What to do when you do not have printout of eTicket?

All my bags are packed I’m ready to go
I’m standin’ here outside your door
I hate to wake you up to say goodbye
But the dawn is breakin’ it’s early morn
The taxi’s waitin’ he’s blowin’ his horn…

And then I remember – Shit !!! I forgot to take print-outs of the eTicket.

Happens all the time – we book eTicket through the IRCTC website and then forget the printout. What to do? As per the IRCTC FAQs, you can get a replacement ticket on the train by paying a fine of Rs 50.

If the passenger is not able to carry the ERS but is carrying the proper Identity card as given during booking, an excess fare ticket will be issued by the TTE/ Conductor Guard against payment of Rs.50/- per ticket, provided if his name is available in the chart. If the name is not available in the Chart, he is not authorized to board the train and the case will be treated as ticketless travel.

We availed of this “facility” while returning from our vacation at Bhubaneshwar:

Replacement chalaan issued in lieu of an eTicket

Now, why is this important if it were already in an FAQ? It is important, because rules never always worked on Indian Railways. Now they do. On one leg of our trip, Mother and Jyostna were traveling together. Jyostna fell sick; The TTE got her a special tea and also got her some medication. This kind of service was not available a few years ago.

English – sucks.

My family takes tuition for our maid servant’s six year old son. I say family because it is not always me, I sometimes get delayed from work or am too tired/incapable of taking a class. The following interaction took place recently between me and Yonna (My maid-servants’ son).

Me: Spell Boxes

Yonna: B – O – X – E – S

Me: Good, now Spell Ball

Yonna: B – O – L – L

Me (thinking: Hrishikesh Mukherjee was right in his movie Bawarchee… English does have stupid pronunciation. My meager knowledge  of Natural Language Processing had also reaffirmed this. I should tell him to learn another Indian language, and give up on this filthy English. Oh bother, if this dude has to grow up and write a blog, his best bet would be to learn the damn Queens language. Anyhow, how can I explain the current discrepancy in spelling; I dislike teaching anything by rote. Should I give him the logical reasoning of how pronunciation and spelling of English varies based on the following and preceding alphabets? That could be too heavy at this tender age, certain “realizations” like the imperfection of English lingo should be reached much later. Rote learning has to do for now.)

Me: Yonna, You have to concentrate on the spelling – “Ball” is written as B-A-L-L and pronounced as “boll”. It is a rule in English. Now write B-A-L-L five times.

(Yonna writes the spelling five times)

Me: Spell “Son”

Yonna: S – U- N

I and Yonna are now looking at each other. Me – wondering what to say since we finished “days of the week” just yesterday, where I had taught him the spelling for “Sunday, Monday et. al.”. He is looking at me with a mix of trepidation and indignation – I haven’t yet said good, and he knows that could mean there is a mistake; he wants to remind me of yesterday’s lesson but is too scared to correct the teacher. I just shrug.

Me: English chaala kashtamaina language (Telugu for English is a very difficult language). Son is spelled as S-O-N, but when it comes with day, it becomes S-U-N. Remember this, and now write S-O-N five times.

Yonna: Ok. saar.

BTW, Yonna is in Nursery and has to learn English and Kannada at school. He speaks a sprinkle of Telugu and Tamil.

For those of the more academic bend of mind, the phenomena of a disconnect between pronunciation and spelling is formally known as “deep orthography” and has quite a bit of interest in pedagogical and academic circles [1, 2, 3]. There have been arguments to support this spelling [1], oppose this spelling, and commercial solutions are available to learn deep orthographies [1].

Leo Tolstoy – the Kingdom of God and Peace Essays.

The students of humanities, arts, and similar subjects must be a harried lot. They are made to read authors like Tolstoy, but the reality of life shows a very different picture, and must be quite hard on the “true followers”. Nevertheless, Tolstoy’s writings carry several lessons; even Mahatma Gandhi’s non-violence was based in part on Tolstoy’s writings  with the aptly named Tolstoy Farm being the first place where Satyagraha was practiced.

I just finished reading “The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays”. The first part of this book is “The Kingdom of God is Within You” (first published 1893), followed by  five essays written/spoken between 1894 and 1909. The book makes for very difficult reading. It is very dense and Tolstoy goes all over the place in each of his pages. There is a wealth of philosophical explanations and guidance in the book if the reader does not get lost in the narration. The first line itself is quite interesting:

From the very foundation of Christianity the doctrine of not resisting evil by violence has been professed and still is professed, by a minority of men.

He explains how many people consider Christs’ teachings to be impractical, given the violence in society. He makes a case that it is indeed possible to be non-violent, but that firmly entrenched beliefs of the Church and other organizations would not let common people believe in non-violence.

Quite difficult matters can be explained even to a slow-witted man, if only he has not already adopted a wrong opinion about them; but the simplest things cannot be made clear even to a very intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he already knows, and knows indubitably, the truth of the matter under consideration.

The Christian teaching seems to men of our world to be just such a doctrine, long and indubitably known by everybody in its minutest details, and which cannot be otherwise understood than as it has been.

In the first chapter, he quotes from “The Net of Faith”, the work of a 15th century Czech author by the name of Helchitsky:

“Christ, by means of his disciples, would have caught all the world in his net of faith, but the greater fish broke the net and escaped out of it, and all the rest have slipped through the holes made by the greater fish, so that the net has remained quite empty. The greater fish who broke the net are the rulers, emperors,  popes, kings, who have not renounced power, and instead of true Christianity have put on what is simply a mask of it.”

….

The Christian, according to Helchitsky’s reasoning, not only cannot be a ruler or a soldier; he cannot take any part in government or in trade, or even be a landowner; he can only be an artisan or a husbandman.
This book is one of the few works attacking official Christianity that has escaped being burned. All such so-called heretical works were burned at the stake, together with their authors, so that there are few ancient works exposing the errors of official Christianity.

He also says that people must even oppose Government service if it goes against non-violence.

There are some people, who, without any definite reasoning about it, conclude straightway that the responsibility of government measures rests entirely on those who resolve on them, or that the 10 governments and sovereigns decide the question of what is good or bad for their subjects, and the duty of the subjects is merely to obey.

Q. May he kill or maim him in self-defense?
A. No.
Q. May he go with a complaint to the judge that he who has wronged him may be punished?
A. No. What he does through others, he is in reality doing himself.
Q. Can he fight in conflict with foreign enemies or disturbers of the peace?
A. Certainly not. He cannot take any part in war or in preparations for war. He cannot make use of
a deadly weapon. He cannot oppose injury to injury, whether he is alone or with others, either in person
or through other people.
Q. Can he voluntarily vote or furnish soldiers for the government?
A. He can do nothing of that kind if he wishes to be faithful to Christ’s law.
Q. Can he voluntarily give money to aid a government resting on military force, capital punishment,
and violence in general?
A. No, unless the money is destined for some special object, right in itself, and good both in aim
and means.
Q. Can he pay taxes to such a government?
A. No. He ought not voluntarily to pay taxes, but he ought not to resist the collecting of taxes. A
tax is levied by the government, and is exacted independently of the will of the subject. It is impossible
to resist it without having recourse to violence of some kind. Since the Christian cannot employ
violence, he is obliged to offer his property at once to the loss by violence inflicted on it by the
authorities.
Q. Can a Christian give a vote at elections, or take part in government or law business?
A. No. Participation in election, government, or law business is participation in government by
force.

Of course, if he opposed all of these, there is no doubt that he was very much against people joining the army. He also says that Governments steadfastly try to ensure that people are dependent on the state, by providing something like “social service” for the citizenry. In return, Govts ask people to pay for this dependence by serving in the armed forces. He gave a powerful example from the diary of one “Nicholas Myravyov of Kars”, written about an event in 1818:

“Tiflis, October 2, 1818. In the morning the commandant told me that five peasants belonging to a landowner in the Tamboff government had lately been sent to Georgia. These men had been sent for soldiers, but they would not serve; they had been flogged several times and made to run the gauntlet, but they would submit readily to the crudest tortures, and even to death, rather than serve. ‘Let us go,’ they said, ‘and leave us alone; we will not hurt anyone; all men are equal, and the Czar is a man like us; why should we pay him tribute; why should I expose my life to danger to kill in battle some man who has done me no harm? You can cut us to pieces and we will not be soldiers. He who has compassion on us will give us charity, but as for the government rations, we have not had them and we do not want to have them.’ These were the words of those peasants, who declare that there are numbers like them in Russia. They brought them four times before the Committee of Government Ministers, and at last decided to lay the matter before the Czar, who gave orders that they should be taken to Georgia for correction, and commanded the commander-in-chief to send him a report every month of their gradual success in bringing these peasants to a better mind.”

I found one line to be particularly interesting “He who has compassion on us will give us charity, but as for the government rations, we have not had them and we do not want to have them.”. Statements like these if accepted by large numbers of people, have huge implications (This line of thought falls in the general area of “anarchism“). Tolstoy further commented on some of the things done by Governments of his time (1880’s):

To begin with, they have recourse to every means of coercion used in our times to ‘correct’ the culprit and bring him to ‘a better mind,’ and these measures are carried out with the greatest secrecy. I know that in the case of one man who declined to serve in 1884 in Moscow, the official correspondence on the subject had two months after his refusal accumulated into a big folio, and was kept absolutely secret among the Ministry.

The remaining chapters of this book are equally intense. The book I read was a version by Rupa Publishers. The translation in this version appears to contribute to some of the dense reading in this book. The original book (Translated by Constance Garnett) makes for easier reading and it is also available as pdf.

Feels wierd…

Bt Brijal was given an approval for commercial cultivation in India [1, 2, 3].I did my bit by sending a fax about this, and am consciously trying to do my bit by doing other things, and writing about them.Interestingly, the Govt body employed to be in charge of genetic products has been called “Genetic Engineering Approval Committee”. It’s URL has a one line explanation about its’ role. I am curious as to why this body is called the “approval committee” as opposed to “regulatory committee” or something else. Guess the underlying assumption is that somehow GE is already going to be approved and, once it is approved there would be little there to be regulated.  Incidentally, all the safety reports related to Bt Brinjal were from the company Mahyco itself (URL).

But this is not the only thing I am feeling wierd about…

China is pretty pissed that our PM visited Arunachal Pradesh [1,2], and our media did give a whimper of response [1]. China had sometime back also started issuing visas to J&K/Arunachal residents on a piece of paper, as opposed to stamping them on the Indian passport [1]. China’s attitude reminds me of a distant cousin who used to resort to cheap tricks in order to make me look bad in front of parents.

I believe that India can be very strong when it comes to things like these. But my belief aint good enough, a billion other folks need to share the belief. Ahem… well, a few among the billions would be OK.

India’s security council seat was given up.

Just learnt that India was once offered a  seat in the UN Security Council way back in 1955, but rejected it. There may have been a lot of arm-twisting by existing powers at that time for us to give it up. But even then. giving it up was a sad strategic decision. I read about it in the Business Line, in an article titled “UN reforms — a fading mirage?” on Sept 16th 2009, Full article URL; excerpt below:

Ironically, around 1955, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was offered the disputed Chinese Permanent Security Council seat by the US to keep out the People’s Republic of China, and he also was sounded out by the USSR Prime Minister, Nikolai Bulganin, to allow China to take this seat while giving India a sixth permanent seat in the Security Council. Nehru rejected this offer in deference to China. History may have been different if this offer had been subjected to serious negotiations. Now, 54 years later, we are struggling for this seat.

Update on October 26 2009:

It appears that all was not so bad. I did think that there must have been some big time arm twisting. And, the Sept 16th 2009 article in Business line seems to be doing bad reporting. There are other takes on Nehru’ stance; Excerpt from an article in the Hindu:

Nehru showed sound judgment in rejecting it and in refusing to walk into the trap. It would have earned India the lasting hostility of China, contempt of the nations of the Third World and of the United States too, conceited, albeit, with perfect discretion; and eventually, a resounding snub from the Soviet Union. India would not, indeed could not, have got the seat; only the odium for immaturity and opportunism.

…..

“Regarding your suggestion about the four power conference we would take appropriate action. While we are discussing the general international situation and reducing tension, we propose suggesting at a later stage India’s inclusion as the sixth member of the Security Council.

JN: Perhaps Bulganin knows that some people in USA have suggested that India should replace China in the Security Council. This is to create trouble between us and China. We are, of course, wholly opposed to it. Further, we are opposed to pushing ourselves forward to occupy certain positions because that may itself create difficulties and India might itself become a subject to controversy. If India is to be admitted to the Security Council, it raises the question of the revision of the Charter of the U.N. We feel that this should not be done till the question of China’s admission and possibly of others is first solved. I feel that we should first concentrate on getting China admitted. What is Bulganin’s opinion about the revision of the Charter? In our opinion this does not seem to be an appropriate time for it.

Bulganin: We proposed the question of India’s membership of the Security Council to get your views, but agree that this is not the time for it and it will have to wait for the right moment later on. We also agree that things should be taken one by one (page 231; emphasis added, throughout).

Bulganin did not make an “offer”. He threw a feeler to test India. He himself recognised that “this is not the time for it”. Had Nehru jumped at the bait, he would have courted certain disappointment before long.

Later, in a Note on his tour of the USSR and other countries, dated August 1, 1955, Nehru wrote: “Informally, suggestions have been made by the United States that China should be taken into the United Nations but not in the Security Council and that India should take her place in the Security Council. We cannot of course accept this as it means falling out with China and it would be very unfair for a great country like China not to be in the Security Council. We have, therefore, made it clear to those who suggested this that we cannot agree to this suggestion. We have even gone a little further and said that India is not anxious to enter the Security Council at this stage, even though as a great country she ought to be there. The first step to be taken is for China to take her rightful place and then the question of India might be considered separately” (page 303).

Coal stories…

“How can we get digital cable and Internet in our homes, but not clean water?”

This was a quote from the mother of a child who was severely effected by the polluted water from a coal slurry. The quote appeared in a NY Times article that can be accessed here. It is easy to miss the innocence of individuals who use technology. No,  it is not innocence, it is the inability of people to see that the very lifestyle they want demands the large-scale environmental plunder and pollution (Note, I said lifestyle they want not lifestyle they need). The 400-channel cable network that they so much enjoy, the internet, the 5-star safety rated sedan, and the 4 bedroom “modern” home, all have their parts to play in the pollution game.

More such articles on coal, and its complications:

http://www.onearth.org/article/coal-country

The above spill happened on 10-11-2000; Quotes from the above:

Local people remember the boom years fondly. Anyone who wanted could get a job, and unemployment went from 25 percent to 3 or 4 percent, they say. “First a guy would get a job at the mine, and after that he’d get himself a trailer, a four-wheel drive, and a color TV. After that he’d get either a boat or a wife,” a county resident recalled. Intense gratitude toward the coal companies may be found in the county to this day.

….

On the scale of spills, it was about thirty times the size of the 10 million gallons from the wreck of the Exxon Valdez. Aside from good local reporting, especially by Ken Ward Jr. in the Charleston (W. V.) Gazette, coverage of the spill had been sparse. Trying to make sense of it from a distance, I wondered mainly about the place: What could it possibly look like after suffering a wastewater-and-coal-slurry spill of 300 million gallons?

…

At a hearing in March 2001, a resident told Art Smith, the EPA official in charge of monitoring the cleanup, that backhoe operators were merely turning over the earth and burying the sludge underneath.

…

Greg Preece said that many of those affected by the spill were burned out on talking about it.

(Excerpt from an interesting interview from the above article)

N.: “An independent test had said that there were six heavy metals, including cadmium and arsenic, in the drinking water, and finally the EPA said, ‘We’ll check into it.’ And we still don’t know if our water’s safe or not.”

M.: “An EPA lawyer at that meeting told everybody, ‘Listen, people, coal mining is a dirty business, and you-all better get used to it.’”

N.: “People around here hear you criticizing the coal companies, and they start moaning, ‘But what’ll we do if the mines shut down? What’ll happen to those jobs?’ I sympathize to a certain extent, but I also tell them, ‘Lots of places in America don’t have coal, and don’t have coal companies, and they manage to support themselves OK.’”

M.: “‘Jobs’ is a sacred word. It’s a word like ’shareholders.’ To some people, I’m the turd in the punchbowl because they think I don’t believe in jobs.”

N.: “And how good a job is it, anyway, if you have to risk the lives of the same people you employ?”

M.: “If people are all scared about jobs, that gives the coal company more power and makes it seem more important than it is already. That’s what happened with this cleanup — the coal company announced what it planned to do, and the government and everybody basically just rolled over and said, ‘OK.’”

…

His grandfather raised twenty-four children on the farm’s 8-plus acres. His father raised two, and Glenn raised six. The farm’s creek-valley topsoil produced fruits and vegetables that won prizes at the county fair. The soil had hardly a rock in it; but after the spill and the cleanup, the replacement dirt supplied by the coal company was all rocks and clay left over from strip mining, compressed to an impervious hardness by cleanup vehicles.

http://blogs.wvgazette.com/coaltattoo/

A video on coal mining in West Virginia Appalachians:

Maruti suzuki presents Independace day special.

And the special is supposed to be sponsoring five movies on Star Movies. Nice… And I am pretty sure there are other Indian firms doing ditto. Problem with us is that the private industry needs to operate on a profit basis, and the Govt. will insist that profit is a bad thing. Hence private companies are always parasitic, and contribute little to nation/society building. This is very much unlike the GE, Siemens, Philips or other companies established elsewhere.

Profit can be good and it can be bad. But in our country, it necessarily has to be bad; the governing body is designed to penalize profit. Hence, profit turns into what it is in India; it makes everyone a market that is based only on goods that do not necessarily enhance society but parasite on it. I recently had a friend talk to me about the General Financial Rules, which indicate how the Indian Govt. must disburse monies. This was a good coffee chat, and a brief reading of the GFR confirmed what was told to me. The GFR is a complex set of rules designed to keep public money in public hands. I have a lot more to learn about grant fundings in India, but I am being told that it is extremely difficult to allow public money into private hands.

land laws – same in Japan?

A very interesting line in Fukuoka’s book, “The Natural Way of Farming: The Theory and Practice of Green Philosophy“:

The problem boils down to this: only scoundrels, the clever, and those in power stand to gain from the issuance and abuse of a barrage of capricious laws. The net result is that the land is being taken out of the hands of farmers. The Agricultural Land Law, established to protect tenant farmers, today serves no other purpose than to thwart the hopes of those wishing to become farmers.

This guy had a high coolness factor. This is the exact same anguish that I share about land laws in India. It is too difficult to be a one acre farmer. BTW, the “Other India Bookstore” is an excellent place to buy difficult to find books such as the one straw revolution. I bought a couple of books from them and they were delivered in impeccable condition within four days. Excerpts of the book can be read on scribd.

A diary entry from May 2001.

I was going through some of my old files and came upon this diary entry.

Life – and Quality

My exams were just over – Four years of hard work was finally going to make some sense – or maybe prove that it was a futile, but necessary effort in career building. A lot of my friends realized that there was something in life that had gone unnoticed in life all these years, though some never even knew what. Now was the time to rekindle that lost heat – felt many of my chums.

It was a day like any other – I had a normal, effortless work schedule, and nothing much to drive home happened during the day. Then there was a call from a friend – she was asking me for some help WRT some project work of some of our erstwhile classmates – who, sadly got left behind in this rat race. Well, in a very casual manner she told me of how her career veered off the normal course a person of our degree had to follow – She had started a Night School, was going to be a correspondent for a leading Mumbai daily. She was an engineer just like me – but had chosen a career that was something many would feel certainly not cut out for an engineer. Yes, It was very surprising – but considering her repute (no pun). The course she would plot for herself should have been more obvious. That was the first thing that prompted me to think over the kinds of careers/lives that were being opted for by the people of my generation. I am not saying that we should change our lines – It is not an easy task – and not everyone can do it. ANd many are very, very able at what they are doing right now and that is the best thing for them.

But, Looking around me I found a mad rush to do something that seemingly did something great with a capital G, and brought money with a capital?? $$?? Many were going thru a schedule that left little or no space for things that are more humane. Satisfaction no longer meant what we wanted to do. It was more like adjusting to Careers that paid bucks and believing that it was the thing we always needed. Yeah, there is nothing wrong with it – Except, if everyone has (wants) money, who is goanna be there to look up to him or her and laugh (or cry)?

Lots said – but then, I thought did I have any examples of people who did something different? Didn’t have to wait long for that one – A friend had just bought a guitar, which he strummed pretty well. I was encouraged to restart playing my violin for pleasure. I had developed a very good interest in the instrument during my 10th Std. I wanted to continue – but the race to have a career had me too busy and held up. Well, It was just that I had felt it not too important then. Even now, its’ just going to be a hobby – I am pretty confident of my incapacity to continue. I am too much unpredictable to do that – But on other counts one may never know.

Since I had restarted it, I was concerned with taking it with me to my stay at US for my study. I hoped that if I have time – I could practice. Wanting myself to be perfect – I had to take advice from someone who knew violins well about how to take good care of it. 6 years with my violin had taught me not much – well I wasn’t with it for too long anyway.

My friend and me went to one pehchaan of his. Uncle was not too well, was recovering from a hip fracture. After some initial sweet talk, we got down to the question – who plays the violin – he asked and then, as a passionate child who had been away from his toy for a few days – he touched the violin – Maybe practice makes a man more than perfect on his instrument – it makes him fall in love with it. The notes, which he played, were great. Simply overwhelming – That kind of stuff was sure to unwind anyone from the grimace of this tiring world. It was simply too good for someone who played with very little formal training.

Here was a man who was at the ripe time of his career – and he had a great life. The only thing he feels not present is the ability to share things with an audience – But that is human nature -you believe that life means more and more, whereas it just means something that is enough. He was not earning too much, but it was more than sufficient. His job was a very involved one – but certainly not over killing him. It left enough time for a few smiles and diversions. I then wondered – everyone, including me, who had to make careers out of ourselves – were embarking upon a journey that had work, work and more work. None of the youth were realizing quality in life as it stands now. Maybe, we have to reconsider what we were going to do. Don’t ever say you don’t like the way you are. Just say that there is something more required – but not money.

The night changed my outlook – Don’t know weather it will last too long. I have always been drawn very strongly to a few things only. But consistent performance was something else – I worked regularly in other departments, but I don’t know how music slowly went away. I guess I am like that only. Just like the youth of these days – I wasn’t able to take myself away from my career. It was not that I didn’t like music – Liked it a lot. Am just like the other guys – When I hear a beautiful guitar, violin or anything else -I feel very nice and compelled to learn it. But like the other youth, I always feel that it is something out of reach.

From now, I will at least remember that my effort can bear some fruit, and not end up as a dust covered violin case. There is life beyond work and career – In fact there is no career if you are just working. I know many people who slog it out in the boardrooms of firms that pay them well, but take the life out of them. They can only resort to passive entertainment and nothing else -wonder what will happen to their post-retirement. Such is the life these days – we have only so much time in our hands – feel people that they leave many things for a later time. Maybe they will try to do it after they are through with their life??

That is the dilemma we face these days. We know that there is something missing out in the scheme of things in our life – but where do we search for it? Do we even make a decent effort to do the search? Three youth – Me, and my 2 friends had decided now that our life and career will not be bound to a monotonous routine. Such a living is no life at all. After all, how many of our needs can we satisfy? There are bound to be some things left behind. And emotional satisfaction is not going to be one of them. Try not to ignore when something in you cries out in an impulse for something. Grab the time from somewhere and search – It may, if not change your life, considerably improve its’ quality.

Proposal for a Dwelling – An ecological gated community in Bangalore

I do not know if this is desperation, or if this is strategic thinking. I am writing this in a bid to gather like-minded people who respect nature and can plan on staying together on a common area along the lines of a gated community. Yes, I know we have the private gated communities and BDA complexes, and oh yes – we also have rental accommodation. But nothing lets us live in a sustainable, ecological, vibrant community that respects nature and enjoys it.

I and Jyostna have been looking for land in Bangalore for quite sometime, and the options are not yet perfect. In too many locations, we have seen that builders focus on “herd mentality”. Land changes hands frequently with people mainly aiming for profit and not really looking at it as a place that can sustain life. Living has become equivalent to spoiling nature and living against it. Gated communities boast facilities like swimming pools which one hardly ever uses; they are too small to be of any value. But most seem to replicate a different place and are totally out of place with our reality (My blog post on Palm meadows in a desert). While even the human species needs to survive like any other, we believe it is possible to organize our own place in this measly planet of ours.

A possible option we are looking at:
Gather together a few like minded folks and obtain property on the fringes of BLR; for example 4 people buy one acre and we have ~10,000 sq foot plots for each family. Each family builds a house on 2000 sq. foot of their land and leaves the rest open. Rely as little as possible on external resources, and share some resources such as wind energy, well, security, ground-water recharging. Not quite Navadarshanam, but regular 9-5 working people who want to be close to nature and lead a calm life. The goal would be to live in harmony with nature, but retain several urban comforts. If it becomes really feasible, we could implement a gobar gas plant and other such, but that would be a stretch goal.

What it would entail:
In terms of money:
One acre of land about 10-15 Kms from Bangalore costs 48 lakhs. I have some options that I can talk about. If four families share one acre, the cost will be 12 lakhs per family. For 1,400 rupees per square feet, it is possible to construct a house that will be ecologically sensitive, and have among other features, it’s own sewage disposal and water harvesting. I have some figures from firms that do ecological designs of homes. For a 2000 square foot home, that would mean about 28 lakhs. The total seems about 40 lakhs. But with registration, electric connection, size of house, delays and other factors minimum-maximum cost could be 45-60 lakhs.

In terms of personal commitment:
Mutual respect that we will not violate building standards and not succumb to selling our respective 10,000 sq. feet of property in the form of parcels when the surrounding areas “develop”.

Best case scenario to make this happen:
20-25 families will participate in this, and we shall have a very vibrant community.
4-5 families will participate in this and they will have a nice place to stay.

BTW, we are not real-estate agents, we do not have experience in doing this. We think this is very difficult, we have a whole bunch of optimism, but we think the outcome is worth the effort. This is a five-hundred foot idea; the exact details can be worked out if and when folks think this is feasible. Comments are welcome.

What are we planning to do if this does not work:
Get a 40×60 plot in a decent locality in Bangalore, have an independent house. We may even have to revert to a gated community .

Comments are welcome.