Black&White Photos

Photo of the Day – IV

Somnath has more than 23 years of international consulting experience in strategic management, institutional reform and governance, decentralization and urban management.
Somnath has managed and led a number of institutional development and strategic advice tasks for governments in South Asia, Africa and China as well as for private sector, bilateral and multi-lateral institutions, and INGOs. His recent assignments include assistance to the formulation of India’s National Urban Sanitation Policy (NUSP), Sanitation Rating of Class I Indian Cities (2010); air and water pollution study for India Vision 2030 (World Bank/MoEF); impact assessment of World Bank’s rural water investments in India; strategy for primary waste collection in Monrovia; multi-sector monitoring and evaluation for a national public sector capacity building programme in Ethiopia; Economics of Sanitation in South Asia; Service Delivery Assessments for Water Sector; design of Bangladesh’s Urban Governance programme investments; Public Toilets for cities in developing countries, etc. His clients include multilateral (WB, ADB, UNICEF); bilateral (DFID, GIZ, AusAID, SIDA), INGOs apart from national and local governments. He has extensive field experience in more than 300 districts of 25 Indian states, various cities in India, and provinces/cities in Ethiopia, Liberia, China, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka.

Text source: http://iihs.co.in/about/people/somnath-sen/

Photo of Day – III

Ooha Uppalapati

As a student of architecture for five years and a professional for two, Ooha has been biased towards the definition of spaces as inhabited and interacting entities, as opposed to purely independent built forms. The collectives of small identities representing a larger common identity, Indian cities have been central to her experiments and learning in this direction. Her limitations as an architect in understanding cities led to an interest in subjects like history, sociology, economics and philosophy. Added to this is the experience of living in three different cities in different phases of her life: Vijayawada on the banks of river Krishna, Bhopal and its beautiful lakes and Ahmedabad, have each been a rich and unique experience. They showed her how habits and rituals define and distinguish an environment as much as and sometimes even more than the physical entities do. She now intends to document and analyse cities as carriers of people, their daily lives and traditions along with the buildings, roads and bridges they occupy. Some distance into this assignment she also aspires to be equipped enough to be able to introduce such elements into these complex systems that can contribute to the design of a cultural progression.

Text source: http://urbanfellows.iihs.co.in/profile-fellows-2016-17/

Blank Page

Sandbox Collective organised Blank Page at IIHS.
Blank Page.
An interpretation of contemporary Indian Poetry through theatre, music and movement.
A Tamasha Theatre Production
Directed by: Sunil Shanbag

Cast: Divya Jagdale, Hridanath Jahdav, Maithily Bhupatkar, Natasha SIngh, Nikhil Murali, Nisha Dhar, Priyanka Setia, Sapan Saran, Sonal Khale, Sukant Goel, Sunil Shanbag, Trishla Patel, Umesh Jagtap, Priyanka Setia.

I made some pictures at the show.

One of the poems performed at the show
“Love in a Bathtub” by Sujata Bhatt
Years later we’ll remember the bathtub
the position of taps
the water, slippery
as if a bucketful of eels had joined us…
we’ll be old, our children grown up
but we’ll remember water sloshing
the useless soap,
the mountain of wet towels.
‘Remember the bathtub in Belfast?’
we’ll prod each other-

1st Kannada Class by Vikrant

Every time I call my Uber/Ola driver I pray that they understand English or Hindi. And soon enough I realised the importance of local language. I was not alone, all of my fellows at UFP felt the same. And Vikrant came to our rescue.

Vikrant leads the Media and Design team and is responsible for design and development of the IIHS brand. The first class happened and we moved beyond, “Kannada Gotila” meaning – “I don’t know Kannada”. And now it is, “Kannada Kalita Ideeni” meaning – “I’m learning Kannada”.

Vikrant taught us some words of daily use and how to make sentences using those few words.
Kannada class is open to all departments in IIHS and it soon became the most famous class. We had some 9 classes so far, though I’ve been able to attend only 4 of them.

Sharing few photos from the first class.