Travelogue - The Timbaktu Collective

Like I had mentioned in the previous post, am just back from a visit to a place close to Dharmavaram in Andhra Pradesh, called the Timbaktu Collective. It's beginnings and philisophy are best read about on the website itself, will just narrate my experiences there.

After 2 hours by train to Bangalore and 5 hours of navigating somewhat substandard roads to Chennekothapalli, was picked up and packed off for some lunch at the school run by the Collective here.

The school has an interesting philosophy of no competition and no extracurriculars. No competition would mean no grading and exams and rankings, student progress is monitored via worksheets that they fill up regularly. No extracurriculars simply means that everything is in curriculum! They have daily crafts, singing and other arts, sports and studies which mainly focus on language and math. Their idea is that if a student masters a language well, then learning knowledge in that language will be facilitated. Most of the students here are from socially and economically backward backgrounds, and some with a history of family violence and others who have been rejected as failures in the local government school.

This is the only school that I have seen that actually encourages making paper rockets in class! The picture alongside is the classroom, The students being engaged in their song and dance practice.
Close by is a children's learning centre, with a well furnished library, computers, tailoring machines, physics and chemistry labs, woodworking tools which the children not only of their own school, but the local government school as well can use. The only restriction is that there is no teaching here, if the students have doubts, they ask the elders present, else they essentially freak out in what which way they like.

The photo alongside is the students learning centre.
Timbaktu is slightly outside the village, and the person you see with the vehicle in the children's learning centre, Mr. Subba Raju was my official guide and contact. A member of the Collective almost since its inception, he is a PhD in Power Systems from IIT Powai, and takes care of the educational initiatives here.

Playground, with a scenic view.

The reason I had visited Timbaktu was to demo a motion sensor based lighting system, like what is available commercially nowadays. They have installed LED based pathway lighting, which is left on the whole night. Considering that they run the whole Collective on solar power, anything that can cut consumption is welcome, and hence my proposal.

This is Subba Raju's house in Timbaktu. Like everything else in Timbaktu, appropriate to the social, economic and environmental conditions found in this area, which boasts of being one of the driest places in Andhra Pradesh, with annual rainfall of 300mm. We reached at around 5 PM, and spent the rest of the evening demoing the system, as well as discussing LED lighting. After a great dinner which was well suited to my tastes (salty, not too spicy), talked a bit about how civilization is progressing and other miscellaneous heavy matters, and dropped off by round 10 PM to rest.

Another incredible initiative of the Collective has been the protection and regeneration of the forests around. The forests have been severely degraded due to forest fires, over grazing and wood-cutting. 15 years of protection have allowed Nature to regenerate the forests, unlike Forest Dept initiatives to bring in fast growing varieties from nurseries and plant them in foreign conditions. The contrast can be seen in the following photos. One is of a hill which is not protected and the other which is. Timbaktu takes care of an area of about 100 acres of forest, and supported an initiative of joint village ownership of forests on revenue wastelands which spans a mind-boggling 10,000 hectares. These forests have made streams perennial, revitalized the economy of artisans and forest produce harvesters as well as providing the local animals with shelter.

I left back for the other kind of reality the next day morning. On the whole, a very refreshing experience, with the added bonus of a kilo of really tasty chutney powder which was made that morning. Timbaktu is an interesting experiment to seek alternate forms of social organisation which are not necessarily parasitic upon the surrounding ecology. Though it will remain an experiment for atleast a few more decades, time will come when the lessons learnt here will be taken seriously by 'advanced' civilizations such as ours. Their entire outlook can be summarised by the next photo. As you might have guessed, this is the same stone that says 'Welcome to Timbaktu'. You will see this on the way back.

A fine example...

... of human creativity breaking the boundaries of formal planning. This was on a train (Jaipur Mysore Express) from Dharmavaram to Mysore, more on that trip later. The woman, a Rajasthani, was extremely hesistant to get her picture taken, hence the face covering. Had to take the picture against her wishes :)

How watertight can we be ?

Was reading a book that I previously mentioned, about an introduction to the notable sociologists from when the term was coined. Among one of the greatest among these was undoubtedly Max Weber, and a small section of the chapter devoted to him talks about his prophecies of doom, that social organisation would tend to more and more rational organisation in terms of efficiency, run by a scientifically guided bureaucracy.

Thankfully, we do not yet live in an age where managers rule every aspect of our lives, from what we eat to who we sleep with. Though it is obvious that an efficient bureaucracy will lead to maximally efficient organisation of human productive output, it is far from obvious that that is what people want, and far less obvious whether it can really be implemented.

An incident narrated by a friend working in a company in Bangalore comes to mind. A romantically involved couple, both working for the same company, were said to be seen smooching in the office. Now, the reaction was one of complete disbelief and shock at how unprofessional people can be. Looking at it from the other side, can one not question as to why a person in love (with what/who ever) cannot show her/his affection where and when one feels ? The answer would be that the office is a place to act in a certain way, and there are unwritten codes of conduct which govern osculatory behaviour here. Why are certain modes of behaviour permissible and others unprofessional ? Because they cause a disturbance, a distraction from the normal activity of efficient production ? While it definitely not my intention to condone smooching in corridors and cubicles, it is definitely my intention to question why any person is required to curb certain parts of her personality. It is hard to see how such an environment would help in formation of a well rounded personality. Also, one finds a tinge of hypocrisy in such attitudes. One is told not to bring home worries into work and vice versa, but one never hears about people told to leave their happiness at home and wear a surly mask at the workplace. Certain things which are beneficial to production are always welcome, the rest, please excuse, please.

Romantic escapades apart, there are many instances of companies cutting employees off the Internet, and similar restrictions in the name of 'distractions'. But employees find creative ways to overcome such things where possible, and a purely machine-like worker will hardly ever surface. To the horror of the top brass, people seem to want to waste time in idle chatting, gossip, tales of woe, trip discussions and many other such uneconomic behavior (I almost forgot the coffee machine ;). Nowadays, many companies seem to have recognized (or resigned to) the fact that people do not enter the office in the morning just to work continuously for 8 hours and then get back to their normal lives, and provide a much more liberal atmosphere, where one gets an opportunity to explore other aspects of social behavior and grouping. Far from Max Weber's tight bureaucratic dystopia, bureaucracy now seems to recognize human inability to divide space and time into watertight compartments, each requiring a kind of behavior that provides maximum efficiency to the task at hand.

Similar to the managerial expectations and frustrations, are our own wishes that sometimes go unfulfilled. We would like a park to be neat and clean and we end up seeing beggars and homeless bums in them. We would like our roads to be clean and free from disturbances but find religious processions and bales of ragi put out for drying. We wish to watch movies undisturbed but end up covering our ears against the cat calls as soon as Bipasha comes onscreen. We want our footpaths wide and safe, but end up walking on the road due to the sudden appearance of a temple overnight on the footpath. Just like human behavior, his cultural creations overflow and confound the best laid plans of the urban planners and middle class.

Just as we want to do things 'our way', so do so many others. About time we recognized and respect the non-watertightness that is so natural in the world.

Interesting comic

This comic caught the eye, coming coincidentally at round the same time I was griping about scientific method :)