Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Water pots on head




That is a stark picture, isn’t it? It is stark in various ways.
Merely as an example of the art of photography, the balance in the composition (light and shade) as also in the physical act of balancing five water pots, it is stark.
The context [1] of the photograph is also stark. This is an article on a local effort in Bundelkhand to establish “an informal structure of Pani Panchayats and Jal Sahelis to address the unaddressed issue of water crisis.”
The photograph also screams the message, stated explicitly in the article, of establishing “women’s ‘first right to water’”. As a male, my instinctive response was why should females have the first right to water. An instant later, I shouted myself down, “Yes, the first right must belong to women”.
You see, in my house, it is my wife who wakes up in the middle of the night to capture the tap dribbles in pots and buckets so that the next morning she can cook my breakfast and lunch. If she did not have that first right to water and I used up all that water for other purposes, say shaving, I will go to office clean shaven but hungry; not a prospect I would relish.
But the starkest message is hidden deep. Shouldn’t something stark come out bold, instead of being hidden? Is that an oxymoron? I think so, but let me explain.
At least one pot in the photograph, the one on the top lying on its side is empty.
In my third class studies (before men went round the moon and landed on it), one of the points that supported that earth had a round shape was that all the other astronomical objects we see are round (we could not see asteroids with naked eye) and therefore earth is likely to be round. Bringing that logic to the situation at hand, I decided that all the pots are empty (it also helped that the lady holds the extreme pot through her dainty four fingers only, sans the thumb!). The photographer must have caught the water lady on her way to the village pond.
Then, what is stark about the photographer catching the lady on her way to work, fetching water? Just imagine what will be the situation on her way back from the pond. Each pot must weigh about 15 kgs (15 litres of water per pot). With water filled pots, the photo will lose its balance – the pots are not balanced! That is, if in the first place she can carry all the five pots at one time!
If she makes multiple trips, one trip for one, or at best two, water-filled pot back, that is asymmetry, between the onward and return journey. The balance, the symmetry is broken. This too is stark, but hidden.
Do you know that the Higgs particle manifests itself when symmetry is broken? Similarly, how important water is to the womenfolk, particularly in the villages where water availability is not exactly a given in regions like Bundelkhand, manifests itself only when the asymmetry between the trip to and from the village pond is manifested.
And, that is a stark message.
Raghuram Ekambaram
References
1.    The water warriors, Sunila Singh, The Hindu, July 17, 2012 (http://www.thehindu.com/life-and-style/society/article3646345.ece)

4 comments:

dsampath said...

There must be a line for water.There must also be a system that one person can keep only one pot or two at a time.She keeps couple of them at at various points in the queue and comes back probably with just two filled pots at a time.

Our wonderful science has not found solutions to locate bore-wells.( we depend on only magical diviners)but yet we spend billions on trying to understand Higgs boson..
Help women to lead better life.. science should give that the priority..

mandakolathur said...

Thanks DS sir ... the point I was trying not to make is that it appears to be a posed-for shot. When I saw the picture I asked myself why would she carry so many pots. I understood the situation as the woman going to the village pond, not a hand pump to fetch water. It is in the latter your take about reserving pot positions in the queue is relevant.

We need Higgs boson and waterlines.

Thanks.

RE

Tomichan Matheikal said...

The photo could be original, real, and not posed-for. While I lived in Shillong I used to see people going to the water taps with umpteen vessels of all shapes and sizes carrying them on a rod or with the help of little children who would be given small milkpowder cans or other such vessels. Water is indeed a problem for many in our country.

mandakolathur said...

I agree Matheikal, but for drawing water from a pond, it is perhaps more prudent to carry two pots and bring two back, even if you had to do the jig twice or thrice. There is no way of carrying five filled pots of water in one trip. This is the asymmetry that makes the picture stark, in my opinion.

By the way, just to stoke your curiosity. You have twenty crates to be lugged up to your apartment in the second floor and you can carry only one crate at a time. How will you do it - carry each crate all the way up to the second floor at one go or collect them all in the first floor and then shift them one more floor up, all done one crate at a time.

RE