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.

Creating a firebreak: You intentionally burn a strip of land clean, so that in case there is a real fire, it cannot jump the strip of land and you are safe on the other side.
Shramdaan: Once a month the group works together to do some improvement works. Here they are laying mud on the road to smoothen out bumps.

1.) Kid of one of the workers
2.) Guesthouse where we stayed. Really cool place.

View from the terrace of the school
Strange rock formation that lines most of the hills in the area. Nobody was able to explain to us how these formed. The local story is that you can follow the trail of these rocks and they lead to Tirupati !

Timbaktu

I had another exciting weekend. This is getting to be a habit. May it continue !!

I went to Timbaktu Collective last weekend with Santosh, a friend at work. There's more info about Timbaktu at www.timbaktu.org. At high level its a non-profit group, not necessarily that different from others, but among the very good ones. Here are some things about it:

They work in areas like land restoration, womens empowerment, children etc. There was a very interesting presentation about how they worked with the government on regulating the water release from a local dam in a way as to maximise benefit based on the farmers agreeing as a community where the water should go. I don't know if you find that interesting, but I do. One of the key issues going forward in water, will be to get agreement from stakeholders on how to use the limited amounts of water available.

I saw a forest fire upclose while I was there !! There was one in the hills a couple of kilometers away from Timbaktu. It was a pretty awesome spectacle.

The architecture and construction were great and I'd love to be there, from that point of view.

This visit for me culminates several strands that have started over the past few years. I first heard of TC way back when I was in the US on some mailing list and was very intrigued by the name. Later I bought this *great* book called Bapu Kuti about alternative development models and there was stuff there about Timbuktu. Still later when I was doing the RIN project http://www.geocities.com/ahminotep/Writings/RIN_project.html

I talked to Shambhu Prasad who is associated with TC, and encouraged me to visit there. And finally the founders of TC were featured on the cover of a weekly newsmagazine here in India (The Week). So finally I did go there so and its great to complete that loop. Yesterday after returning, I went back to read the Bapu Kuti article again and it was fascinating to correlate what was written about the people to what I had just seen in person.

TC operates as a 'virtual' panchayat of all its full-time members. They meet once a month and give reports and come out with to-do items and make decisions. Its pretty interesting structure and has some of the useful elements of corporate working in it. Its mostly funded by donations at the current time though, which is not so sustainable.

The setting is gorgeous (in its way). Its in the barren hills of Anantapur and is surrounded on 3 sides by hills. I liked the scenery very much. And I'm more and more struck by feeling the truth about the cliches of going back to nature etc. The break from city life is refreshing and stronger than refreshing, I feel it causes some change in you.

Before I left I had contracted a cold, and I wasn't able to take appropriate care there due to the circumstances. I had severe earache one night and since then I have had a persistent ringing in the ear. I am quite concerned about this, I think it may be permanent. I've heard about this in the past, the medical term is tinnutis (probably got the spelling wrong).

The founders of TC, Bablu and Mary are pretty striking people. Their background is really interesting and you would find it interesting but I won't blog about it much. He is Bengali, she is Keralite, they both learnt the local language and settled in AP. Bablu in particular is a great bear of a man and radiates energy. There were several other remarkable people there.

In talking with Mary, I found out that one of their problems currently is keeping up with the documentation and reporting required by their donors. I suggested that I might help them out for some time with that, and they responded very favourably. More about that soon ! I did spent some time their continuing to think about what I should do after quitting the job and I am converging towards spending some time doing odd jobs and volunteer work. I would enjoy this immensely as I would get to work with many diferent people and do many different interesting things. And I would be looking around for what to do on a permanent basis. There are already several things that I am seeing, including TC, which I could usefully do.