Timbaktu contd.

Okay, there are a lot of specifics on Timbaktu that I can write about, thought I would do so. Firstly, I uploaded the full set of photos onto despoki.net:

http://www.geocities.com/ahminotep/Writings/timbaktu.html

Kolattam: The TC workers all get together monthly to talk about their work and their plans for the next month. At this time they do a traditional dance called Kolattam. All collective members must learn and take part. It was amazing watching them do the dance which is a very fluid and sensuous one. I guess its not that different from Dandiya. It has clear parallels in the corporate world in bonding and teambuilding exercises, though those are not nearly as graceful ! The collective members are all ages and all personality types and to see them all blend together and become part of the dance was striking. Especially for the more retiring or introverted types, the dance would be a real opportunity to come out and be part of the group. There is a quicktime movie of the dance I took:

http://www.geocities.com/ahminotep/Writings/timbaktu/DSCN0452.MOV

The structure of the collective: They are all employees and get paid. They are geographically spread out and work with people in 3 mandals, but the energy comes from the central location where they meet monthly and where some of the folks like, and a school, guesthouse and other infrastructure is there. TC was founded by a couple Bablu and Mary Ganguly and the structure would seem to have some tension between democratic particapation and the will of the founders who obviously are held in high regard. The members of TC are organized into fairly formal groups of people who are focussed on specific activities, like schools, self-help groups, irrigation .

Monthly meetings: They call these the panchayathi meetings, I suppose one can see them as a virtual village and so these are the virtual panchayat meetings. They give their reports their quite professional and there is animated discussion. These meetings are spread over 1.5 days, Friday evening through most of Sunday. The meetings are quite creatively structured, besides the Kolattam mentioned above, they show a movie on Friday nights using a LCD projector and DVD/VCD kind of things. They use modern audio-visual equipment effectively, and they have a bunch of laptops. During the weekend I was there, they were showing a movie presumably off the web about an organic produce market in Peru, kind-of to sensitise the collective members of the importance of organic farming as well as to show that they are other people doing this stuff around the world. There are many women members so I wonder how these women feel about TC and how they make it fit into their other lives with husband and chidren. The budget of TC is about a crore and most of it is donations from individuals and aid agencies. The decision-making can be somewhat informal -- someone will say after some amount of discussion on a topic "Ok, so shall we go ahead and do this ?" and if there are no 'nays' the decision is deemed to have been taken. I would think that this would lead to domination by the more outspoken aggresive types, or the founders and early members.

Timbaktu organic: This is an interesting offshoot from Timbaktu, a bunch of people are working on getting farmers to go organic and on the marketing of the organic produce. They are quite gung-ho and have made some progress, at this point they have been able to sell as much as they are making and the constraints are on the supply side. We talked a little about millets. There is an interesting story here which I have read a little bit about in the past. Millets is a collective term for a variety of grains that grow in dry climates and are more nutritious and balanced than rice or wheat. Due to the focus on rice and wheat during the green revolution, the millets got neglected and comparitively little cultivation happens. Eating more millets is a great win-win situation for everybody as these are not resource intensive crops (little water needed) and could help poor farmers a lot. There are several varieties with english names and names in the local languages: ragi, korra, foxtail millet are some I found out. You can replace rice with millets in normal Indian meals, and you can make idli , upma etc with millets. Co-incidentally, my wife bought ragi vermicelli recently in Bangalore and it was quite okay.
Eat more millets !!!!!

The people at TC: There seem to be two types of people. One is highly educated urban IIT or engineer types who have 'dropped out' of the mainstream and ended up at Timbuktu. The founders fall into this category. The school is run by one person who is a PhD in energy systems from IIT B. The organic farming is done by an engineer from Mysore and a MBA type. They are all extremely pleasant people and in some cases, highly thoughtful and moral folks who have though through their values and settled on their current way of life. The other type of people are very local types who often don't know english and have done a degree in a local college and ended up here while looking for employment. They came across as fairly confident and capable and pleasant, and I think they enjoy the work a lot and have gained a lot in personal growth from it.
I talked some with the founders and they were more or less what I would have thought of them. One interesting thing is that, for various reasons, they ended up sending their children to Rishi Valley for education instead of educating them locally. They said that Rishi Valley was pretty good but the usual children who went their were pretty rich and that caused their son some trouble in adjusting.

There is a constant stream of visitors of various sorts to the place. While we were there, there were a couple of people from Oxfam Australia, which funds the group. There was a european woman who was teaching the children arts and crafts. There were a couple of young scientist types who were putting together some maths syllabus/ computer education kind of stuff. There was also a prof from IIT Bombay with some of his students who were trying to set up a VoiP over wireless setup to connect the full campus. Whew !

They showed a video about their work in water issues and tank management , restoration of traditional water harvesting structures blah blah. I found it very interesting and important work.