Currents

I rode up to Palampur, Himachal Pradesh from Amritsar amid the debris of the monsoon floods. Brick houses had been halved. Sacks of cement were placed upon the slopes, I guess, to slow down the speed of erosion. Whole bridges destroyed, their pillars standing still as if they were stems of uprooted trees. It took seven and a half hours to reach the village of Kandbari. I thought about water a great deal this week, about currents more specifically. At a moderate pace, they bring forces of irrigation, power generation, and so on. A bit higher than the moderate pace, currents of flowing water bring destruction, of an untold variety. Human ambition shaped by concrete (quite literally, the material of India’s modernity) has a fictive arrogance that gives humans the illusion that its structures are permanent, unassailable. I saw this week, the crumbling of that arrogance. Ensconced in a car, I thought about the fluiditiy of land.

But this time that I spend annually at the Sambhaavnaa Institute is precious, although the surrounding Kandbari village (in the last five or six years) has been visibly clutching onto pathways that lead to the concrete modernity of the plains. I woke up in the morning to the worrying sound of rain. Rains in October may mean further destruction. The skies cleared in a while, by 7am the whole Dhauladhar range was in full view across the horizon.

The Sambhaavnaa campus is a reminder that apathy is not the only option. A mindful modernity is possible. I marvel every year at Didi Contractor’s vision and the care with which the members of this community keep it alive. Stone and mud - that is all it takes to build. The sun’s light is made the most of. There is a small farm. An alternative school runs out of the campus. They practice a zero waste policy, an incinerator works quietly to ensure that any non-degradable waste is processed. Laddoo, the canine campus guard ensures that the correct combination of friendship and aloofness is maintained.

They make me think every year of our unthinking modernity - Gurgaon, Bangalore, and elsewhere. Where concrete shapes a mad aspiration for some form of progress that is not Western, not Indian, not local, not regional. Stone walls of old monuments are painted over. Old bulidings are pulled down to make aspirational, matchbox apartments which promise to abate everyone’s anxieties about having arrived in the heady matrix of power and well-being. This campus is a reminder that gentleness and thoughtfulness need not be divorced from the onward march into progress.

Jane Goodall, the primatologist died this week. And Pandit Chhanulal Mishra, the bhajan and thumri singer from Banaras. I have been listening to him incessantly since this news broke. The two departed souls are telling me that sacrality is everywhere, that I must stop looking for it merely in texts and shrines.

[Images are from the Sambhaavnaa Institute, Kandbari, Palampur. Copyright: Atreyee Majumder, 2025.]