Economy on the landscape

In your geography class, you may have studied about the three types of economic activity: primary (extractive activities such as mining, fishing, agriculture), secondary (manufacturing), and tertiary (services).

Plastic, plastic

You see, it’s a conveyor belt issue. And a never-really-goes-away kind of issue. Things don’t stay put, and your and my boundary lines on a map mean absolutely nothing in this situation. In many ways, that Spanish hospitality phrase “Mi casa es su casa” (‘my home is your home’) takes on a whole new…

Franz and Rava Idli

28 June 2014 was the 100th anniversary of an event of great importance for the world. It resulted in the deaths of millions worldwide, brought an end to empires, technological and scientific breakthroughs, changes in population structures, and widespread re-alignment of the human geography of…

When mythology meets geography

Mid-2000s.

One of my 8th standard students, Pashmina, rode the same bus. One day she was reading a book about goddesses in different mythologies — an unusual topic for someone her age. We got talking about this. She was clearly very passionate about…

Home !

Often, we have to go away from home to understand home in new and interesting ways. This is a common experience among many who have migrated from their homes to distant lands, especially if those lands are altogether a different country. We look back at home and observe myriad things that we had not before…

The world on Bull Temple Road

I went somewhere interesting on 17 November 2014. It was the annual groundnut festival on Bull Temple Road, Bengaluru.

It started as an annual folk festival and fair. Now, it is international! Every year, the media and various others write about it…

Bangalore healthscapes

Take a deep breath!

Feel good? “Yes” or “no” depends on your geography. Among other things. Today, I want to share a few thoughts about healthscapes (landscapes of health).

We, the people

People! We are very interesting. In some ways.

When the PM (currently Sri Narendra Modi) of India has to coordinate and set the tone for the development of the nation (along with the entire government structure from Central government to village panchayat), one of the key…

Solid ground?

In the Arctic region, beyond 66½˚ N latitude, the ground is in a generally frozen condition for most of the year. Ice and snow are the normal landscapes. Even in the warm season, liquid water available is very shallow. Under this, the land remains shallow. Add to these the high-speed winds. Trees cannot…

You and We = Us!

Increasingly, over human history, no single country can exist without interacting with others. Even that seemingly most isolated of countries, North Korea, has to interact in some way or other with other countries in ways to benefit itself.

Problems in pieces

Geographers look at the shapes of states and try to understand how the shape of a state affects its life. Geographers identify a variety of shapes of states:

Compact — states are close to being circular. These have roughly the same span of latitudes as longitudes. At…

Religion and geography — making more meet the eye

Ramadan (or Ramzan) is underway. Since Islam follows a lunar calendar, the dates of Ramzan vary from year to year. Throughout the world, the basic pattern of the observance of Ramadan is common to all Muslims. The beginning and ending of the…

We, the people — in a pyramid

During his recent speech at Madison Square Garden, New York, New York (yes, the name is written twice!), India’s Prime Minister spoke about India becoming a major source of labour for the rest of the world.

Medical geography

August 1854. London was experiencing an outbreak of cholera. People were dying in alarming numbers. A physician, Dr John Snow, did some very innovative investigating. He plotted cases of cholera on a map of London, using dots to show where the cases were occurring. Then using interviews with…

Distant connections

In an earlier column, I had mentioned the interconnections among the three spheres — hydrosphere, atmosphere, and lithosphere. In passing, I have also mentioned examples of these connections. Today, I’ll expand on this topic a little more.

Geography: discipline and the power of conversations

[This is a blog version of the final weekly column for the Student Edition of Deccan Herald, a Bangalore-based newspaper, for the academic year 2013–14. This column appears in the Monday, 24 March 2014 issue. I have shared most of those…

Politics, longitude, time

I was scheduled to fly from New York’s John F Kennedy (JFK) airport to New Delhi by Kuwait Airways. I flew from Fargo, North Dakota to JFK. I thought, “Why not just check my large suitcases at the counter, get the boarding pass, and then loaf around JFK for the next hour or so till…

GeoVidyaa Geography Centres started in Tamil Nadu

The Indian Institute of Geographical Studies starts two new GeoVidyaa Geography Centres in Tamil Nadu– one at Nirmala College, Coimbatore and one Cascade Montessori Resource Centre, Chennai.

Geography — in the news

I often tell my students that geography is a lot about prepositions. Well, one preposition primarily: where. It’s about location … and a lot of other things that come from that one concept.

We, the people — 2

When I was a young school kid (1960s and 1970s), we had a family in our neighborhood. The ‘head of the household’ was M. He worked as police constable. However, since he was physically rather unfit for actual police work, he was employed at the home of the Inspector of his station as a domestic…

Confluences — not just for rivers

All cultural practice occurs in geographic space. Thus, culture is very spatial. If it is spatial, it can be mapped.

Among the many cultural acts that we perform, pilgrimage is one of the very powerful acts. Pilgrimage is often described as “an…

Transformational geographies

The Chief Guest was a geographer … he had a degree in geography and had taught it for some years. But now he is a rather high-up person in an administrative job in an education-related government department.

It’s about time!

Call centre workers and IT employees experience it. Long distance jet-setters –of late, Prime Minister Sri Modi, US Secretary of State John Kerry — experience it. And geographers such as my USA-based colleagues with whom I work have to deal with it.

Us and them

Lately, we have been reading about the violence against northeastern Indians living in different parts of India. While these stories are about episodes of violence, there is widespread discrimination against people from northeastern India in many parts of the country.

Bengaluru workshops, December 2014 — Report

What do you get when you put a bunch of highly skeptical school children, some of their parents, a medical doctor, the doctor’s parents, and a fanatical geographer?

Ebola geography — Part 1

PART 1

Geographies — latitudes, climates, soils, settlements, shared spaces in the biosphere (where the lithosphere, atmosphere, and hydrosphere intersect), cultural practices, the size of Earth, and vast distances. Jet travel. Advanced medical and…

Geographical Rights = Human Rights

Watch the footpaths in your city. If you are in Bangalore, you will very likely ask, “What footpath?” And you would be quite right to do so. Over the past two decades or so, our cities have rapidly become hostile to pedestrians (from Latin pedester, on foot).