5 may-reverse osmosis

Today was a busy day at the office! I rode with Azathmullah for the last time, and paid him 150 Rs. He actually seemed very disappointed that I wouldn't be riding with him in the future. By now he is very friendly with the office guard and they have nice familiar little Kannada chats while I gather my money. But, the freedom of the bike does call...

Rahul, head of the Grants Team, gave one of his lectures today. He's astonishingly knowledgeable and these lectures are a weekly event. When I first joined, I was told the talks were in a series that began with the Big Bang and would end with a full analysis of groundwater. This fluid trajectory is not obvious to me, as I jumped into the middle of the series, but the talks are still great.

The current focus is geology, and we've covered erosion, the types of rocks, weathering processes and plate tectonics. There is lots of input and questions from everyone. The entire Grants Team attends, as well as a few other interested people from other areas in the office. Rahul springs from physics to geography to sociology, and it certainly keeps the brain limber! The talks are good fun, everyone is cheery, and there is a sense that the work is gaining a bigger perspective and a relevant context.

The talk lasted until lunchtime, and the Grants Team all sat together at the little round table in our room. Today, conversation was all about books. Total heaven. We had lists going of book recommendations for everyone, and heated discussions about authors and particular novels. Literally two hours later, we went back to work, only to be interrupted for another meeting.

This one was exclusively for the Grants Team, with two representatives from an organization called Naandi Water, installing reverse osmosis plants in Indian villages to clean the drinking water. The very first day I started my internship, I had that three hour talk with Amrtha about everything to do with the water sector (I don't think I ever blogged about it, having promised not to bore you at the time. Now I've sufficiently bored you with every other mundane detail of my life so I might as well not skip the work-related ones). Anyways, she told me then that our organization doesn't give grants for reverse osmosis plants because although they're effective at stripping water of any and all contamination, they are not a sustainable structure or one that a community can manage to maintain without professional help. 

So, I was wondering why we were meeting with these representatives. But it is always useful to learn about something different and I am certainly very glad we had that meeting. Amrtha and I walked into the conference room first, where the two Naandi representatives were waiting.

Shwetha, one of the representatives, was a very pretty Rajasthani girl with an American accent. With her was Gayatri, an elder woman with short gray hair, dressed well and with a clipped accent that suggested she was proud of her education...so the rest of the Grants Team filed in and the presentation began.

I feel like I've learned so much already, and it was so satisfying to understand this talk, to have the familiarity with terms and to know what questions I wanted to ask. I always have a hard time listening to ideas without picking at them, and I was picking furiously at this talk in my notebook. It's just that it is so easy to find cracks in things, especially because nothing will ever be perfect, so it's only a matter of time before you find out what is wrong with it. How dark is that?!!

Anyways. I was calling back all of this Anthro 55 stuff I remembered from that class I took in the spring, everything about social suffering, structural violence and stigma, semantic illness networks and idioms of distress. Like when Gayatri was talking about how you could never be certain if the health problems you saw in rural villages were a result of unclean drinking water or of old age or entirely unrelated conditions. How did people talk about their conditions, I wondered? Was there a stigma associated behind certain terms? She related an anecdote about  a village that was convinced their water had arsenic in it, and so did not take kindly to people telling them otherwise. Semantic illness networks at work.

It is probably all the anthropology I've heard that made me respond so negatively to her talk. How was she so unconcerned with the effect the imposition of an entirely new technology would have on lives and social dynamics? What would happen to women, if the act of water collection became gendered (if the plant was far away, only people with scooters or bikes might go collect, what if this was only men?). If Naandi ran the plant for 5 years, what would happen after they left? Where did the waste from the plant go? How did they choose the people who ran it?

Everyone raised great questions, and it did not seem to me like the representatives were giving the questions adequate attention. Probably because it is unnerving to have your ideas challenged from 8 different directions when they're so new that even you haven't explored them fully. But then, that's a natural part of bringing them to the table. So at one point, someone asked Gayatri a question and she nodded rhythmically while browsing her computer to bring an unrelated picture of the plant up on the projector.

Wow, that totally bothered me. I just hate it when people look at their computer or phone while you're talking to them! And considering she was the one coming to present her idea, you would think she'd be a little more engaged. But anyways. I quietly conveyed my frustrations to Amrtha, and went on taking notes.

Done with the presentation, Gayatri began playing Free Cell, not realizing her computer was still projecting to the big screen! What a faux pas. But she was elderly and did not seem to have tremendous familiarity with the idea of projection. That's about all the slacks I can cut her.

So I was all riled up after this presentation, really, just fuming with my own sense of self-righteousness, and went to Amrtha with a zillion questions as usual and because I was relying on her to show me the other side of things. I think I did this with her once before, but I don't remember when. But there was one time when I made an off-hand statement that I didn't think too deeply about, and she challenged me, forcing me to examine my beliefs and how I conveyed them.

Downstairs on the couches, a similar scenario played out this time. I began listing everything that the woman had wrong, all pleased with myself for having noticed. And Amrtha explained things suddenly in a very different light. We talked about how easy it was to be cynical, but how at least these women are trying to do something good for people. We talked about the dangers of rapid judgment and about getting stuck in a narrow perspective. Amrtha pointed out that to these women, the slow and steady community approach might seem sluggish and ineffective. It's all about perspective.

I have to think more about this talk, because we said a lot and I'm still distilling meaning, but I'm putting down the basics here for now. We also talked about loving work- whether you do what you love or love what you do. Amrtha was saying you might not love everything you have to do, but you do it sometimes anyways, things like sweeping or paying bills. A point to be made is that if you decide you will only do things you love, a lot of important tasks get left by the wayside. Amrtha's point was also that the things you do best are the things that you love doing, so you should seek to do what you love ( I think ).

I don't know that I agree though, and I think this is that point where I share my perspective and everyone tells me I'm naive and 19. But I guess that doesn't make it any less of a perspective. So anyways, I think I genuinely love what I do (as opposed to just doing what I love). It takes effort sometimes, but I really do enjoy every little process I go through in life. I love driving through polluted traffic because I like the life you get to watch. I love sweeping because I like the process of making a floor clean. It reminds me of a passage I read in a book many years ago, about how the process of writing begins not when your words start forming on paper but the moment you pick up the pen. There is that joy to be gained from processes.

I've been thinking about this a lot after reading Zen and the Art and The Prophet in quick succession. Zen & MM talks about doing everything with love and respect, the littlest task, such as changing motorbike oil, with a sense of its importance. I'm hopelessly in love with that idea. I think that if you slow down enough in life, and take the time to do things with care, everything becomes a joyful process because after all, it's joyful enough to be alive. It is only rushing through things in order to finish them quickly that brings me stress.


I raised this question on the bike ride home with Srikanta, and his view was similar to Amrtha's. Anyways, I think that what people will say to my romantic love of doing anything and everything, is that I love it because I shoulder no great burden of responsibility yet. But I hope I never lose this. I like how happy I am.

We talked about travel on the ride home as well, and Srikanta, like Dominique, has never been outside India nor has any desire to venture outside. If he could travel anywhere, he says he would travel on a boat just to the ocean and open waters. I guess that makes sense with my view, because you should enjoy the process of traveling without needing a destination. But I'm so hungry for new places that it always surprises me when people aren't.

I want to travel a lot more in life. Ooops power just died. Anyways, that about wraps it up for the day, and my computer is about to die! Lastly, I cancelled my trip to Chennai for my relative's temple opening...I won't be able to finish my final report for work if I go.

I can't decide if I'm disappointed or not. It would have been nice to go, but it's not that important, and Chennai will be very hot. Also, I love my work...