Aomame

Aomame, 1Q84, Haruki Murakami

5’6…Not once ounce of excess fat…The left ear much bigger than the right, and malformed, but her hair always covers her ears…Lips formed a tight straight line…Small narrow nose, somewhat protruding cheekbones, broad forehead, and long, straight eyebrows…[Face is a] Pleasing oval shape…Extreme paucity of expression. (Suggested by goya-galileo-vangogh )

http://thecomposites.tumblr.com/

Sundays

Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

My container farm – phase 1

So, there’s this guy named Dr Doshi in Mumbai. Apparently he grows a ton of things on his terrace, and he’s written a couple of passionate books on the topic. When I got interested in how you could produce food, and especially how you could recycle your food waste and use it as a basis for growing your own food, I found his instruction manuals and figured I’d want to try his method out. This weekend and last, I finally got around to collecting all materials and get started. Basically all you need is – bags or other containers, some biomass, compost, soil, water and of course seeds. In this first phase I prepared the bags so that I can sow next week. Here’s the recipe :

1. Get your sacks

I used cement bags. Rice bags, fertilizer bags, buckets or anything like that which is easily and cheaply (or even freely) available would do. Open up the closed end, so that it becomes a tube so that it will drain water properly.

2. Fill the bottom 50% with biomass

I used straw which I could get from the local fruit vendors (they use it to pack their containers). Leaves, twigs, sugarcane from juice vendors or anything of that sort should also work. Whatever is available. This layer is for good drainage while still holding the compost and soil in its place

3. Add compost, 25% of what’s left

I started with the compost that i produced from my own food waste. Since I mix my food waste with leaves, and since there’s a lot of heavy-duty biomass (like mango pips) I put this in the bottom layer with the other biomass. In this way it’s given even more time to decompose as well as serve as a useful biomass layer. After that I filled up with gobar or cowdung compost which I’d got cheaply from local nurseries.

My compost

4. Add soil for the rest 25%

I filled up with soil and then finally mixed it with

5. Water and let drain a couple of time so that the soil sets in the container

At waste picker slum in Delhi

At waste picker slum in Delhi

via twittelator

The other story

From Nilanjana S. Roy, Listening to Rushdie:

Midnight’s Children tears up the textbook version of Indian Independence; one of the ways to counter, for instance, the hagiography of the Gandhi family, those full-page ads featuring Indira and her progeny is to read Rushdie’s portrait of the Widow and what she did during the Emergency. But in these times, there are other writers who continue to write against the grain of the official histories — the more official, the less likely to be true. Amitav Ghosh’s Opium War series swings the perspective around to the Indian view, Tahmima Anam’s The Good Muslim stands (as Rushdie’s Shame did some two decades ago) as a reproach to those who would deny the bloody history of Bangladesh. There are fewer writers who write against the grain of religion. Tahmima Anam is one of them, and The Good Muslim is a mercilessly accurate exploration of two kinds of tyranny — the tyranny of the righteously faithful, and the twinned tyranny of the righteous liberal who stands against the excesses of faith. In many ways, Anam writes against the backdrop of the question Rushdie asked many years ago, when he wrote The Satanic Verses.

Question: What is the opposite of faith?

Not disbelief. Too final, certain, closed. Itself a kind of belief.

Doubt.

http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/nilanjana-s-roy-listening-to-rushdie/461970/

Where the Mehrauli flower market ain’t no more

I was told that this market had been there for 100s of years – in fact
maybe one of the oldest in India. Thankfully, on my last visit to
Mehrauli I was relieved to see that such a blotch on the face of the
world class city of Delhi had been conveniently relocated.