সহাবস্থান (Sahābasthān, Bengali; English: Coexistence) Greetings from the Rainmatter Foundation! It’s been a minute. As I sit to write this, I grapple with mixed emotions. While I want to be elated to see how well our Sharing Cities campaign is being received, I come across a video of a wolf cub being bludgeoned to death […]
Community knowledge, connection and stewardship of a place go hand-in-hand. Listening and building connection is critical not just for the place but also for a sustainable planet I had never heard of a fasal chakra. Nor a village engineer. Neither about halma, swaraj shala and gram swabhiman diwar. And the most counter-intuitive and rational-defying thing […]
દુકાળ (Gujarati: Dukāḷa; drought) The month of August has been furiously extreme. Incessant rainfall in the Himalayas had the rivers flowing in spate. Buildings and bridges washed away in water and dozens of landslides morphed local maps. Hydropower dams opened their floodgates, without warning, flooding villages and towns downstream. We have on our hands much […]
Skrap has grown to become one of India’s leading sustainability firms in the last couple of years – with a number of big events like the NH7 weekender, SBI Green Marathon (Mumbai) and waste management at the IPL in Ahmedabad under their belt. In a chat we had with their team to get insights into […]
Waste is not easy Waste is not an easy subject to deal with. It’s hardly pleasant either. We know. We agree. Conversations ranging from the lack of infrastructure and the subsequent mismanagement of waste to upcoming innovative circular solutions and everything in between; and of course its impacts and intersections with the larger climate puzzle […]
गुंतागुंत (Marathi: Guntā guṇṭī; entanglement) It’s been a while… The jumbled forces that move our world and interconnected systems are beginning to unravel our tangled lives. The summer of 2023 has brought heatwaves, wildfires, floods and landslides. After the hottest June on record, July turned out to be the hottest month in at least 120,000 […]
I would’ve been about 16 or 17 when I came across Gavin Aung’s comic strip illustrating potentially the most famous excerpt from Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot. To paraphrase, all of our pasts and futures, dreams and losses, wars and loves have taken shape on what is a mere speck in the gigantic scheme of […]
From harvesting to sorting, our crops undergo a lot of change before reaching us as food. A lack of mechanisation at the farm level means much of this work is done manually Farm-to-fork is a marvellous idea. What’s not to like about cultivating one’s own food and having a stable supply of fresh, healthy and […]
Below is Vikas’ account as he travels to three regions in Jharkhand and asks residents about their relationship to their ‘home’, pokes at the changing aspirations of rural India, and wonders if a transition from interventions to responses might be more meaningful. Indian villages are a treasure-trove of resources, cultures and skills, traditionally passed down […]
The climate crisis manifests differently across different regions. Its impact on varying wildscapes and species can take any form ranging from glacial melt in the snowy Ladakh, to the bleaching of corals along the coasts of India. That being the case, every region would have to ask its own questions, and explore its own unique […]
Two years is but a blip in the history of our planet. The Rainmatter Foundation is past the two-year mark. That day came and went, and we were unsure if we ought to make an announcement or do something special. “What’s there to celebrate? An entire Himalayan town has been sinking, there’s been only […]
ਅਨਾਜ Anāja; Punjabi (Cereal/grain) Photos: Nandhu Kumar/Unsplash We are passing through a period of transition. As the Southwest monsoon takes leave from the Indian subcontinent, the kharif harvest sets in. The crop, especially rice, is associated with abundance. India is estimated to have produced a record 127.93 million tonnes of rice in 2021-22. That it […]
शहरी पारिस्थितिकी (Shaharee paaristhitikee, Hindi) Urban ecology Rainbow Drive layout in Bangalore was one of the flood-affected areas this August and September. Photo by KP Singh via Citizen Matters Water has been the cornerstone of civilization. Cities have sprawled themselves into existence along river banks and sea coasts for thousands of years. Over time, we’ve […]
برف کا تودہ (Barf ka toda, Urdu) Glacier Photo by Ahmed Radwan/ Unsplash From heatwaves and shrinking rivers to parched fields and monstrous floods, the world witnessed extreme events throughout August. The flooding in Pakistan, compounded by glacial lake outbursts, is yet another reminder of how vulnerable we are in the face of the climate […]
বানপানী (Bānapānī, Assamese) Flood Photo by David Talukdar/Unsplash In the words of the Adi people, it is a river “that flows through our heart,” chronicles Aarti Kumar-Rao in an intimate and enlightening essay (which you can also listen to). The river, one of the longest in the world, changes course and washes away villages in […]
Why did the mushroom walk into the bar? To expand its network! Jokes aside, fungi networks are so vital that they are termed the “circulatory system of the planet”. Fungi can colonise, multiply and survive in air, water, dung and even on foam. These microorganisms–neither plants, nor animals–are widely prevalent, and are present in everyday […]
हयों (Garhwali: Hyun; Snow) A huge shout out to the Waste Warriors and Linger teams for this digest’s title. There are dozens of words for snow and snowflakes: Qanik (snow falling; Inuit/Yupik), nysnö (new snow; Norwegian), feefle (snow swirling around a corner; Scots), snjómugga (a small snowfall; Icelandic), kramsnö (snow that can be easily shaped […]
ڀنڀوري (Sindhi: Bhimbhori; Dragonfly) Migrations make for spellbinding stories and compelling heroes. November started with a bird setting the record for the longest recorded flight by a land bird. An Eastern bar-tailed godwit, identified as 4BYWW, journeyed from Alaska to New Zealand, covering a distance of 12,200km, flying for more than eight days straight! Her […]
शरद (Hindi, sharad; Autumn) Salaam. When there’s a nip in the air, when there’s a cold breeze blowing, when some of the birds begin to leave, when the trees switch to a riotous wardrobe and when the leaves desert the branches to kiss the ground… can you resist the seduction of autumn? India is mostly […]
പ്രതീക്ഷ (Malayalam: pratīkṣa; Hope) What might you expect from a story of two men behind prison walls? That perhaps it’s about violence? Is bleak? Even tragic? The Shawshank Redemption is all of that. It is also an account of an unlikely friendship between two people from starkly different maps… a tale that encompasses music, […]