Re: [silk] Grief during a pandemic

[Pooja Sastry]

On Fri, Jul 23, 2021 at 11:57 AM Venkatesh Hariharan 
wrote:

> Thanks for starting this thread, Udhay.
>
> As someone who has been interested in financial inclusion and would like to
> see India become a developed country in my lifetime, our country's callous
> handling of the pandemic has driven me to anger, grief and sadness. The
> news of people dying from lack of oxygen concentrators, delayed treatment
> etc has been cause for acute anxiety and depression. The ray of hope in all
> this darkness has been how individuals have rallied and organized
> themselves to provide food, medicines and other supplies. Even as I see
> homelessness and despair grow in the streets around me, I also saw people
> bringing food packets in scooters and cars and selflessly delivering it to
> the homeless. Ultimately, this is a role that the state should do. This is
> what we as taxpayers pay the state to do and to see the state absent here
> is to realise how far we need to go to develop world class governance
> capabilities.
>
> I am a happy introvert but this pandemic has been hard, even for me. I know
> it must be ten times harder for my friends who are extroverts. Based on the
> vaccine procurement and rollout, my rough estimate is that we will emerge
> from this pandemic only by the end of 2022. If it happens earlier, I will
> consider it a bonus. I have managed to cope by:
>
> 1. Slowing down my life. I quit an earlier job which was a thankless task
> that consumed my days and nights and weekends too, and took on a consulting
> role that gives me more work-life balance. It is less pay, but I decided
> that it is what makes me happy.
> 2. Catching up on my reading
> 3. Music. I bought the Harman Kardon Soundsticks 4 and love listening to
> blues, jazz, ghazals and all other kinds of music on it.
> 4. Exercise. After years, I have been regular with exercise and it has been
> a great morale booster.
> 5. Catching up with friends over a walk. This has been my biggest mode of
> socializing during the pandemic. We walk wearing masks and we take great
> care to follow Covid appropriate behavior.
>
> I could write more but have to get back to work :-)
>
> Venky
>
> On Fri, Jul 23, 2021 at 11:10 AM Radhika, Y.  wrote:
>
> > I was in Zaragoza, in the province of Aragón, Spain from January to June
> > 2020. About 7 weeks into my stay, the government declared a state of
> > emergency, the borders closed and the country hunkered down in what was
> > called "the first confinement". I was living alone already in my friend's
> > apartment on the 9th floor of a building that faced the river Ebro so I
> > continued there. At the time there were a lot of people exercising at
> home
> > - some ran marathons within the confines of their homes. My own feeling
> was
> > that I had entered true randomness and timelessness.  I lost interest in
> > food using it only to maintain myself...really, my senses were not their
> > usual selves. There were unknown birds I saw in flight, there were the
> > leaves shimmering on the poplars along the riverbank. In the kitchen I
> > heard songs and chatter on the radio while I cooked. A window in the
> > kitchen looked down into the donut hole of the courtyard in the center of
> > the building. From this window I reached out to hang clothes on the
> > clothesline. Sometimes I heard a neighbor two floors down ordering her
> son
> > about. Other times, a neighbor, appropriately named Ángeles, would lean
> out
> > the window right across from me and ask me if I needed a mask or anything
> > else. Once the breakfast was prepared I took it over to the living room
> and
> > watched the sky and tried to note the changes in the kinds of clouds that
> > appeared - one blue, blue, blue sky day there was a summer cloud so
> fluffy
> > and light you knew no water could stay up there and all the water there
> > welled up in my eyes instead through magical transference. In the
> > afternoons, I lay on the bed that had an ornate headboard. From there I
> > could look into the kitchen waking up one night to see a dazzling flash
> of
> > lightning land on the kitchen floor. I could die and people wouldn't know
> > about it for a while. This thought came to me very quietly, with no
> fanfare
> > and not even self-pity. It really was possible; anything was and always
> is.
> > Sometimes in the afternoon, I visited the bookshelves in two separate
> > rooms. There were mostly books that were my friend's dead husband's
> choice:
> > lovely art catalogues and books on painting, Dosteovsky and Tolstoy in
> > Spanish, the work of many others I won't ever know. One book I came back
> > with is a small book on the weather and climate of the region. I've
> > translated it since. In the evenings, the 8pm singing and dancing in the
> > Juliette balconies lasted about 15 minutes. Most of the time only the
> birds
> > and animals heard us. Sometimes, police cars passed us and would stop and
> > applaud us. Once, an ambulance stopped 

Re: [silk] Valuing and selling inherited trinkets

[Pooja Sastry]

> Pooja
>
> If you have a working cassette and CD player, please let me know.
>
> Thanks
> Lakshmi
>

 Hi Lakshmi, sorry this comes late, but we do have working cassette and CD
players, will be happy to show you.

I’ve had a very good experience with the antique dealer Ramachandra his
> number is +91 96866 71615, he has a store (more of godown really) off
> Commercial Street.
>
> Also, in case you find any fountain pens or stationary in there, I’ll be
> happy to pay you for them as I collect fountain pens.
>
> If you are fine with it, me and my wife would be happy to come over (we
> are quarantining ourselves until the 31st)  and look at those wooden boxes
> as she loves them as well.
>
> —
> Thank you,
> Bharath
>

I'm sorry for the late response, Bharath! Thanks so much for this lead,
will follow this up after the lockdown. We do have fountain pens, and you
and your wife are welcome to come over to look at them and the wooden
boxes, except it looks like it will have to be after April now.

Hope you are all safe and well, everyone. Enjoying the thread on behaviour
change post-Coronavirus and thinking about how there's probably no "normal
we can go back to" now.

Pooja

[silk] Valuing and selling inherited trinkets

[Pooja Sastry]

Reaching out to Silklist for help.

I grew up as one of five people living in a house in Bangalore built for at
least 10, with endless space for hoarding the knick-knacks of four separate
households from three generations. Constantly dusty, a nightmare to clean
and maintain, and stuffed with things from ceiling to floor.

Among other things, we have paper-thin painted and gilded bone china,
lacquerware, ivory dolls and toys, carved wooden perfume boxes, obsolete
(but working!) radios, cassette players, video cameras, cameras and
goodness knows what else that I can't begin to describe, all piled up in
chests or gathering dust on shelves.

(This has arisen as a consequence of the quarantine, come to think of it.
Opening chests restlessly and promising ourselves that THIS time, we will
deal with all this.)

We would like to sell them, if anyone is willing to buy them. Not throw
them away, because then they're sure to be sold one way or another, except
not by us.

Has anyone here tried to do, this, too? I would be so grateful for advice
on how to value items like this, especially in India. We're willing to sell
outside India, too, except we don't know how and if we can.

Thoughts?

Pooja

Re: [silk] Bangalore and Chennai food/restaurant recommendations

[Pooja Sastry]

>
> There are a dozen places I would go to in Bangalore for authentic, tasty
> food over MTR. From street corner benne dosa places, to North Karnataka
> food to TamBram food to mudde idli places, But I would hesitate to take
> a foreigner with no previous exposure to Indian restaurants to many of
> these. I.e., don't throw them in the deep end of the pool.
>

Try Oota Bangalore in Whitefield? A wide range of things to try + local-ish
(from across Karnataka). Pricey, so west-friendly hygiene standards.

>

Re: [silk] Flamebait of the week

[Pooja Sastry]

Thanks Deponti.. I agree, although I've helped draft regulations that do
exactly this, and similar regulations are quickly becoming standard across
the country.

It's not clear what the motivation for these regulations is, since nobody
other than private owners of the (larger, more visible) structures seems to
actually stand to benefit. No owner of a tiny century-old house with a
leaking roof wants to keep it that way for our viewing. And most of those
non-residential structures are not libraries or museums but offices, hotels
or private clubs, now benefiting from property tax rebates and higher rents.

Built heritage is identity, image-of-the-city, commons. But it's hard to
measure all this unless the building is actually in use as a market or a
place of worship. There is also a car windshield view aspect to heritage
appreciation: if I admire a beautiful structure, I may have the education,
resources and leisure to do so.

The perception of heritage buildings as beautiful objects that create
context, rather than as being products of their context is used by tourism,
too. Pattadakal, for example, is not only ticketed, but repeated attempts
to remove and resettle the adjoining village (which is probably older than
the temples themselves) have been made over the last decade because it is
considered a displeasing generator of sewage. The "redevelopment" of
Bhubaneswar's old town under the Smart City scheme includes the relocation
of some centuries-old mathas, simply because they are not pretty.

I would love to see some sort of value capture mechanism to skim the
notional value off heritage buildings and distribute it better.


On Mon 6 May, 2019, 3:38 PM Deepa Mohan,  wrote:

> I think you should get the reaction to this from the owners of an erstwhile
> hertiage building (eg, Cash Pharmacy on St Mark's/Residency Road in
> Bangalore).
>
> My daughter, an architect now, was 10 when, after a visit to Delhi, she
> remarked that in that city, the dead had far better accommodation than the
> living.
>
> And I would also ask Pooja to respond to this!
>
> Deepa.
>
> On Mon, May 6, 2019 at 2:41 PM Thejaswi Udupa 
> wrote:
>
> > On Mon, May 6, 2019 at 1:43 PM Alok Prasanna Kumar <
> kautilya...@gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> >
> > > Here's some flame-bait that's been rattling around in my head for a
> while
> > > now:
> > >
> > > Laws that protect "heritage buildings" owned by non-public entities
> (any
> > > form of private property) in cities are a bane on equitable urban
> > > development, entrench privilege and prevent social-mobility. They are a
> > > form of expropriation of private property by the state without
> > > compensation.
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > My current employers in Chennai would love this viewpoint.
> >
>

Re: [silk] Affordable housing

[Pooja Sastry]

ed things. And if you assume
> > the cost of construction to be Rs. 1000 per sq foot, the entire project
> > would be 200,000 crore rupees. That's not a large number at Indian
> Economy
> > scale. Plus, its an investment, not a hand out.
> >
> > Also, the fact that such housing developments will have to be far away
> from
> > the city center shouldn't be a deal breaker. There is enough mass transit
> > technology available.
> >
> > What might be the reasons why this isn't happening?
> >
> >
> > Thanks and regards
> >
> > Narendra Shenoy
> >
> >
> >
> > On Sat, 27 Apr 2019 at 10:38, Pooja Sastry 
> wrote:
> >
> > > Hello all!
> > >
> > > I would love to hear what the members of this list think of affordable
> > > housing - certainly from architects (hi Naresh!) and urban
> policymakers,
> > > but also everyone here.
> > >
> > > In my work as an urban planner, we throw around ideas like
> affordability
> > as
> > > a function of land prices, minuscule floor areas, five times annual
> > income,
> > > construction quality and technique - but these, for me, completely miss
> > the
> > > mark. I'm a "millennial", renter, and likely never-homebuyer myself,
> and
> > I
> > > don't think it should be a stretch to see housing as an essential,
> > > accessible (not to mention flexible and time-based) infrastructure
> > instead
> > > of a luxury.
> > >
> > > Thoughts?
> > >
> > > Pooja
> > >
> >
>
>
> --
> Alok Prasanna Kumar
> Advocate
> Ph: +919560065577
>

[silk] Affordable housing

[Pooja Sastry]

Hello all!

I would love to hear what the members of this list think of affordable
housing - certainly from architects (hi Naresh!) and urban policymakers,
but also everyone here.

In my work as an urban planner, we throw around ideas like affordability as
a function of land prices, minuscule floor areas, five times annual income,
construction quality and technique - but these, for me, completely miss the
mark. I'm a "millennial", renter, and likely never-homebuyer myself, and I
don't think it should be a stretch to see housing as an essential,
accessible (not to mention flexible and time-based) infrastructure instead
of a luxury.

Thoughts?

Pooja

Re: [silk] Soliciting recommendations

[Pooja Sastry]

On Wed, Oct 25, 2017 at 11:18 AM, WordPsmith  wrote:

> Thank you, all! This is immensely useful. Signing up for a bunch of these
> right away.
>
> > On Oct 25, 2017, at 06:23, Venkatesh H R  wrote:
> >
> > I second The Contumacious Curmudgeon -- Alok's newsletter is short, funny
> > and unfussy.
> >
> >
> >
> >> On Wed, Oct 25, 2017 at 8:38 AM Gautam John  wrote:
> >>
> >>> On Tue, Oct 24, 2017 at 1:54 PM, WordPsmith 
> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> Do you subscribe to any interesting email newsletters that hold
> >> interesting news / updates / links to things happening within particular
> >> disciplines? Things that interest the practitioners in those fields and
> >> have not yet made it into the realm of the general media?
> >>
> >> Four that I look forward to.
> >>
> >> [Free] The Contumacious Curmudgeon by Alok Prasanna Kumar. Weekly
> >> updates on the law, courts, and other institutions in India and
> >> elsewhere, with a streak of sarcasm and a healthy dose of opinion.
> >> https://tinyletter.com/AlokPrasannaKumar
> >>
> >> [Paid] The Ken is a subscription-driven media site. We write one story
> >> a day (weekdays only). These stories have sharp, original insights on
> >> technology, business, science and healthcare from India.
> >> https://the-ken.com/pricing/
> >>
> >> [Paid] The Daily Update consists of substantial analysis of the news
> >> of the day (~1800 words) delivered via three daily emails in addition
> >> to the free weekly article (four total articles per week). These
> >> updates are always timely, but also timeless in their investigation of
> >> “Why” and “What’s next.”  https://stratechery.com/membership/
> >>
> >> [Free] Pocket Hits https://getpocket.com/explore/pocket-hits
> >>
> >>
>
>
Here are a few that I like:

Cities and Urban Planning
http://www.urbz.net/
https://nextcity.org/

Public Policy
The newsletter of the Takshashila Institution, mentioned above
https://www.thinkpragati.com/ (by some of the same people as at the
Takshashila Institution - also silklisters. Hello!)

The "new economy"
http://www.rethinkeconomics.org/
http://evonomics.com/

Gender and Transport
https://dgroups.org/worldbank/GATNET

Materials/ Industrial Design
https://materia.nl/
http://www.core77.com/

Re: [silk] Travels with the fish

[Pooja Sastry]

On 20 Jan 2017 12:22 pm, "Udhay Shankar N"  wrote:

Posting this fond review of 'Travels With The Fish' in memory of the said
fish: author Gopinath's younger brother and longtime silklister Ramu
Narayan, who passed away last week. Farewell, Ramu.

Udhay


http://www.outlookindia.com/outlooktraveller/books/travel-cl
assic-travels-with-the-fish/

TRAVEL CLASSIC: TRAVELS WITH THE FISH

Funny, quirky and spontaneous, this book is a classic Indian travelogue

October 11, 2015

C.Y. Gopinath’s Travels With the Fish appeared at a time, back in the old
millennium, when Indian travelogues were thin on the ground, and funny,
quirky, spontaneous ones even more so. Gopinath made his own rules,
slipping in accounts of the pigs of Bhusawal and travels in rundown Bihar
along with stories of his adventures in fancier places—Jerusalem and
Chicago, Australia and France. The fish that he travels with actually stays
at home and proffers bookish advice a priori and post facto. This armchair
traveller is old school too; he knows his stuff, in that brainier
pre-Internet age, from the Condé Nast magazines he collects and has
internalised. Best of all is the food. Many stories come with a recipe
thrown in—for the sublime aubergine and chicken that Gopinath ate at the
home of his Cairo taxi driver which he reconstructed with much trial and
error over years; or the green curry for which he smuggled in galangal by
the suitcase from Thailand. The wry tone gives way to ecstasy only when he
is describing eating, with a description of a humble rice and dal meal he
had in Rajgir taking the cake. This marvellous book could, just as well,
have been Travels with the Dish.


--

((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))


Delurking to share that I first read Travels with the Fish when was 12, on
the recommendation of our drama teacher at school. It went on to become a
favourite book that didn't stale with re-readings. Soon after I first read
it, Ramu Narayan mentioned (at a silkmeet, perhaps?) that the Fish was
based on him, and hearing this thrilled me to bits.

Saddened to hear of his passing.

[silk] Fwd: Introduction

[Pooja Sastry]

 Welcome, Pooja is always a good season in West Bengal, and that ought to be
 true here, too!

 I know your dad as Nallu, but my delight at the opportunity to get to
 know a child as an adult in her own right doesn't change. Can you tell
 jokkus like your dad does?


Hi Deepa aunty! I remembered later that you know my dad by his home name.
Not yet ... the ones I can tell are his originals, but I'm slowly making up
my own now, which I try out on him.

Welcome Pooja. I too studied architecture -- but only for a while. I
 learned the error of my ways and moved on to serfdom in the IT
 industry. We have, therefore, nothing in common. :-) Welcome,
 nevertheless.
 When I studied architecture I was in the camp that considered
 architecture an engineering problem that included aesthetics as one of
 the requirements to be fulfilled. I annoyed (and was annoyed by) the
 crowd for whom it was Art (with a capital A).
 Where do you place yourself?


The former camp, definitely, Biju. It's why I moved to urban planning,
because all five years of architecture school were a blank in terms of
understanding Art. I felt much more at home in planning school, but also
made some sort of partial peace with architecture somewhere along the way,
which is why I decided I could practise it after all.

If nothing else, I regularly bring back stories such as that of the master
bathroom with two potties (for no other apparent reason except that they
can afford not to share one), or of the client who insisted on beams and
columns being taken off wherever he didn't like them until the structural
engineer gave up and stopped returning calls.

Thank you all for the warm welcome!

[silk] Introduction

[Pooja Sastry]

Hello! My name is Pooja. I studied architecture in Bangalore and Urban
Planning in Ahmedabad, and learnt a few months ago that I could begin to
call myself an architect-urban planner and my former professors by their
first names.

Until very recently, I was working full-time at an architecture firm in
Bangalore, but I am currently between jobs. In the meantime, I freelance as
an architect, or more frequently, as an interior designer. When projects
come along, I work as a researcher for a start-up planning consultancy with
some fellow alumni from planning school. I am also writing a
paper-in-progress called Poverty and Transport Accessibility in Bangalore:
the need for a gendered perspective which brings many of my interests
together.

I coach schoolchildren in Mathematics on the weekends, and really enjoy it.
One child was very upset when I told her I would probably not be able to
teach any more after this year. I would have rejoiced in her place, so
although it puzzles me, I hope it's because the children enjoy it, too.

Those on silk-list will know my father as Shiv, so Udhay has known me since
I was little and I am lucky enough to have met many of you. I have been
lurking on the list for two years, so I thought maybe I should finally
de-lurk and say hello.