At 112mm (the lens’s narrowest end), descending to Vijayawada.

The sun sets over buildings as the city wakes up. People look up from their evening commutes and soak their worries for a longlived moment in the amber light of the day before the third of the smaller lights turns green and then reset their paces. They reach home and open their windows and stand outside on the many amber-lit balconies and listen to Thamarai in peace. I doubt the Thamarai bit. The amber-lit evenings see windows open with and without overturned crosses up top. Lost in a sea of people and buildings and tall cars and short trees and longwinding streets bathed in amber, the opened windows and the thieving, adultering conversations that drop by with the wind find purchase in the folded-away curtains and dried laundry fluttering in the balconies. I hear traces of Visiri from the neighbours’ radio as the station gets stuck for a shortlived moment in a faraway frequency carried over over the laundry and the teacup left over the sill. There are no radios in the city. The windows remain shut and the ones with upturned crosses stay open for longer than they have any right to be. There are no conversations apart from the ones in one-way streets lined with packed supermarkets. Over the air, a dog-food advertisement layers itself over the one for superthin undergarments. People in cars don’t look up in fear of accidentally looking into the eyes of children selling plastic knickknacks and jasmine threaded into uncanny helices. The cellphones keep reminding them their choice of the fork in the road at this hour of commutes and street children and superthin undergarment adverts was indeed, pathetic. The sun sets over buildings as the city lulls itself into sleep.

I want to fall in love inside a bookshop and never leave. Hold my sambharam while I acknowledge the hopeless unoriginality and the likely impossibility of the whole situation. I have, in the recent and otherwise past, come very close to going down on my knees (not to look at an unloved pile of newsprint in the corner) and recovered as someone leaned too close to the usual suspects. Countless tomes* have filled bookshelves and spilled over (looking at you, Blossoms) trying to mix the carnal with the dustjacketed. I have fallen in love with books before. And I know people come to bookshops still. How hard can it be to put the two together?

*Miss K is definitely not one.

First, it aims our focus at the root cause of Anthropocenic climate change – an accelerated mode of existence that is impossible without fossil fuels. Indeed, I might amend Aldo Leopold’s land ethic of 1949: ‘A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community.’ It is wrong, Illich and I would argue, when it moves faster than the speed of a bicycle. If we found ways to eliminate inefficient acceleration, we would lessen the snarged victims of the world, but there would also be some obvious beneficial cascading effects.

Gary Coll writes on the ethics of roadkill and our need for speed. (Aeon, Link)

JNU Students have a YT Channel up and the lectures are worth an all-nighter, if not a last-minute train journey to Delhi.

Aeon shares an awe-inspiring video portrait of Dr. Mahabir Pun, the Nepali educationist and social entrepreneur who runs the Himanchal Education Foundation in Nangi.

It is in another ceramic studio, nine hours from Paldi, that Mr.D’s message arrives, bringing with it the news of MP Ranjan’s untimely demise. The message is an austere single sentence; one could see Mr.D struggling to type it out.

MPR took us through DCC at NID when we were unformed, idealistic teenagers nibbling at this alien, amorphous thing called design, while his contagious passion for a people-centred design practice was almost palpable, like the hot, humid Amdavadi air in the summer. Three and a half years later, I would interview him for my graduation project, and he would talk me through the enormous volume of grainy, digitised photographs from his early days as a student of design, his toy-factory years, the beginnings of DCC, Katlamara and Jawaja projects; images of an Indian design identity being shaped as if in a slow-turning lathe. It is this hands-on-designer in MPR that surprisingly finds scant mention in most media. Among the photographs were moments from field trips across India, making one long for times of simpler, more meaningful things, times when building these things was of greater value than the pedestals they were put on. His insistence on this greater purpose of design as a profession continues to be relevant even after five decades of Charles Eames’ ‘cardboard-computer’ vision for indigenous design.

His spirit will continue to inspire generations of people to look at design as a powerful tool shaping societies and livelihoods.

Anupam Purty shot the portrait for Dekho. The image on the right is from MPR’s archive.

Notes: DCC is Design Concepts and Concerns, the course helmed by MPR at NID. The Eames’ cardboard reference is from An Eames Primer, Eames Demetrios. See page 227 here.