Art Stash

So, I have a friend who's studying to be a graphic designer, and I thought some of her stuff was really cool. The link's below:
http://upasnapandey.blogspot.com/

I think my favourite is the 3M glove advert.

Orbit

How much can you miss a place where, to begin with, you never spent much time? But suddenly, you find yourself standing in a mall holding a bar of soap to your nose, and the bottom drops out of the depths of your desolation.

Sights and sounds keep well; they hang in state in the pillared galleries of memory, etched in stone or as delicate watercolours that fade at the touch of a breath. Voices and noise and music play through concealed speakers and set the score for our lives, the tempo that we move by. They are retrievable, they are concrete in memory; they are rarely lost, only sometimes misplaced.

Smells and touch are elusive, but I am made afraid by the intensity of emotion they induce. Some are innocuous whistles warning the approach of a new train of thought. I sit in a college bus that runs from the hospital to campus, and the route is mapped in olfactory imprints. A coffee-steam X marks the spot where we start, driven away by the insistent shove of yesterday's fish as we drive by the fort. Wait for the clatter of bloody silver to die away, and it is replaced by the hawker-cry smell of beef pakodas at Lakshmi theatre. Or we may drive by the bakery on a Friday and the smell of freshly-baked bread will follow us down the street. We turn the corner near the jail, a little way away from college, and a dark green smell accompanies the degree's drop in temperature.

You can spend a night enveloped in it, and in the morning it will linger on your skin, on your clothes. But skin is renewed and clothes must be laundered and all you are left with is the remembrance of its existence. You feed for a year off a week's memories, tease them apart and hope you missed something, pray they will survive until they can renew themselves. Leave them to settle into the crimson morass that raises itself up and changes shape, muddy your feet over and over again as you wade in to recover them. And you can think that you have let them rest, sung them to sleep with the fishes. And then you let yourself be split open by the rasp of hair against your cheek, and alien smells like lilacs will run down a street framed in archways and call to you.

Turn away to go back to the smells of your life: the jasmine chains and hair oil, the sandalwood talc and beef pakodas by the road, the distant cologne and the shower gel, the antiseptic smell of hand-sanitiser and the cow-dung cakes of fuel. But the nighttime musk of remembrance has made you nauseous with longing, and the split between the worlds is all at once true and insignificant.

There is no world to return to, only an immediate environment and the larger truth of my reality. Dichotomies merge to lead me here, standing with a bar of soap in my empty hands.

Less-than-Perfect Timing

Mr S (the friendly fieldworker) and I visited a balwadi in a muslim colony in Vellore yesterday to find that two of the children hadn't come to school: they had just been circumcised.

Wash Your Hands Before They Eat

Another Sunday, which means another trip to one of the local grocery store-cum-bakeries. Our project involves making 17 kilos of an energy-dense nutritional supplement each week - arguably too much for a domesticated little food processor to handle; the bakery has a heavy-duty cake batter mixer, accurate weighing equipment and people to help out, so production has been conveniently outsourced. With the advent of the project, my lazy Sundays have been transformed by grinding 5 kilos of roasted peanuts, hauling them over to the bakery and supervising the making of the supplement.

The production unit is above the main shop and connected by a curved set of stairs behind the cash counter. It's dingy, the air heavy with heat and filled with the metronome clack of the bread slicer, or the whoosh of hot air from the oven. The floor is overlayed with butter, flour, sugar and grime and the doughy mess sticks to your feet when you walk barefoot, having taken your shoes off at the entrance.

I think they've gotten used to my weekly visits since they don't excite as much apparent comment as on my first trip here, and the fact that I can make myself useful by lifting and carrying seems to make it less awkward. Language is still a bit of a problem but my Tamil's improving and they practice their Hindi and English on me; the pale-woman-on-the-production-floor gets talked about but less. Still, it's funny how you can feel so alien in another part of your own country.

What am I learning? 1. Getting your hands (or feet) dirty is a good thing when the people doing your work for you are. Skin washes. 2. When you know what you need you can find ways to ask for it even if people don't speak your language. 3. It's not always pleasant to know where your food's coming from!

A Day in the Field

The teacher at this balwadi is 19, and she just got married a few days after we recruited here. She's back in the working-version of her bridal finery, teaching the children rhymes as I sit by and watch.

They stand in a loose huddle as they try to navigate their tongues around the "chukupuku"ing of the rail-vandi. Inexplicably, their repertoire includes English rhymes from I-don't-know-where, although they know them only as a series of sounds randomly strung together. Their enthusiasm for them, though, is apparent:

I seethamoo
An themoo see me
Gawbleff themoo
An Gawbleff me!

Laxmi moonwalks in a corner all by herself, then claps her hands at a painted tomato on the wall. She's already 3 and hasn't started saying more than the simplest words. Her mother is understandably worried but access to a developmental paediatrist is limited when you are living where they do. They all leave her to her own devices, only making sure she's fed or sleeping when the other children are; they cannot understand her but neither will they neglect her. During our Community Orientation Program in our second year, we saw grown women who probably started off as she did: from children to be taken care of, they grew into adults not responsible for their actions. In the economics of survival you can eat if you work; If you can't work and other people must work to feed you, you are a liability. Luckily, the extended family structure that rural neighbours seem to adopt is as rich in support as in censure.

Lunchtime, and the children set to picking their own pet hates out of their food. Little bits of tomato or drumstick leaf gather in heaps beside the plates to be swept away later along with the day's debris. Some ask for more, some refuse to eat unless they're fed and the ayah soon has three open mouths and rapidly-emptying plates in front of her. The others have finished and raise their plates to slurp up the last vestiges of their sambhar. One little girl wheezes between slurps.

Now the mats are spread and they all have to lie down. The teacher sits waving the flies off their faces for a while and soon, the only sounds are those of deep breathing and the occasional snore. Traffic is infrequent at this time and for a while, all I hear are rustling leaves and crows exploring the brightly coloured buckets I brought with me for our sample collection. The government school in the village just broke for lunch and four girls in uniform huddle at the doorway. I turn and smile at each of them and go back to my book, but they still stand and stare - either satisfying curiosity or a mute appeal for attention. I recognise Divya from the last time I was here. Jeyalakshmi seems to be the leader of this pack, and introduces the others as well as herself when I ask her her name. My scant knowledge of Tamil limits my conversation, andI can just stumble through the barest niceties - an exchange of names and basic information, punctuated by profuse smiles and vigorous nodding when I hear a familiar word.

These girls are bright-eyedly lovely. They're too sophisticated and grown-up to come pulling at my clothes or mock-charge me like the little kids, but their curiosity is unabashed. It's amazing how many of the women and the girls in these places only need an opportunity to assume social responsibility to become women who make a difference, in their villages or outside. Several women whom the hospital has involved in its outreach programs or given basic training to are now pillars of their communities, encouraging other women and giving them what seems like sound advice.

A moped just sped by and I can hear the growl of a line bus. Soon, the vehicle from the hospital will roll up and the most tearful of these little study-participants will rush around to shake hands or wave goodbye. I will leave with my assorted paraphernalia, the plastic buckets and little bottles now full. They will go home and come back tomorrow as they have done and will do for so long. I can just hope that what we're doing will actually make a difference to their lives, be a butterfly effect that ripples outwards. Intervention is a strong word and we never know to the fullest what differences we ever make. For now, we will roll away and happy chants will waft down the roads.

Vovezaraad
Vilessabiloo
Suka isswee
Asoaaru!