The village beauty ...

The Data collection is as elusive as it can get... the village a beautiful place as beautiful as it can get despite the flies that live "harmoniously", the increasing amount of plastic waste that makes me wonder why is Bangalore making plastic roads.. Indian villages don't have roads and too much plastic.. if we could use the plastic waste within them maybe all villages will have metalled roads in India ...and this is no lols..

Today started on a mixed note and the day was a mixed note day no doubt.. my bus got delayed thanks to a very long goods train that was crossing the road. lols well this is lols. cause the train came to the unmanned crossing and then the assistant driver got down and walked ahead of the engine clearing the traffic and impatient bike car drivers away and the engine roared its whistle and moved behind the assistant driver just like a little toddler learning to cross the road behind its mother. lols.. the log 60 Bogey goods train was thus taught to cross the road in about fifteen minutes.. the next railway crossing was manned but the meter gauge train took its own sweet time and the impatient jeep drivers created a traffic jam and so my usual 2 hour journey took an extra half hour.. then comes the task of moving from the taluka place to the village and the shared auto took 40 minutes to move and budge as it did not have enough passengers.. and i discovered a girl wearing a skirt and moving in an auto in visnagar :)

In the meantime my partners in crime in mean in the data collection were administering some questionnaires and we were getting some data. i saw the huge village pond . We even spent a full hour in the village temple of Umiya Mata and i discovered beauty in there.. beauty that usually we all will ignore.. see the pics... the temple is built majestically though not very grand in size and it has beauty in many aspects the gates, the pillars the design and best of all the charm in the idol of the deity . it is a sight for all of us to see and realise how realistically charming deities we have in India in villages and most forgotten corners as well. we just don't have time and eyes to see it most of the time . I hope you enjoy the data collection pics. lols the birds and the buildings.

In the meantime i shall worry about my worst fears being confirmed.. the youth have lost touch with agriculture in this village and there is a rising incidence of males well past marriageable age not getting brides due to the high pressure on land.

Another beauty i noticed today was that of a full grown tree with a round foliage that had not been cut or shaped by something else. the original tree as we might call it today in the cities and this sad lols.

The life and issues of Adaptiveness in Bharat or Rural India

What does one do in a village, if you come from a city and not a village?

Wif your PhD thesis takes you there .. there is enough to figure out and time is always short. This is precisely what has been happening with me while i tell people about how i accomplish very little work in a day of fieldwork. let us look at how this unfolds.. why? well cause i want to explore the pace of life in a village..even for an urbanite like me who is overplanned lols!!! yes Over planned and you will see how.

Today, like usual, i started on time but my partners got delayed. The reason was simple. The bus they had to take was cancelled. the first reality of "Bharat" within India hits you. there are two things which get cancelled so easily these days - the flights of Kingfisher and Jet Airways and the Buses to rural India. No wonder the airplanes are called "air"- "buses"...lols..

I decided to make the "most" of time on my hands and i decided to pay a friendly visit to the Visnagar office of Development Support Centre (DSC) . i was met there by Shri Vijaybhai and it was a more than welcome reception and i tried my best to cooperate with him as well. i got some good information as in the name and location of a few villages which coudl posisbly be my sample unit villages for data collection and also the names of main contacts. That was more than what i had bargained for as i landed in without prior information. If you have'nt wondered how i reached the visnagar DSC office unplanned is not cause i carry a list of contacts with me or because the internet penetration in Gujarat is very good and i have used the internet in Visnagar and trust me the internet cafe there has better speed than the sify iWay in lucknow:) sad :( but true. i had the DSC ahmedabad number and i called them up to get to DSC visnagar . That brought me to vijaybhai who connected me to mohan bhai and rajandra bhai :) phew already too many characters and offices and location..well this Gala-head story is just beginning to take shape.

My mobile got a charger easily in the DSC officer but it fell and it stopped working . The repair shop guys were more polite for my more than 5 year old mobile phone there than i could ever find in the city. I was happy at that. I rushed to village Kansa and was met there by the Secretary of the irrigation cooperative called the "shri kansa Irrigation Cooperative for the sale of Canal Irrigation Water". I wonder who named that...

I was met by Gowdabhai . a very helpful gentelman who also doubles up as the operator of the irrigation cooperative. i decided not to "waste" time and i requested him if i could interview him as a farmer member of the cooperative. I was almost through when i was joined by my partners and then we tried to catch others in the village.

we searched on institutions and farmers for our sample and as we searched we got to know they were gone to a meeting for the irrigaiton canal. some others were gone out on personal or family errands. from one to four we talked about the irrigation cooperative to the secretary and corrected the information that i had collected earlier. a critical part of this was understanding new services like the washing ghat for women which i had mistaken as an activity of the irrigation cooperative. it is only tactfully supported by them.

beyond four we had no option the secretary was showing the laurels won by the cooperative and himself. Soon we realised the world is a small place. my IRMA juniors Shweta Kolluri and Shweta Prasad had visited Babubhai and we discussed sweet melodious memories from thier visit to his name. the next hour was spent on this.

We were forced to decide further work was not happening today. and we decided to move out of the village. While we made the plan for the next day i got a friendly visitor on the road and i decided to help myself.

so at the end of the day in a Indian village you can click a Peacock in its glory :) if not anything else. If you agree with this you miss that i was living the slow rural life for a day and trying to understand the changing needs and aspirations of people and hence the need of the Water Management Institutions to adapt and be successfull by fulfiling the expectations of the farmer-members. I was exploring the rate of adaptiveness that existed in the institution. In such a village the institution can respond to any exigency like a breach of the canal minor in less than two hours and a change of rule or procedure in less than two days where the decision is with the consensus of all the members of the institution. ..so now think twice about whats fast... whats slow.. and how important it is know the context before we conclude something as fast or slow.

the house of Research and its mess of responsible Researchers

Hmm a long absence from the blogosphere.. and I'm trying to be back. Well what brings me back this time is none less than a Nobel laureate Dr. Paul Krugman. My friend Avinash Kishore Shahi did not find him interesting as a teacher ( for more log on to http://www.avinashkishoreshahi.wordpress.com) and the Nobel committee found him very exciting. They even lauded his teaching. That is not what brings me here.

What truly brings me here is the fact that he is a popular writer in the New York Times with a regular column where he criticises Mr. Bush and makes himself interesting to a Global audience. My interest has always been in doing work that connects to real lives of people and since the time is ripe i can take a dig, unlike the virtual finance world. Krugman does connect to a popular sentiment of the masses, even if most of the masses are not of the US, it would still be valid in an increasingly globalized world.

How many of us researchers ever try to take our work to the common man and make sense for him?

How many of us researchers want to place our work in popular literature so that a mass of people can benefit from it without our worrying about dissemination of our research and its findings.

How many of us researchers are confident that we can tackle the layman questions and show the connection with the real world of our research?

How many of us researchers are capable of not losing sight of the actual real life problem, we touch upon in our research ,in the maze of epistemology, validity, reliability, sampling design and so many other arguments and counter arguments?

How many of us are still excited about the problem we are trying to tackle when we are finishing our thesis and have not made the compromise of hitting a deadline cause it had to or altering the design or sample cause of some "practical" issues like operational funding etc.

I am not saying that i am beyond this or i have not done this or that but is it a more important question that our research is based on reality as it exists rather than a method proclaiming my religion of "good" "rigorous" "research". The vote is open now and we all have to cast our own vote . If relevance is achieved by compromising rigour (as many will vouch for relevance vs. rigour) why do we need rigour at all. If rigour is what is research is about (as many will vouch about purity of research again ) then why do we need to tell the implications and managerial implications or policy imperatives of our research at all. i guess its been long the research house needs to set the house in order. also i know this wont happen. Veblen had tried the same 110 years ago and we still live in the mess he had wanted to clear.

Amidst all this i wonder what Krugman does to this debate? apart form kick it up in my mind.