drain! Here's a bit from Vikram Seth's 'The Elephant and the Tragopan' possibly based on the agitation against dams in Manipur and Nagaland. " Your pipes cry out for renovation./ Your storage tanks corrode and leak;/ The valves are loose, the washers weak./ I've seen the water gushing out/ From every reservoir and spout./ Repair them it will cost far less/ Than driving us to homelessness."

Like that story this one doesn't have an end, yet.

Fire stomping

After a long not very satisfying shoot (the highlight was a Hoopoe sighting) at the airfield, a group of kids ran out of the close-by colony asking to see the snake I was carrying. I wasn't, off course, and told them so. They carried on then with their games, whizzing around the airfield on little bikes. As I got ready to leave, some them started yelling 'fire, fire' and indeed there was one. Someone had carelessly thrown a cigarette. They put out this fire, along with the sole security guard there, using leafy branches, a little piss, water and their little feet. Just as they put one out another smaller one broke out, and threatened to be worse than the first. It was put out post haste.

They told me of a huge fire that had raged here some years ago threatening their houses. Their methods of fire control had proved ineffective and eventually fire engines had been called in. This is the second very large fire thats happened here (that I know of) in the last couple of years. There are always a few small ones, quickly put out by security guards or someone nearby. I helped put out the one in the second picture along with 10-15 guards. Its a scary experience, little ones start from nowhere just under your feet. The smoke is suffocating and your face and eyebrows get singed.

Fire is probably a part of the local ecology and there might be some seeds that need it to germinate. This grassland is a tinderbox in the dry season, waiting for the smallest spark. In the long run, it's going to be a serious hazard. Many of the new buildings that IISc is planning are going to be built around this area. I can just imagine the damage if a serious fire takes root. A glass bottle thrown carelessly concentrating the suns energy on dry fuel, a cigarette carelessly chucked into dry grass. We are so used to doing it in these parts of campus, I can't expect people in IISc will suddenly become careful when they get there. I hope there will be fire management systems in place when they do move. And walls, to keep the fools and their wastes in, and away from the airfield. At least, a designated smoking area (people will smoke, theres no way around it), with those huge ashtrays that used to be seen in old cinemas. And a waste disposal plan that doesn't involve chucking chemical bottles over the wall/fence. And off course plenty of hoses and fire fighting equipment and sprinklers...

Off course, the way IISc deals with trouble usually is to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I expect that the whole area will be bull-dozed and shorn to nothing (after the first fire, never before) and we will have lost a unique little ecological system. Or maybe not, maybe someone will think of it, maybe safeguards will be designed? And people will be able to peer out of their high windows over rolling grasslands and hear sweet sweet sweet.

(9th Feb '07: This post has nothing to do with the fire that occurred at MCBL last night. The two places are quite far apart.)