India’s Population Uncensored

India's Population Uncensored | Painted Poem by Remigius de Souza

Here population explosion unlimited
Many Family Planning options employed
All Planning remedies get tired
Once an obstacle of Auspicious Time worked
But now through all seasons and times
Marriages happen 24x7 on TV serials

(18 February 2013 | Mumbai)

This is not an intellectual verbal acrobatics, but poetry in real life experienced and encountered by all my senses. Clearly, this is a word-caricature of Indian disparity or absurdity on several fronts, which cannot be caught in a photograph or a movie or in a fat discourse. Call it a poem, or a parody, if you wish, that defies rules of classical or romantic literature.


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©Remigius de Souza, all rights reserved.

Mother Nature With Us Forever

Mother Nature With Us even after Death as Soil or Ashes

(From: Remi's Photo Synthesis: SRISHTI – SUKTA)

PRAISE MOTHER NATURE

The home of Mother Nature has no gods-idols-hero worshipers
In biotic - abiotic nature comprehend Supreme Spirit personified;
She is ever visible, audible, edible, tactile, sexual...
Progenitor, boon to mortals, Dance of Life and Death, too;
Mother Nature embodies one Language–Dharma–Scripture–Law;
She is Primal Guru–Primal School–Open Book, freely available to all.
Remigius de Souza | Mumbai | 25-12-2009

Mother Nature at our hand

Mother Nature does neither recognize humans as her favourite species nor their social boundaries and hierarchies.

Bamboo

Civilized Societies are so obsessed with boundaries that they decorate. add on ornaments, make memorials out of them and applause them, such as Great Wall of China, which is no more than a symbol of feudalism!

Similarly plants and other animals too don't recognize human societies' boundaries and social hierarchies. The domesticated animals - chickens, cats, cattle, goats etc. - too don't recognize them, except when they return 'home' in the evening.

Bacteria, in hordes, enter our guts when we start taking external foods, other than mother's milk, in our early childhood; they make colonies there.

Hopefully, we behold 'Nature' beyond 'greenery' of gardens, farms, woodlands, remaining forests, and wetlands; beyond Wordsworth's poems, Turner's paintings, beyond photographs / movies / videos for visual pleasure; howsoever advanced they may be, they are not alternatives to Nature,

They may help us to recall our beautiful/terrible experiences of Nature.

Life Sciences and archaeology, with their advances, also help us to know more about Nature and our place in Nature.

Perhaps we realize power and dreary aspects of Nature in cyclones, cloud bursts, earth quakes, lightening, tsunami and Climate Change (which is not fiction).

First observation of Nature

Any first hand contact with Nature at elementary and personal level is a good beginning, may it be watching self in body-and-mind; no rituals, no auspicious timings, no mantras, no special settings and sitting postures are required. Just observe with attention and compassion, as both body and mind are our tools and we are their custodians. There is no mystery; we are part of Nature just as the ‘greenery’ outside.
We can carry on this observation any time, or through out a day. 

Second observation of Nature

Roadside Sapling in Tree Pot

 We, Indic people, believe in Five Elements: Earth, Water, Fire, Air and Space. The best option is to observe plants and be in contact with then.

Better still for us is to actually sow a few seeds from kitchen in a small tin / plastic / earthen pot/s (at different seasons) and help them grow. No need to refer any manuals.

Every seed may not germinate. Watch them, see them sprout, take care, feed them sunlight and water. By and by, we come in contact with Elements, together with saplings, thereby with Mother Nature.

 

 Agricultural Revolution at Nature’s Lab

Ten thousand years ago half naked humans domesticated wild plants and animals, and Agricultural Revolution began in a most trying natural conditions.

It did spread all over the world (without Intellectual Property Rights attached).

Civilized Society did not exist then. Rise of Civilization which is also called Urban Revolution followed Agricultural Revolution five thousand years later.

Industrial Civilization was born just a few hundred year ago, where we belong. We received our learning on the Assembly Lines in Mass Schooling System.

Isn't it a high time to get acquainted with Mother Nature – Srishti?

(12/09/2012)

Note: While writing this post I came across this blog-pot “Humans and Nature: Can the Gulf Be Bridged?” (The New York Times, Feb. 5, 2013). The very title shows how the west / westernized / the urbanite etc. is divorced from nature. (Please see my comments on the post.)~ ~ ~ ~ ~
©Remigius de Souza, all rights reserved.

To Kill a Mosquito (Painted Poem)

To Kill a Mosquito

To Kill s Mosquito (Painted Poem)

Fumigation is on,
on mosquito menace;
instead get immune
to multiply in million,
Like humans in margin
when arrogant men
take Nature's Law in
Their hand, in Mumbai.

Remigius de Souza | Mumbai | 21-01-2012

Environmental Revolution set in mid-20th Century in the West. Science grew in leaps & bounds. Yet environment continued to suffer in equal proportion of progress in science. Global Superpowers continue to splurge energy on world summits.

We hardly learn from Srishti – Mother Nature – and her laws of Ecology, Energy and Environment. We are busy destroying Nature's ecological balance.

Alas! The frenzy to kill insects at Urban Habitats and Rural Farms annihilated benevolent bees and butterflies that helped pollination… and those kept population balance of prey and predator species.
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©Remigius de Souza, all rights reserved.

Indian Farmers' Woes and Joys

Key Word: Art, Farming (i.e. Agriculture, Aquaculture and Horticulture (forestry) collectively or separate)

Five Elements

Traditional farmers’ lives that depend on monsoon are almost identical in many regions of the world. Hence the following text is inclusive.

Very few would ever believe farmers are artists. Farmers' art is most risky vocation, among all types of occupations, professions and vocations. Even a few may not understand this fact though they may know what is farming.

Haiku by Remigius de Souza

Farmer's art takes place on real field down to earth. Like in words, painting, photography etc. it does not create virtual reality. Farmers take the colours from Mother Nature - Srishti, of five elements, Earth, Water, Fire, Air and Space, and on a canvas of small or big plot of land; he works with contemplation. They are never verbose. They are fully in contact with every nook and corner of their farm; likewise the health of all the plants.

Haiku by Remigius de Souza

Farmers are not only artists, they are also planners, but not like town planners, who flatten the lakes and land, and cut it into pieces, make their 2D drawings to build 3D art of cities. Farmers use undulating land for management and conservation of water and land.

Poem by Remigius de Souza

Farmers are management experts, too! They manage land, water, seeds, fodder, weeding, manure, tools, carting, storage, other food crops, rearing animals and birds. And equally important are the repairs, maintenance, examination, improvement and policy planning in every aspect of home and farm, which is part of their homestead. All of these, they do within available resources. Many farmers may be ill-literate but are not 'un-educated' as the elite think.

Poem by Remigius de Souza

Traditional sculptors, for years, make Ganesha, Durga idols in clay. They are aware the deities are to be immersed. Yet they work with devotion, faith, without boredom. Farmers too work with same dedication. Their labour of love, therefore, is elevated to the status of 'vocation', of art. In their karma there is element of contemplation – Dhyan – hence it is 'spiritual' too. Traditional farming also involves action by Community Participation.

Haiku by Remgius de Souza

Politicians are like white clouds.

The educated elite class have an impression that farmers work only four months (during the season) and the rest of year lazy around. Even the experts like Amartya Sen are not exception. What about the governments and bureaucrats?

Haiku by Remigius de Souza | Image by Soojung Cho

More than natural calamities, the real cause of farmers' woes and miseries are the government and bureaucracy, market and industry, and their wrong priorities of progress and development.

Note: There is lot to learn from farmers:
1. Watering the farms: Learning from the people. Governments could learn how to save resources, particularly currency spent for development, and seal its draining at the bureaucratic level - the starting point, which consumes its major part.
2. Cow dung, Rice and Amartya Sen (a critique):Challenges of 21st Century
3. SEE: Soojung Cho’s Artworks of Inner Vision (http://www.soojungcho.com/home.htm )
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©Remigius de Souza, all rights reserved.

My Home My Heart (painted poem)

With money you can buy houses, but money cannot buy for you a home. 

House is where the Home is;
Home is where the Heart is.

 

Squatters in Mumbai - fallout of Development in India

(Image: Shelter for the bus passengers / Shelter for the Displaced in Mumbai: Contradiction in Mumbai's Urban Design. 

Both togather symbolise India's Development Planning, and exposes its hypocrisy.)

Whenever I walk down-to-earth in Mumbai I notice 55 million people live in the slums and squatters, struggle for their daily bread.

It is their Daily Prayer in Action to Life. They aren't activist like the elite; they are actionist without duplicity, and without words.

It seems their number is daily rising defying the official statistics:

just like the rising national GDP of India;
just like rising Stock Exchange indexes in the money market;
just like rising numbers of skyscrapers rising higher and higher on Mumbai's skyline;
just like rising number of vacant blocks of houses awaiting higher returns of their investments.
It seems all these have lost their heart and home, both, in the money market, though the squaters on the street-side!

The reason to notice them is simple: Once I practiced as architect-planner; once I was a teacher; once I was landless teen age farm labourer; once I too was a displaced person. Only I had opportunity for formal education in time.

All these people have come from many regions of India. They come from the places wherever Mumbai has left its footprint. The rulers of India must not ignore this fact. The capitalist – Indian and foreigners – who have settled in Mumbai are capable enough to buy over all of them, but where they can get educated slaves why should they care?
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© Remigius de Souza, all rights reserved.