Some more of...(or less, depending on how you see it)

Water. I missed World water day on the 22nd. Fortunately Magnum didn't and has not one but two fabulous features on it. The second is particularly...refreshing.

The other is merely a reminder. If you still haven't done this, Go up to your roof today, or to whatever is the highest point you can get to in IISc at 6:00 PM, stay there till the light dies. Take your camera if you're so inclined. This thing won't last much longer. Tell people you think might enjoy it.

Finally click on the second image to see the full size image. I ran a quick crude image analysis on that picture, there are at least 1200 birds in it. That's probably a third to a fourth of the whole flock. Its lovely, really.

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!

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.

Water

I learnt to swim recently, pretty late in life, I guess. The first thing I had to do was get comfortable in the water, believe me it's still a struggle sometimes, I can get all tense if things aren't quite so...But the one image that kept me going, that was the motivation to learn to swim, was this image of leaping in and cuting my way face first through this blue thing. Oh, I know it sounds stupid and very 'filmy', but God, that image has a sense of abandon and freedom I am not equal to, I love it.

Water has, as I see it, power to transform, to change beyond recognition. Through it's brute force, partly through its indifference all things are equally brutalised or loved depending on how you see it.

So you can imagine that when I saw the presentation 'The seventh wave" at Magnum I was kind of sucked in and blown away. The photographer Trent Parke it says is their only Aussie photographer, he's also a sports photographer and a much decorated one at that.

His images seem to sometimes say that we're not creatures that belong in water. We remain at the threshold, afraid and fascinated. When we're in this environment, we're aliens. We are afraid of it and yet conquer it, there is triumph in our mastering it and ourselves. Some of our alienation has to do with a loss of innocence (you know water and the womb and so on). The water separates the child and mom. It does not distort the innocent but brutalises her. Hence, eventually us and water isn't about mastery but about return; a return to safety, to silence, to acceptance.

Water isolates us, deprives us of many of our senses, sound, smell, vision. Yet it encloses us in a way that is sensible. Unlike the way that wind makes us aware of air, we are always aware of water, whether mobile or not. This can induce both comfort and panic, its eventually not about the indifferent water, it is about us. It is about temperament.

I enjoy solitude; a long swim is one of my favourite ways of isolating myself. Swimming the middle lane in an empty pool is the closest I've ever come to flying.