An idea for Bangalore: a green infrastructure that is both sustainable and deeply rooted in the local culture.
“Every human being is born with an inherent desire to create,” says the Indian film director Shekhar Kapur.
With that in mind, Kapur, who directed Elizabeth: The Golden Age among other films, teamed up with Indian musician A. R. Rahman (best known in the West for his Academy Award-winning work on Slumdog Millionaire) to cofound Qyuki, a social network that fosters creativity.
Dubbed “a community of creative expression,” Qyuki launched late last year with an initial investment from Cisco Systems.
Anand Shah’s company Sarvajal is working to bring clean water to India. But it’s not just giving it away. Instead, it’s Each of these franchisees sets up “water ATMs,” where rural Indians can go and see their water being purified and bottled.
“People say that MBA students are arrogant, that they don’t want to dirty their hands, and only want to give their advice.”
- Abbasali Gabula, deputy director at SP Jain, a leading school in Mumbai.
Accused of being part of financial problems and a decline in morals, one Indian MBA program is taking action, requiring its students to spend significant time in India’s slums, working with children.
No discussion of the life and work of Oscar Niemeyer is complete without Brasília, the dazzling capital that sprung up in the Brazilian savanna in 1961. The Brazilian starchitect who passed away on Wednesday, was responsible for the project’s crowning achievement: the monumental government buildings that stood proudly as emblems of the power of Modernist architecture’s promise—and, later, unfortunate failure—to shape a utopian society.
What gets less attention is that, a decade earlier, another urban vision was taking form more than 8,000 miles away, in India, under the supervision of Le Corbusier. Chandigarh, like Brasília, was intended to be a sparkling new city, created from scratch as a way of shaking off the albatross of colonialism and instating a native, democratic government. And modern notions of urban planning and architecture were central to both new capitals, as the premier architectural photographer Iwan Baan documents in a recent book, “Brasília-Chandigarh”. Fifty years into existence, the two cities have evolved into examples of how grand utopian projects can both inspire and disappoint.
A group called Genomic Gastronomy is using a dessert ingredient as an atmospheric sensor, and a way to get people to face the horrible air they’re breathing every day.
The Big Ideas Inside A New Version Of India’s $35 Aakash Tablet
The Indian government is teaming up with Chinese tech giant Huawei to search imported smartphones and communications devices for signs of malware and spyware. However, some Indians are nervous because of Huawei’s close ties to the People’s Liberation Army and fear that the firm could be complicit in cyberattacks.
“There’s always this narrative of failure and tragedy when one discusses Indian urbanism,” -Kanu Agrawal, Curator, Jugaad Urbanism: Resourceful Strategies for Indian Cities,
The exhibition is “design by the people, for the people, of Delhi, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, and Pune,” says Agrawal, and showcases everyday innovations of slum-dwelling residents and the designers and architects who work around them.
Agrawal, a Delhi native, studied at New Delhi’s School of Planning and Architecture and worked with the acclaimed Achyut P. Kanvinde, and later completed his Master’s in Environmental Design from the Yale School of Architecture. Kanvinde was one of the first to bring modern design to India. But the jugaad exhibit presents a different take on modern urbanism in India—that of the everyman.
Jugaad Urbanism opens at New York’s Center for Architecture next week.
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