I was saddened to hear the news this week of the death of Mahantji’s, and it led me to dig out the picture of him at his beloved Krishna lila and the following which I wrote for a collection about him late last year. The news item from the Times of India speaks to his international and national profile. The following is more of a personal reflection of my memories of him.

I came to know Mahantji when I lived in Varanasi between August 1996 and December 2007. I had the good fortune to find lodgings with his maternal nephew and through these connections was able to experience Mahantji’s work and influence on the neighbourhood, the wider city and his extended family.

Often I would end my day by visiting Mahantji in his ‘receiving room’ at Tulsi ghat. Having wiped my brow and removed my gamcha I would be ushered in, to be greeted by a picture of serenity, far removed from the hustle and bustle of the streets. Of course I was never alone for these audiences. More often than not there were other supplicants and visitors keen to discuss various matters with Mahantji and I was always struck by his kindess with his time and his willingness to listen to people’s problems or points of view. Indeed his ability to listen before making a judgment or offering advice was never lost on those who had sought his opinion – even if, as often seemed the case, they didn’t hear what they would have liked from Mahantji, for he did not suffer fools gladly.

I think the strongest impression I have of Mahantji is his generosity. Much of what is written about him and his work focuses, quite appropriately, on his work to find a permanent solution to the on-going pollution of the Ganga. However, Tulsi ghat always struck me – and I use the word struck advisedly – as the centre of a project of cultural patronage. The cultural and religious intensity of Varanasi is in large part the result of the spiritual and financial investments of people such as Mahantji whose patronage provides the basis for some of the most signification events in the religious and artistic calendar of the city. I’m thinking especially of the Krishna lila (play), the Sankat Mochan music festival and the countless other festivals, such as the Dhrupad mela, and events which, with his financial and spiritual support, mark out the cultural rhythm of the city. The crowds at these events make it clear that these are not minority interests, even in an era when mass media (my object of study during my years in the city) compete for their attention. The cultural intensity of the city is in large part due to the leadership of people like Mahantji whose acts of patronage provide the basis for much of what has, over may centuries, made Varanasi a distinctive city with a undeniable performative richness

Many of the guests at Tulsi ghat had travelled from far beyond the city to have their audience with Mahantji. Academics, journalists and those interested in his work on cleaning the Ganga were often to be found in attendance. These guests often seemed fascinated by contradiction presented by a professor of Hydrological Engineering committed to the cause of the Ganga’s pollution, and a devout Hindu who would bathe in its pure waters each morning. It always struck me that there was little point in trying to understand Mahantji in terms of this apparent contradiction because for him there is no tension in the idea that one can be a devout Hindu and an engineer. Instead we can see that his life’s work was devoted to one substance – water – that is at the heart of the beliefs and daily practices of Hindus, and his beloved Varanasi, and is the ultimate sustainer of life on earth.  In that sense Mahantji’s work and life transcends distinctions between the secular and the spiritual, or the worldly and other wordly. His life was one of profound unity.

EPIC 2013, London 15th-18th September

EPIC 2013 is coming. The Call is out and can be found here. Tickets will be going on sale in March.

“Traditional societies do not exist to help us tweak our lives as we emulate a few of their cultural practices. They remind us that our way is not the only way. A child raised in the Andes to believe that a mountain is a protective deity will have a relationship with the natural world profoundly different from that of a youth brought up in America to believe a mountain is an inert mass of rock ready to be mined. The mythology of the Barasana and Makuna people is in every way a land management plan revealing how human beings once thrived in the Amazon rain forest in their millions. Take all the genius that enabled us to put a man on the moon and apply it to an understanding of the ocean, and what you get is Polynesia. Tibetan Buddhism condenses 2,500 years of direct empirical observation as to the nature of mind. A lama once remarked that Tibetans do not believe that Americans went to the moon, but they did. Americans may not believe, he added, that Tibetans can achieve enlightenment in one lifetime, but they do.

The voices of traditional societies ultimately matter because they can still remind us that there are indeed alternatives, other ways of orienting human beings in social, spiritual and ecological space. This is not to suggest naively that we abandon everything and attempt to mimic the ways of non-industrial societies, or that any culture be asked to forfeit its right to benefit from the genius of technology. It is rather to draw inspiration and comfort from the fact that the path we have taken is not the only one available, that our destiny therefore is not indelibly written in a set of choices that demonstrably and scientifically have proven not to be wise. By their very existence the diverse cultures of the world bear witness to the folly of those who say that we cannot change, as we all know we must, the fundamental manner in which we inhabit this planet”.

“About thirty years ago, when Keynes was in the depths of economic unfashionability, going up to a group of macroeconomists and trying to start a conversation about the multiplier would have been roughly like going up to a group of astrophysicists and trying to start a conversation about your star sign.”

The multiplier and GDP is well explained earlier in the same piece:

“Imagine for a moment that you come across an unexpected ten pounds. After making a mental note not to spend it all at once, you go out and spend it all at once, on, say, two pairs of woolly socks. The person from the sock shop then takes your tenner and spends it on wine, and the wine merchant spends it on tickets to see The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, and the owner of the cinema spends it on chocolate, and the sweet-shop owner spends it on a bus ticket, and the owner of the bus company deposits it in the bank. That initial ten pounds has been spent six times, and has generated £60 of economic activity. In a sense, no one is any better off; and yet, that movement of money makes everyone better off. To put it another way, that first tenner has contributed £60 to Britain’s GDP. Seen in this way, GDP can be thought of as a measure not so much of size – how much money we have, how much money the economy contains – but of velocity. It measures the movement of money through and around the economy; it measures activity. If you had taken the same ten quid when it was first given to you and simply paid it into your bank account, the net position could be argued to be the same – except that the only contribution to GDP is that initial gift of £10, and if this behaviour were replicated across the whole economy, then the whole economy would grind to a halt. And that, broadly speaking, is what is happening right now. People are sitting on that first tenner.”

I live in Peckham and so was naturally interested by what happened in the boarded-up window of Poundland after the riots in 2011. And, since I’m someone who uses post-it notes from time to tim, and work within a professional caste for whom they are key tools, I was provoked into reflecting on their use. However, I have to admit a certain amount of luck in the telling of this story…

Being an organiser of EPIC I had very little time to prepare my talk, and getting to that task late in the day I quickly discovered that the story I had wanted to tell initially – about post-its in a boarded up window – would look a little different, and more interesting. The Peckham Peacewall had been made permanent by a local artist and installed in Peckham Space, next to the the landmark  library.

Acknowledgments: Many thanks to Chris Ratcliffe at Garudio Studiage for his time and help in telling me the story of the Peacewall, and to Rebecca Cahill at Peckham Shed and John Clare for permission to use their photographs. And, of course, credit should go to the people of Peckham Shed who created the Peacewall in the beginning.

“What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow out of this stony rubbish?” – T.S Eliot, The Wasteland.

This talk asks what comes out of riot and what tools are used to effect a renewal?Many of us (people who do research, do ‘innovation’ or work with ideas, and many others besides) use post it notes everyday. They are a tool and a totem of our work – markers of the fact that we interpret and organize data and create ideas. They are symbols of a professional caste. But what happens when they turn up in a rather different setting – what uses are they put to and what sort of lives can they have?

Let’s start at the beginning. August 2011. I’m at home in Peckam, south London. I went outside to see what was happening and why there was a helicopter hovering above us. I saw a ploom of smoke and given that London was being convulsed by rioting and looting I thought I might learn more on TV.

That week in August a large number of areas in London and other major British cities experienced severe unrest following the death of Mark Duggan who was shot dead by the police in Tottenham, north London. Trouble had broken out in Peckham. On TV I discovered that there was looting and arson taking place 5 minutes away from home on Rye Lane. Greggs the Bakers was on fire and many shops had been vandalised.

Peckham is a traditional London working class community, albeit one showing signs of gentrification of which, being a resident, I guess I am evidence. It is ethnically diverse, with significant populations from Bangladesh, the Caribbean, China, India, Ireland, Nigeria, Pakistan, Eastern Europe and Vietnam. Despite the arrival of bars, bistros and bohos the geographical and social heart of Peckham is Rye Lane. It was Rye Lane where most of the looting and arson occurred and where the Peckham Peacewall emerged the following day.Members of a local theatre company, Peckham Shed, who work with teenagers in Peckham headed to Rye Lane to participate in the clear up. This was a process replicated more widely around London as communities ‘struck back’. Seeing the boarded up window of Poundland, a discount store, they thought it would be a good idea to get people to express their opinions about what had happened in Peckham.

The result was an array of four thousand post its inscribed with a wide variety of messages displaying mainly positive feelings about Peckham. Thoughts built on thoughts, statements on statements, in a way that perhaps we’re all familiar with. Certain themes and feelings predominated, often forming in clusters where groups of friends or families built on each others’ post its. So, in many respects, the post its of Peckham were similar to the post its that we are familiar with. They make voices and opinions tangible, they allow voices that might not be heard to be represented, they state intent. They inscribe identities, subjectivities and statuses.Riots subject people to violence perpetrated not by a distant and abstract enemy but by their own community and riots challenge people’s sense of understanding of their community. In this context, anthropological studies of riots (e.g., Veena Das‘s Mirrors of Violence), have spoken of one task confronting the impacted community as being the need to reformulate their world, by establishing a bridge between the self and the world, and of connecting a ruptured past with visions of the future.The Peacewall was quickly picked up by the national media. But this being Britain in the summer, rain and a strong breeze started to damage it. And when council workers came to remove it there were fears and some anger that they were going to destroy it and that they were acting on Council orders to have the wall destroyed since it represented a bad (and possibly lasting) image of the area. One man who lived in a flat above a shop opposite had taken it upon himself to ensure that no one damaged it. The Wall had become a strong symbol of one community’s overwhelmingly positive response to the convulsions of the previous days. 

And I guess that’s how it is for most Post it notes. They have short and somewhat inglorious biographies – a brief moment of glory encapsulating a thought, an idea, or even an insight. Physically they peel, they float to the floor and the tearsheets they’re attached to are rolled up and discarded. Theirs is a life of impermanence – they’re merely bridge to something more lasting. But the post it notes that were produced in Peckham’s community brainstorm were destined for a different sort of life. A local artist, Chris Ratcliffe, was determined to ensure that voices that had found expression through the Peacewall could be heard long term. He had recently been working on a project designed to get residents of the area to engage with creating a long term vision for Rye Lane and surrounding areas, and the Peacewall offered itself as perhaps another set of evidences about how people felt about their community.

This urge to preserve resulted in the Peckham Peacewall. Funding was sought for a project to recreate the wall in a more permanent form. Local teenagers from community groups were recruited to trace over each and every post it note in order to ensure that both the original messages, but the distinctive calligraphy of each and every contributor could be captured. Chris had toyed with the idea of printing the content in a uniform text but instead wanted to allow people to return to the wall and easily find their own messages.The tracing paper was scanned and the post its were organised into a formal grid. The ’tiles’ were then printed on a large format laminate material. The post its were arranged in a grid and printed on a laminate material – and installed in a public space near to Peckham’s pubic library on what had previously been a rotting chipboard partition. The material is guaranteed to last at least 10 years. Permanence of this sort is not something that the average post it enjoys.Chris left blank post it notes throughout the grid on which things can be written. And people are writing on them, nearly always reaffirming their positive view of Peckham.The Peacewall successfully manages to be both a memorial to a moment in time and a place for that memory to be continually enacted. That bridge between self and community, past and future that accounts of life after a riot suggest is so important, has been constructed. The post notes we use in our everyday work practice, I suggest, do somewhat similar things. They act as bridges between research and analysis, between people and their ideas, they act as means of staging ideas and giving voice to fragments of thoughts and concepts. But most often they are highly expendable tools – bridges that we can, to use a military image, blow up behind us as we advance.  Sometimes, I hope I’ve demonstrated, there are reasons why sometimes making them a permanent can make sense too. I would suggest that in Peckham this is certainly true. The Peckham Peacewall has made a permanent place of memory to a violent episode in a community’s recent past and its strong, willful response to it. 

My children didn’t quite understand what was happening around them the day, or the morning after the riots. But they enjoy going on their scooters to read the post it notes at Peckham Space. And they are, I would hope, not alone in finding the Wall both informative, full of local expressions (as well as quite fun to visit). The Peacewall is now an icon of Peckham that points to a brighter future – it really does act as a bridge between a violent episode in the past and an area of London looking forward.

Source unknown

In the longer view of history, India has only recently come to be seen as a poor country. As early as Roman times there was a dramatic drain of western gold to India; during the reign of Nero, the Pandyan kings even sent an embassy to Rome to discuss the latter’s balance of payments problems. A thousand years later it was India’s extraordinary wealth that drew in the merchant adventurers of the East India Company. They came to India not as part of some Tudor aid project, but instead as part of a desperate effort to cash in on the riches of the Mughal empire, then one of the two wealthiest polities in the world. In Milton’s Paradise Lost, the Mughal city of Lahore is revealed to Adam after the Fall as a future wonder of God’s creation: by the 17th century, Lahore had grown richer than Constantinople, and with its two million inhabitants it dwarfed London and Paris combined. It was, in terms of rapid growth, prosperity and opportunities, the Gurgaon of its day.

What eastern Europeans are to modern Brit­ain – economic migrants in search of a better life – the Jacobeans were to Mughal India. It was only after the arrival of the various colonial powers that India came to be perceived as poor. What is happening today is merely India’s slow return to its natural place at the forefront of the world economy. History is on its side.

In the long run, if India can learn to reform its institutions and clean out its political stables, it should not find it difficult to revert to its rightful and natural place as a rich country and a major power. After all, India’s people thrive wherever else they go in the world. India has the talent; and it has the resources. All it lacks is the political will.

Nice to have the long view. Most current commentary on India seems to take a quarterly view of its prospects. Given the depth of history in the place, that seems at best misguided, at worst myopic.

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.

Charlie Stross

Sermon, John Donne, 1572-1631

I’m in the midst of writing something about big data, and I’m struck by what, at the time of writing this piece, I thought of as a quantity vs a quality theory of phenomena.

Social network thinking then, and perhaps still, seems to privilege size over quality –  the sense is that social graph’s power lies in its size rather than in the complexity of the relationships, and the relationships between relationships within it. I think the same is true of big data right now – the qualifier ‘big’ is really what people focus on. But size, as they say, really isn’t everything.

Here’s the post from 18th March 2004:

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn’t a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace:  when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his
generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their
education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

From Another Time by W. H. Auden, published by Random House. Copyright © 1940 W. H. Auden, renewed by The Estate of W. H. Auden. Used by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.

Provocative piece from the The New Enquiry, arguing against the idea that a ‘logged on life’ is a distracted one that detracts from the quality of our relationships in ‘real life’:

“…we are far from forgetting about the offline; rather we have become obsessed with being offline more than ever before. We have never appreciated a solitary stroll, a camping trip, a face-to-face chat with friends, or even our boredom better than we do now. Nothing has contributed more to our collective appreciation for being logged off and technologically disconnected than the very technologies of connection. The ease of digital distraction has made us appreciate solitude with a new intensity. We savor being face-to-face with a small group of friends or family in one place and one time far more thanks to the digital sociality that so fluidly rearranges the rules of time and space. In short, we’ve never cherished being alone, valued introspection, and treasured information disconnection more than we do now. Never has being disconnected — even if for just a moment — felt so profound.”

Horst W.J. Rittel – The Reasoning of Designers 1987