Interview: Culture is important for Sustainability - Prof. S. Swaminathan

18th October 2016, Bharat Niwas.

How can you disconnect sustainability with culture and heritage, is Sustainability disassociated from Culture, what is sustainability? It is not only about living being, plants and so on. Sustainability also confers to family, which is broken now.How do we attain sustainability for celebration of life? My simple answer to this is: Take life seriously and enjoy yourself.

-Prof. S. Swaminathan





An interview with Prof. S. Swaminathan, co-founder of Tamil Heritage Group and director of Centre for Arts and Culture- Sudharsanam, Pudukkottai. Prof Swaminathan is a qualified mechanical engineer and a retired Prof. from IIT Delhi where he taught for over 3 decades. A man of many pursuits; his interests vary from science, architecture, literature to Art, music and developmental issues. He believes in cultural route to development and holds that understanding and exposure to cultural heritage could help people to enjoy and understand life better; he has beautifully tried to bring this idea into action through Sudharsanam. For further details please visit www.pudukkottai.org.

You have been advocating 'culture-scaping' for quiet sometime, can you elaborate the concept?

'Cultural-scaping', it is like land scaping, when I am sitting here I should know that I am in Tamil Nadu, in Auroville and within India. The things around you, the environment should make you feel that way. For example: if you go down, in the ground floor, the architecture is not Indian; nothing on the way tells me that we are in India. What I say is –we must have culture scaping. Why the pillar here cannot be similar to what it is in Ajanta? Our surrounding can tell a lot about our culture. For example each tree tells something about our culture. For instance if we take Saptaparni, it is mentioned in the Vedas and has medicinal values- this is mentioned in Sakuntalam. If we disseminate these information, people will know the significance of what is around us and the culture behind.

How would you brief the relevance of Cultural scaping?

This is an idea that you have got to feel and adopt on your own way. In your state, you are and should be surrounded by what your state can offer and not what London offers. But it is going in the different direction. For example where you come from has lots of Bamboo. In Bamboo what you see is the branches, the tree is underground and it had many values. The things around you should be able to make you feel and realize where you are. One should also understand the ramification of it.

What is the status of heritage and culture in today’s society?

Nobody bothers, now it is only something that is fashionable to talk in particular society, nobody bothers beyond that. All of us have accepted that anything foreign and western is supposed to be good. Our present civilisation has got numerous problems that we are realising now, for example global warming and so on, but there are other things as well: broken families which are also corresponding problems.

We have accepted certain things. For example we don’t bother if the lights or fans are running and no one is using them, we have learnt to live with it. In my time: we got electricity in our house only when I was in 8^th standard and we had very little things. We used to get a set of dress only on the occasion of Diwali. Both the rich and the poor person used to get same thing, the richer person will get slightly costlier dress but the difference was very minimal, one of the reason being that nothing very costly was available. But if you give me 2 lakh rupees today, I can spend it all within 5 minutes and from tomorrow onward I will ask you Rs 1000 a day to maintain those things- this is the kind of situation we are living in today. So, first of all we must understand- what are values in life today, contemplation which is absent today should be there. In the present society, everywhere there is crowd but everyone is lonely.

What are the types of initiatives and institutions that you would like to see that is required for understanding of culture and heritage?

Don’t you think you can imagine it yourself? Why should somebody like me, who is almost reaching 80 tell you what is needed. You know it better; you should decide what is better for you. You should not bother with experience and so on. For example: 40 years experience may not be any more than 1 year repeated 40 times. But the point is: are we able to think for our self. First of all, take life seriously and taking life seriously means, I can be happy provided my family is happy, my family is going to happy if my community is happy, my community will be happy if my town is happy, my town will be happy if my state is happy and so on. It is what Gandhi said “Oceanic circle”. People now-a-days should be able to take life seriously and think for sensible solution for all the problems.  

Where do you see the role of cultural understanding in sustainability?

How can you disconnect sustainability with culture and heritage: Is sustainability disassociated from culture; What is sustainability? It is not only about living being, plant and so on. Sustainability also confers to family, which is broken now. For example: today husband and wife don't talk to with each other because they don't find time for each other. Sustainability starts form the family- at present , the children do not have time to spend with their parents and the parents do not have time to guide them, provide them company, celebrate life- sustainability of family is important and needs to be acknowledged. If we can have fossil fuel forever or not is important but a different matter, what is important is how do we attain sustainability for celebration of life? My simple answer to this is: Take life seriously and enjoy yourself. You don’t have to except what I say. You got to contemplate on it, find out your own solution, read books, have discussions and have your opinion. I want the people to think for themselves. 

Tamil Culture: A Curtain Raiser - Presentation by Prof. Swaminathan

SLI organized a session on Tamil Culture to familiarize the heritage of Tamils among Auroville Community on 18th October 2016 at the Institute. Prof. Swaminathan, IIT - Delhi (Retd) gave a wonderful presentation on Tamil Literature, Music and Temples. Please find below some of the pictures taken during the programme. Devotional Songs from different Tamil Poetry sung by Mrs. Swaminathan added value to his presentation. It was a wonderful learning experience to most of the audience who are from different walks of life.

SLI Lecture: Tamil Culture, A Curtain Raiser

SLI Lecture: TAMIL CULTURE: A CURTAIN RAISER

Date: 18^th October 2016, Tuesday

Time: 10 a.m. to 12 noon

Summary: The Tamils contributed significantly to the fabric of Indian culture with a continuity of over 2000 years. The major fields fall under all the three major areas of creative expressions, literature, fine arts and performing arts, mostly form a religio-spiritual angle typical to the Indian sub-continent.  Such complex web would not be easily understood by those who have not been brought up in this tradition or even those who have been brought up without the awareness of the arts, music or literature. An attempt during this occasion would be made to demystify the culture of the Tamils by profiling the emergence of their literature, arts and music during this lecture.

Speaker: Prof. Swaminathan. S. Swaminathan was born in Pudukkottai, Tamilnadu in 1940. After qualifying as a Mechanical Engineer, he worked as a professor in Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi for more than 30 years.

Realizing that Indian youth have an inadequate understanding of their local heritage, Swaminathan decided to acquaint the students of IIT-Delhi with various aspects of Indian culture. The topics he begun to research and explore were Indian music, Sanskrit, ancient Tamil literature, Tamil prosody, development of scripts, Gandhian philosophy, etc. He has authored books on Mahabalipuram monuments and Ajanta caves.

As an activist, he has participated in and initiated a number of socially relevant projects. Among other projects, he co-founded Tamil Heritage Group in Chennai which has for over 5 years now been organizing significant talks and events to promote Tamil heritage. He was also instrumental in setting up a Centre for Arts and Culture, called Sudharsanam, in Pudukkottai, his native place.

Workshop for Fine-tuning District Diagnostic Process and Roll-out Action Plan by TNRTP - Auroville October 6- 8th, 2016

A three day District Diagnostic tool Workshop organized by Tamil Nadu Rural Transformation Project at Auroville. SLI played host to this important event in which the World Bank officials and the Tamilnadu Rural Transformation Project executives and consultants came together to shape and finalize the District Diagnostic Tool for the upcoming project that will be implemented over the next 6 years in over 25 districts of the State. SLI has been  requested to be a partner for the project.

Memorial Meeting for Nick Klotz

SLI organized a memorial meeting for Nick Klotz at Institute's backyard. Friends and Well-wishers of Nick from Auroville joined and payed tribute to him.

Interview: "Capacity Building for youth can rejuvenate Organic Farming in Tamilnadu" - Mrs.Subhashini Sridhar, CIKS

27th september 2016, SLI. An interview with Subhasini Sridhar, Programme Director, Centre for Indian Knowledge System, Sirkazhi, Nagapattinam district.

Tell us about your work and current priorities at CIKS...

Currently we focus mainly on strengthening of farmer groups through Farmer Producer Organisation. We have been working with 9 districts in Tamil Nadu with more than 25,000 farmers and basically our focus is on strengthening of organic farming. The centre is also working on revival of traditional Paddy varieties and validation of tradition knowledge systems in India.

What is the current status of organic farming in Tamil Nadu?

At present people are more aware about organic farming and there seems to be increase in adoption of organic farming methods by the farmers.  Many farmers are now aware about the hazards of chemical fertilizers and pesticides and they want to switch over to organic farming. The only constraint is the marketing of the organic products. There is lack of availability of platforms to market the products and the market is full of products which are adulterated- ‘the so called organic products’, but it contains pesticides residuals. In order to promote organic farming in Tamil Nadu it’s marketing needs to be taken care of.

You mentioned that there are many so called organic products which are not really organic, how do we differentiate between the adulterated organic products with the real products?

Many of the farmers by default practice organic farming and some have switched to organic farming but in spite of that, they do use small amount of chemical fertilizers and pesticides though they are selling it as organic products. So in the market there is a competition between the genuine organic as well as the so called organic products.  The onus shifts to the consumers, who need to figure out what is the real organic product. For that consumers need to be aware of the details about the products they are consuming.

Towards this end, we are educating the consumers on how to identify the products as organic, we are also making effort to establish link between the consumers and the farmers, so that the consumers are aware about the producers and the technique adopted by them.

According to you what is the role of youth in Organic farming?

As far as youth are concerned their role is very important but at present there is increase in  migration of rural youth to the urban and semi-urban cities which is very alarming. Presently, mostly people above 40 are engaged in agriculture and the youth are more or less uninterested. But in some pockets we can see that the youth are leaving their corporate jobs and coming back to farming but unfortunately most of the youth are switching off to other occupation.

How do you plan to tackle this issue?

Our centre in collaboration with organisations such as Sustainable Livelihoods Institute wants to retain the village youth in agriculture. Therefore, our major focus for the next two years is to encourage the youth in organic farming by giving them capacity building training focusing on enterprise formation and better agriculture with profitable income.

Memorial for Nick