eye 2022 — ✅ خرید وی پی ان ❇ ip ثایت vPn آی پی اختصاصی ◐

آگوست 7, 2022

How the tiny home movement with its focus on responsible choices and living light is catching up in the country

Anna Reddy, a retired teacher from Bengaluru, is living free in the autumn of her life. She has downsized and moved into a 320 sq. ft tiny home that has been upcycled from an old shipping container. Having lived through the loneliness of a lockdown and waking up to the need for smart budgeting as a pensioner, she has chosen to be resource-conscious without feeling the pinch. So, she’s leased a patch of land on a friend’s farm far out of the city, parked her pre-fabricated home on an outcrop overlooking a lake, plushed up the interiors and wrapped herself with a huge sun deck. Apart from sleeping, cooking and chores, she spends sunrise to sundown outdoors, tending to her organic garden, attempting some landscaping with rocks and foliage, writing a blog on the patio, lounging with her dog, dining with friends under the stars and watching the season change colour. “Can we make room for something more meaningful in our lives than clutter it with things that one has no use for and spaces that are unmanageable?” asks the 58-year-old.

Not far down the road are Rohit and Maya Chinnaswamy, both software professionals in their late 20s, who have a tiny home of their own in a land bought years ago by their parents. Just married, and with COVID-19 giving legitimacy to a work-from-home culture, they have created their oasis without the burden of EMIs, living rich rather than squeezing themselves into a city apartment. “Minimalism is not about giving up, it is about choosing what you need. We don’t have the big TV wall but we have a bigger drop-down projector screen,” says Rohit.
The interiors of Habitainer’s Jade Garden, Bengaluru (Credit: Habitainer)
The tiny-house movement, which advocates a “living with less philosophy”, is no longer an alternative way of living. As cities bulge out of the seams and shrink the greens, tiny houses are being seen as a sustainable, energy-saving and low-carbon footprint reality than an option. In India, where homes are repositories of memories, collectibles and heirlooms and the acquisitive measure of success, we seem to be right-sizing our mindset where bigger does not mean better and less is more.
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Reddy says she had to cut her belongings by one-third. That wasn’t difficult. “I hadn’t used them in years. But I kept my books. My ‘smart’ kitchen is bigger and more functional. Maintenance fees and bills are now less than half, I am debt-free and can spiff up my home in 15 minutes. My house is small, but I am living big,” says Reddy, who’s working on a wildflower project with the locals. And should she choose to move elsewhere, to the hills or coast, she can dismantle and reassemble her modular home.
So what is a tiny house? According to the 2018 definition by the International Code Council in the US, it is a dwelling unit with a maximum of 37 sq. m (400 sq. ft) of floor area, excluding bedroom lofts and mezzanine fitouts. But they stretch outdoors with extended porches, leading the inside to the outside. It is debt-free living (the price range varies from Rs 6 lakh to Rs 25 lakh depending on embellishments) and low-maintenance. Some day, it will run off-grid, with solar energy and harvested rainwater.
Okno Modhomes Swiss chalet-style wooden villas at Gandipet near Hyderabad (Credit: Okno Modhomes)
With space optimisation a challenge for city planners, tiny homes are seen as a way of future-proofing our existence on this planet. And now that industrialists like Anand Mahindra are backing Chennai-based Arun Prabhu NG, who built a portable house on an autorickshaw, and furniture major IKEA is running a pan-India “Tiny House Project” since 2019, the trend has caught on. The endorsement by Tesla chief Elon Musk, who described his rented one-room pad at Boca Chica, Texas, “more homey”, and with Netflix and YouTube propagating the movement, conspicuous consumerism is no longer aspirational but a societal vice. In resource-starved times, bigness is about letting go and making healthy space for the next generation. Alternative living is an experiment but considering that between 2014 and 2018, the average apartment size in seven major Indian cities shrunk by 17 per cent, according to a study done by ANAROCK Property Consultants, the tiny-home movement is carving out its niche in our realty market. The US-based Jay Shafer, who started his company, Tumbleweed Tiny House, in 1999, is today feted as an icon by millennial tiny-home builders in India.
“Owning a big house is a socio-cultural statement and a small house has so far been seen as a second home. Most of our pre-fabricated homes were being used in resorts and country estates with owners renting them out for Airbnb guests. Post-pandemic, more people want to live in them permanently. With tech-enabled features and plush comforts, we have built more than 200 houses in two years. We’ve even located one in Hyderabad’s posh Banjara Hills. And while south India had woken up to the concept for some time, we are now getting orders from the north as well,” says Payal Jindal, co-director of Loomcrafts, which builds steel module homes with patented technology and stylised interiors.
After the customer chooses the layout and design, a unit is completed, from chassis to electric wiring and interior fitments, at the factory within 90 days. “Steel limits the use of other materials, is structurally strong and requires low-cost insulation in the form of fiberglass blankets, which are fire- and sound-resistant. And while we make trailer houses for international customers, here we place them on a cemented plinth. We then plug in the water and electricity lines that are available in farmlands or leased community land,” Jindal adds. Loomcrafts offers an all-weather guarantee for 50 years.
The interiors of Habitainer’s Jade Garden, Bengaluru (Credit: Habitainer)
Bengaluru-based The Habitainer makes luxury container homes with flippable sofa-beds, bar-cum-tables, extendable kitchen counters, and customised refrigerators. Inspired by the high demand, its director Gaurav Chouraria is now exploring possibilities of setting up India’s first tiny-home community where investors can lease their own little green patch and set up their homes. “We have done 70 projects in 62 locations across the country in the pandemic years. Of these, only two are offices, the rest are homes. Many have taken to the idea of living permanently in container homes after their staycations at Air bnbs during the pandemic,” he says. The company buys containers at port auctions, using 20 ft x 8 ft for regular homes and 40 ft x 8 ft for premium ones. “There’s a 27-point checklist. For example, we won’t use containers that have carried radioactive material or chemicals. We then strip it down and insulate it with aircraft grade rockwool. High ceilings control ambient temperature and doors, skylights and windows ensure cross ventilation. People mistake tiny living as a cramped-up compromise or forced minimalism. But the basic idea is to stay indoors as little as possible and pursue activities outdoors,” he says.
While this may seem more apt for single people, empty nesters and young people, Chouraria dispels such misconceptions. “The fluidity of adding or joining more containers on your land means that families can actually stay close to each other while maintaining privacy. And since these houses are portable, you can take them as you move or sell them online should your priorities change. You can reuse, recycle and renew,” he says.
Interiors of Caesar Fernandes’ Goa home (Credit: Caesar Fernandes)
Chouraria is now tying up with camping operators to strengthen his revenue stream in the travel industry. Like Tejaswi Rajanah, who owns a five-acre guava plantation, an hour-and-half drive away from Bengaluru. He’s parked a 160 sq. ft single container with a 200 sq. ft of porch called The Little Ranch. “I rented it out during the pandemic at Rs 1,000 a day with discounted deals for staycations. Overlooking a valley, it has good mobile network connectivity where you can comfortably ‘work from nature’,” he says. The Little Ranch was built using a used shipping container, which usually goes into scrap.
Two 23-year-olds from Hyderabad, Harshit Puram and Parikshit Linga, are working with wood while building vacation homes in Gandipet on the outskirts of Hyderabad. Launched in April this year, Okno Modhomes builds Swiss chalet-style homes with atrium-high ceilings in 90 days. They import guilt-free wood, from New Zealand, Finland and Norway, which means that for every tree cut, four more have already been planted. “Besides the cellulose and water are extracted in such a way that no termite and moisture can get into them. Cement attracts and radiates heat, wood does the reverse,” says Puram. Leak proof, synchronised with cloud-based voice service Alexa and fitted out with IKEA, these span between 300 and 500 sq. ft. It is the only project to be recognised by the Indian Green Building Council.
The Little Ranch by Tejaswi Rajanah, on the outskirts of Bengaluru (Credit: Tejaswi Rajanah)
Caesar Fernandes, CEO, Wooden Homes India, himself lives in a pre-fabricated 800 sq. ft home. He, too, imports certified red pine and spruce planks, arguing that the Scandinavian cutting technique reduces wastage. “Our wood panels are interlocking. And apart from treating the wood every two years, there’s no maintenance really,” he says.

As tiny homes dot the margins of our big cities, and in the absence of Western-style building codes, what are the legalities involved in building one? Fernandes says, “Given their portability, tiny homes are considered temporary structures and do not come under civil construction laws. Usually, people rent farmlands or take advantage of farmhouses owned by friends and relatives but leasing land, particularly in tier II and III cities, where there are controlled green zones (non-residential zone) with 10 per cent allowed for housing, is a possibility. But we need revision of building byelaws to dedicate new zones for 160-300 sq. ft living.” Nevertheless, a beginning has been made. Simplicity, according to Renaissance Man Leonardo Da Vinci, “is the ultimate sophistication.”

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ژوئن 4, 2022

‘Tomb of Sand’, Geetanjali Shree and Daisy Rockwell’s International Booker Prize-winning novel, traces a storied past and the futility of borders

On the very first page of Tomb of Sand, the translation of Geetanjali Shree’s Ret Samadhi by Daisy Rockwell that won this year’s International Booker Prize, Shree writes that the book is a story of two women and one death. But it isn’t merely that. It is a tale told across the vanishing leap of time, across borders, genders and relationships, across the insurmountable hopelessness that men generate and the sea of hope they populate. “Women are stories themselves,” writes Shree. As the novel progresses, the many storied lives of her female protagonists hold the universe of her novel together.
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Critics have variously tried to classify the book into a genre. It belongs to the genre of Partition novels, they said. Yes, it does but no, it doesn’t. It belongs to the genre of romances. Yes, it does or maybe no, it doesn’t. It can be classified as a feminist novel, they said. Yes, surely it can, but no it can’t. Just like the sky — vast and borderless — its canvas stretches beyond genres. That’s the power of this book and its quintessential je ne sais quoi.
Eighty-year-old Ma is the protagonist of the novel. Well, even that may not be true, because protagonists are the stabilising force in a story. Ma destabilises the tale. She is the one who brings in chaos. Every page that she appears in is enthralling madness — a madness that makes you fall in love with her character, that gives so much stability to the story that you want the tale to never end, quite like the night of love which Shree creates almost at the end of the book, a night of ragas and memories.Best of Express PremiumPremiumPremiumPremiumPremium

Just like people in our lives, there are other characters, too, in the novel — the good, the bad, the beautiful, the ugly and most importantly, the undefinable ones. There’s Bade, the man of the house (strange that ‘Man Of The House’ can be abbreviated as MOTH, meaning ‘death’ in Hindi); there’s his wife, Bahu, and their two sons. Bahu and Bade refer to each other with ‘D’. It stood for Darling after their marriage, but (de) metamorphosed into Duffer as years went by. Then there is Ma’s daughter, Beti, the bohemian who challenges both MOTH and family traditions and who is the second woman in this tale. And, finally, there is Rosie bua, the undefinable one. She-He. Rosie-Raza. The character who brings Ma to life. She, too, adds madness to the tale. These characters from a wide stratum of society that Shree has populated the Tomb of Sand with, fuel the storyline and reflect her impeccable depiction of the chasm between caste and class.
Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree; Translated into English by Daisy Rockwell; Penguin Random House; 696 pages; Rs 699 (Source: amazon.in)
Ma is a perfect fictional representation of the vicissitudes and shades of life she lives. She has a bit of Ammu from Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997), a touch of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Úrsula Iguarán from One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), a hint of Krishna Sobti’s Ammi from Aai Ladki (1991), and an air of Sethe from Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987). She makes you laugh gregariously and sob incessantly. She can love and hate with equal zest. She becomes a wall one moment and a door the very next, as much invisible as she’s visible. She’s the kind of character whom generations will love and relate to.
Ma subverts this story one last time when she decides to go to Pakistan. That’s the moment in the book when the reader is faced with the futility of a border. Shree exposes the ineptness of borders against the will of people in search of love and hope. She writes, “A border is a horizon. Where two worlds meet. And embrace. A border is love…”
Shree’s ability to describe the indescribable is the other hallmark of Tomb of Sand. She repeats what she did effectively in Mai (1993) and Humara Sheher Us Baras (1998), becoming in turn all those that many ignore — walls, doors, chrysanthemums, cane and even dust. She employs surrealism to propel the story. A man called Anwar appears on page 225 of the book, disappears and reappears again on page 584, but all this while, the reader keeps looking for him. He’s the silent charm of the book and just one example of Shree’s sheer mastery in making us wait in anticipation for a character who never utters a word and who cannot move.
It is in the moments of magic realism, a genre in which the book can fit in snugly, that the literary genius of Shree is revealed. The Solomon moments wherein Shree weaves the language of the crows and partridges into a beautiful tapestry of words act as the sutradharas in the tale, drawing us closer to the narrative. And then the moment where she collects the writers of Partition at the Wagah border — Khushwant Singh, Krishna Sobti, Saadat Hasan Manto, Intizar Hussain, Rahi Masoom Raza and others, all with their stories, characters and words, pierce the soul. What more would anyone want than Bishan Singh from “Toba Tek Singh” (1955) saddleless through the change of guard ceremony at the Wagah border?

If beautiful language enslaves one, translations set you free. This translation of Tomb of Sand by Daisy Rockwell sets Ret Samadhi free for a global audience. A good translation is like a revolution. It gives language, culture and identity a new perception and a new freedom. For Tomb of Sand, I can believe what Ngugi wa Thiong’o had said in Dreams in a Time of War (2010) — “Written words can also sing”.
Do I regret anything in the book? Yes, I do. I regret not reading it in 2018 when it was first published in Hindi. And most importantly, I regret being a man in the land of fabulous women like Ma, Beti and Rosie — women who are an antitheses to all the wisdom men offer them relentlessly. Tomb of Sand is a mausoleum to their hope and happiness.
In the Art of the Novel (1986), Milan Kundera says, “The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.” In Tomb of Sand Geetanjali Shree has a question for everything that we have in today’s broken world — hate, hopelessness, myth and identity. She effectively proves that in the age of disbelief, love continues to be a belief for some.
(Shah Alam Khan is professor, department of Orthopaedics, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi. Views are personal)

می 28, 2022

Meet Usha Jey whose hip-hop Bharatanatyam blend went viral this week

Earlier this week, Usha Jey, a 25-year-old Paris-based dancer and choreographer, uploaded her video on Instagram that merged two completely unrelated dance forms — Bharatanatyam and hip-hop — in an attempt to cover the really long distance between them. The result is a stunning mélange as Bharatanatyam adavus (basic steps) hold with popping, locking and breaking effortlessly. Jey, with Mithuja and Janusha (Tamil-Sri Lankan Bharatanatyam dancers from Switzerland), shift personalities with every step as they dance to American rapper Lil Wayne’s 2018 hit, Uproar. “I call it hybrid Bharatanatyam. It is my way of switching between hip-hop and Bharatanatyam, two dance forms that I love, learn, and respect,” says Jey, in an email.
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Dressed in chequered bottle-green Kalakshethra saris and jasmine flowers in their hair, the trio has given a compelling performance and the response on social media (over 25 lakh views on Instagram and a long list of appreciation posts), on the delightful short performance has been hugely popular. American record producer, rapper, and record executive, Swiss Beatz, producer of the original track, recently shared the video on his social media. “Dance is magic for me… My aim is to keep the essence of each dance and create something that does justice to who I am,” says Jey.
A clip from Usha Jey’s hybrid Bharatanatyam viral video. (Photo credit: @signature.ch)
While many loved the uniqueness of the performance, some had issues with cuss words in the lyrics alongside Bharatanatyam. “As I am living in this hip-hop world, I didn’t realise at first that it could disturb. I took a ‘clear’ version of Uproar, a version where curse words are muted. My intentions are right and I’m true to myself. The interpretation one can have is based on their own story and background so I respect every opinion… I try my best to find the right balance and not hurt people’s feelings, while still being me and letting my creativity be,” she says.Best of Express PremiumPremiumPremiumPremiumPremium

Jey was born and raised in Paris. Her Sri Lankan Tamils parents from Jaffna, who left the country in the ’90s during the 26-year-long civil war to escape “the Sinhalese government’s oppression towards Tamil population”. Jey grew up with questions on identity and attempting to understand her heritage.

What the f- though ?
Where the love go ? 🧨@LilTunechi @THEREALSWIZZZ pic.twitter.com/H7kTfQXMO4
— Usha Jey (@Usha_Jey) May 22, 2022
Hip-hop, however, was a natural progression in Paris, a significant training ground for the art form. She went to a class because her best friend didn’t want to go alone.

“With time, I realised that this makes me happy and free,” says Jey. She learned under Paris-based dancer and choreographer Kanon Ghetto-style, who gave her “faith to be a professional dancer.”

It was a few years later that Jey began to connect with her roots. As a child, she’d discovered koothu — an informal dance depicting scenes from ancient epics — through Tamil movies and would perform among family and friends. When she opted to learn Bharatanatyam at 20, she figured it was late, but decided to immerse herself anyway. She found a guru in Bharatanatyam dancer Anthusha Uthayakumar and gave the next few years to the form; hip-hop stayed around. “While growing up as an Eela Tamil in France, I understood that my biggest wealth is my culture. That is why I cherish it a lot,” says Jey.

Her quest to understand identity continued while the war in her country of origin and its horrors resulted in anger and sadness within her. Dance became a form of expression. In a previous video she created in her hybrid Bharatanatyam series in 2020, she danced to One Hundred Thousand Flowers, a song about the discrimination and massacre of Tamils in Sri Lanka, created by Canadian-Sri Lankan rapper Shan Vincent de Paul in his album, Made in Jaffna (2021). He raps, On your left hand side, if you look you’ll see, five-star resorts built with mass graves beneath. Jey’s angry eyes and movements do the talking about an imbrued history.

“If I choose a dance, I have to really take time to understand the background of these forms. It takes time to learn about history… These two cultures are really close to my heart and putting them together is a representation of my life,” says Jey, who will be releasing more videos in the coming weeks.