A Monkey Story

/ Rajashree Varma / 2 Comments

monkeyI love monkeys like I love elephants. I can sit and watch them for hours, they’re so interesting and intelligent. If you get a chance, you should try it some time!

Here’s a story about an experience I had with monkeys in my home town of Nilambur:

The city of Nilambur had lots of monkeys roaming around. They used to come into the city and our houses in search of food. This might sound sinister, but actually the way they came around was hilarious: they’d form a line and march towards the city gate, cross it, and then enter neighborhoods as a group. The problem was, they created havoc! They destroyed all the crops and stole objects that took their fancy,  making a mess of the whole place. My grandmother lost many of her blouses, and since she got very upset, my grandpa decided to keep a dog, named Tommy, just to scare the monkeys away.

I didn’t see the following incident personally, but the way Grandpa told the story, we used to laugh out loud and ask to hear the story over and over again. Continue reading →

If You Happen To Be At Yale

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Vincent van Gogh, Le café de nuit (The Night Café) (1888). Photo: courtesy Yale University Art Gallery.

 

The intersection of these three names–one, a painter who is known to have influenced a community of influential fellow-painters during his own brief lifetime (not to mention since); one, a community of revolutionaries; and the other (how many ways can we categorize Yale according to the communities it represents?)–is as oddly appealing as the painting in question:

Van Gogh Painting Seized by Bolsheviks Will Stay at Yale

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Do The Green Thing Countdown 27/29

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“Better By Bike” speaks again on the topic of bicycle power, in the interest of Earth Hour as promoted by WWF and which Raxa Collective’s community will be participating in:

Today we are delighted to present a poster from a man who needs no introduction, but that won’t stop us from introducing him anyway. Sir Paul Smith is one of the most admired figures in the world of fashion: a style guru, a gentleman and a mad keen cyclist. He has created a piece of heartfelt pro-pedal propaganda featuring one of his own cycles and a message in his own writing: “it’s better by bike”. We agree.

Why?  Continue reading →

The Importance of Flowers

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Photo credits: Christoph Hurni

Photo credits: Christoph Hurni

Flowers are quite important in Indian culture. They are needed in the temples to adorn the gods, as well as for other decorations, be it for a wedding or for any other function.

If you walk through a street which is close to a temple, you will see lots of flower vendors. Since it’s said that there are up to thirty-three million gods in Hinduism (isn’t that amazing?!), India clearly needs lots of flowers. Of course, many people don’t actually know all the millions of gods (including me), but luckily there aren’t many restrictions on what flowers can be used to adorn any given god!

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Do The Green Thing Countdown 26/29

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Today’s is a dark one, darker than our normal post content but in the spirit of going with the flow we link out to this poster appropriately called Extermination Workshop:

Step forward Michael Wallis, a left-field thinker and co-founder of branding agency Corke Wallis. In this satirical poster-cum-drama set in the future, he speculates on the totally ridiculous idea of standby mode, and makes us ask ourselves: “why on earth would humanity come up with such a hopeless invention?”

Michael says: “I’m supporting Green Thing and Earth Hour so that when the apocalypse comes it is at the hands of something really epic like aliens or cyborgs or giant reptiles from another dimension, not DVD players.”

Why?

 

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Do The Green Thing Countdown 25/29

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Continuing our promotion of Do The Green Thing’s campaign on behalf of WWF for Earth Hour, we point you to Switch Off Engine by Harry Pearce in which he:

…takes a warning sign from the depths of the car world and reuses it to create a messages that instructs us to step away from our vehicles and go by foot instead.

“The visual language of obedience demands our attention and compliance,” says Harry. “Maybe the car industry should follow its own rules.”

Why?

Continue reading →

Libraries Old And New, Big And Small, At The Core Of Communities

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Cover_The_Public_Library_bookThis book by Robert Dawson pays attention to one of the institutions we care most about, libraries–specifically public ones. Why do we care so much about them? Because of the essential role they play in so many communities, both small and large, with regard to education and egalitarian opportunity.

Toni Morrison’s assessment of the book is that “Robert Dawson’s work is an irrefutable argument for the preservation of public libraries. His book is profound and heartbreakingly beautiful.”  From the author/photographer’s own website the text that introduces the work is a mix of promotion and fact:

This project is a photographic survey of public libraries throughout the United States featuring essays on libraries and the public commons from prominent American writers. The book The Public Library: A Photographic Essay will be published in April, 2014 by Princeton Architectural Press. ISBN 978-1-61689-217-3

Smallest library, now closed, Hartland Four Corners, Vermont

There are over 17,000 public libraries in this country. Since I began the project in 1994, I have photographed hundreds of libraries in forty-eight states. From Alaska to Florida, New England to the West Coast, the photographs reveal a vibrant, essential, yet threatened system.

For the past two centuries public libraries in America have functioned as a system of noncommercial centers that help us define what we value and what we share. The modern library in the computer age is in the midst of reinventing itself. What belongs in a library? Continue reading →

Adyanpara Waterfalls

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Adyanpara

The nightly Adyanpara Waterfalls are nestled near the city of Nilambur. Not many know of its existence. Even though I belong to the same city, I came to know of it only quite recently.

At Adyanpara, the speeding stream finds its way through the ups and downs of the contours of a black rocky terrain that  plummet around 300 feet. The stream flows through the rain forest to the rocky basin with a series of cascades all along the way; however most of them are too tiny to be  taken seriously. The swift stream in due course gets morphed into the bigger and slower River Chaliyar.

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Recycling’s Rare Odd Find

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We should recycle, re-use, waste less just because. Occasionally there are distracting stories about other reasons for these more eco-efficient behaviors. A copy of the USA Declaration Of Independence found in a “junk” sale–that sort of thing. These rare occurrences just make it more fun to do the green thing:

When a scrap metal dealer from U.S. Midwest bought a golden ornament at a junk market, it never crossed his mind that he was the owner of a $20 million Faberge egg hailing from the court of imperial Russia.

In a mystery fit for the tumultuous history of Russia’s ostentatious elite, the 8-cm (3-inch) golden egg was spirited out of St Petersburg after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and then disappeared for decades in the United States. Continue reading →

Do The Green Thing Countdown 24/29

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We will walk the walk until March 29, when Earth Hour comes, and talk that walk too. To infinity, and beyond, if possible. Yesterday, when this campaign first came to our attention, we posted three samples from the campaign linked from Phaidon’s article. Today, straight from the source:

Our motto is Creativity vs Climate Change. Our product is a feed of beautiful, subversive and delightful inspiration made by great creative talent from around the world. Our aim is to inspire as many people as possible to live in a less selfish, less consumptive, more imaginative and more sustainable way. Try it. You might even like it. Continue reading →

Pro-Environment Posters For WWF’s March 29 Earth Hour Initiative

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Walk the Walk by Marina Willer for 29 Posters for the Planet

Walk the Walk by Marina Willer for 29 Posters for the Planet

We appreciate collaborative efforts to raise awareness about environmental issues, especially when they come from places where the focus is not normally on conservation. Design agencies are generally designed to sell more stuff. Publishers are generally designed to use ex-trees to communicate stuff. But some designers are on the other side of the consumer behavior-influencing fence. And some publishers use those ex-trees to publicize a more tree-centric future.  Ethics sometimes prevail over ambition. Education sometimes jumps the line.

Professional communities–whether design firms, publishers, hotel companies or take your pick–all have latent collective action lurking in their futures. We hope nature and culture are the beneficiaries. Thanks in particular at this moment to publisher Phaidon, which is in itself worthy of a post on its series of environmentally-friendly books and initiatives, for bringing this initiative of design firm Pentagram to our attention:

Pentagram’s carbon free foot print

Design agency works with Do The Green Thing charity on environmentally friendly posters

The gulf between our high-consumption lifestyles and the kind of sustainable world many of us hope to inhabit is vast. Yet the changes that could take us there aren’t unthinkable, as our recent book, The World We Made, makes clear. Continue reading →

Taj Mahal

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Photo credit : Sanjayan

Photo credit: Sanjayan

A Unesco World Heritage Site and considered one of the eight wonders of the world, the Taj Mahal is in Agra in the Indian state of Utterpradesh. Twenty-two thousand laborers and craftsmen worked on the mausoleum complex between A.D. 1631 and 1653, to the cost of what is believed to be thirty-two crore (320 million) rupees. Continue reading →

Sophie Olsen, Come To Kerala!

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It has been a while since we extended one of these invitations. More frequently than we realized, these invitations have some connection to water. This exhibit on Sophie Olsen’s website, which came to our attention due to a blog post by Jessie Wender on the New Yorker’s website, leaves us wanting to learn more about the people she has photographed. With the photograph featured in Wender’s post there is just a small bit of context:

OLSEN: Diving down to the ocean bed without any equipment, Ngui is searching for fish to bring home to his family, on the Surin Islands, off the coast of Thailand. This photograph is part of a larger series about the sea nomads called the Mokens. Traditionally, one Moken family lives for as many nine months of the year on a boat; their children learn how to swim before they can walk.

So, what better than to invite Sophie to come to Kerala and tell us more in person. Until then, on the Dazed website there is an archived blurb about this exhibit that looks like about as much as we will learn for now: Continue reading →

Nākd Bars Revisited

/ Seth Inman / 2 Comments

A while back I was exposed to the wonder of Nākd bars, and I shared some reasons why you should eat them. Now, I’ve had the luck to try several more of their creative and delicious flavors. Before I dive into those, a quick aside: along with seven hundred other students, this semester I’m taking one of the most popular classes at Cornell University, Introduction to Wines. One of the course goals is learning how to parse the different aromas and their combination with the wine’s acidity, alcohol, and other elements, all of which come together to make a complex liquid.

As I tasted more Nākd bar flavors this year, I thought to myself that if I was being taught how to judge and analyze such a complicated thing as wine, then there was no reason I couldn’t apply the same process to something as naturally simple as a Nākd bar, and write some brief thoughts on the new flavors I tried!  Continue reading →