Green

Day 29 (Tuesday 29th December 2015)

29 - the number of letters in the Turkish alphabet

I love the calm days between Christmas Day and the start of the New Year. They are always a good time to contemplate the world and this post by Anthony Allinson should make you do just that. Given the awful flooding over Christmas in the North of England, Scotland and Wales (with more storms on the way) combined with other meteorological problems elsewhere in the globe, Anthony's post is highly topical.

To use Anthony's own words when describing himself, he is "not a HR wonk". He is an Operations Manager with a great track record of establishing PMOs, global services and support organisations. He is currently leading the Managed Services function at Mosaic Island, a digital transformation company based in Bristol and London. I met Anthony via Twitter (his handle is @allinsona). Despite his desire to distance himself from HR (!) Anthony is passionate about the working environment and ensuring that he knows what matters and motivates people (so that he can ensure that one fuels the other, thereby ensuring that customers and colleagues have a great experience). Antony writes a well-followed blog, Joining the Dots  he also has a passion for the people of India and the issues that they face, having become involved with the Sylvia Wright Trust that looks after the sick and disabled in Tamil Nadu - the state hit with severe flooding over the past month.

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Like most people who read this blog I suspect, I voted in the May 2015 election. I value my vote, even though I know it often counts for little on its own.  They add up. That’s the point. I am a little swayed by the argument that people died so we could have the vote I suppose, but note a lot more pragmatically that suffrage came to most men only a little before it more famously came to women. In 1800 around 3% of the adult population had the vote.  It is all quite recent really, a norm, a right we’ve had universally for quite a short time.  I value it as a hard won right, gained over many centuries.

Where I live in rural Hampshire they don’t so much weigh the vote as look at from a distance.  The pile of blue Conservative votes dwarfs the other piles. It is no contest. 

Ballot papers being counted in Hampshire UK

I am a natural Conservative voter, perhaps that makes me less like the majority of people who read and contribute to this blog, I don’t know. I don’t like much of what they do, what they stand for, where they come from and how they behave, but still, I tend to vote for them.

In 2015 I voted for the Greens.  Why?

Out of all the issues that did the rounds this year, the environment matters most of all when set in the context of what differentiates the parties and the need to do something quite radical about it, and to do it now and to keep doing it for a very very long time.

Many other issues do matter and must be dealt with too, it is not “all about” the environment, but it might get to the point where it is.   

I care about our health service and that tricky balance between social safety net and our each being responsible.  If there is a kitchen table debate that happens most often in our house it is around what constitutes an effective education system and what “they” should do to fix it, interspersed with hypocritical rants about why “they” keep meddling with it. I think that having everything on a sound financial footing is necessary for sustained control and stability.  I am less convinced that GDP growth is as all important as we often unthinkingly seem to assume it is.  I do not have a clear view as to what to do about the chaos (I first wrote, “unrest”, and felt that an insulting understatement) in North Africa and the Middle East and the impact it is having on the people there and increasingly on us.  

You can read into all that what you like.  It probably adds up to reluctant Tory. I generally don’t like being pigeon holed but I think I fit the bill.  

I listened to the election debate, joined in a little and concluded that what each party would actually do varies by relatively little, diluting the power of all our votes, further reducing their effect.  People will take issue with that.  I accept they are not all the same.  That would be a jaded view, a counsel of despair which is something I generally rebel against.   I also accept that the current debate about what to do about the chaos I referred to above is massively important, very much a now issue and another that will require effective policy over decades and perhaps even centuries.  

It was when I looked at considerations about the environment that those differences on most other matters suddenly looked small, cyclical and a little irrelevant in a long term and truly global context.  All a bit troublesome in the now, but frankly neither here nor there when set is alongside what we are doing to the world and the need to act promptly, practically and in a highly co ordinated way, making some very tough decisions. Those decisions will test democracy.  I worry that the period of democracy we are enjoying and value so much might turn out to be a bit transient too. 

If any of you read one of my other blogs in recent weeks you’d know I have been to India.  

Chennai, India - photo by Anthony taken on 16th November 2015

I have been there 30-40 times before, but always cocooned by business class cabins, air conditioned cars and swish hotels, so I can then work in palaces glass and steel.  This time I was in a small city, and met real people who live in one and two roomed huts on a few dollars per day. It was not an emotional or moving experience.  It was thought provoking though.  We were there, not to make them richer, or more like us, but to fill gaps where that poverty becomes a real problem.  In this case for the deaf and disabled.  See tswtblog.wordpress.com/normality for that story.

The energy consumption per head is a fraction of ours in the West.  It is rising and broadly we can’t and shouldn’t stop that.  I saw a lot of cars, tuk-tuks, lorries, buses and motorbikes, but relative to the population, still not many at all.  The houses I went into typically had one light bulb, perhaps a fan, in one case a fridge albeit one shared by several families, a village fridge, a bit like a village pump.  I also came across the village mobile phone. 

Typical village scene in Tamil Nadu

There is a whole piece in those observations and what we think of as needs. The consumption gap is wide and will close. I expect Africa to make the same progress while the population there grows too.  Growth in China has slowed but actually still continues, “slow" being a relative term.

I wrote this just as the Paris climate change conference opened a few weeks ago. The agreement seems, by general consensus with a few dissenters, to be a good foundation which needs more work and continued intent.  It was a tough agreement to reach, the product of failure in Copenhagen and long negotiation before Paris.  Following through will be a lot tougher still and take a long time.

Many reading this will know about change and how it is much better when one does it to one's self rather than having it done to you, being in control to the extent that one can be.  The current normal, one that assumes the world can contain 10 billion people who can consume energy in a way that will tend towards the way we do in the West now is not credible. 

Photograph taken on 16 November 2015 in Otley, Yorkshire, UK

There will be change.

The new normal will be very different to the current normal. We can do it deliberately, under some level of control, or not.  There is scope for disorder and chaos if we allow it to just happen. 

That is not something I will explore here,  it will take too long, but it is something we should ideally avoid and at least contain.  I suggest we start now.   

We could always have a cull I suppose.  That’s the other way.  Humans tend to do that every so often.  Especially when resources become scarce. We call it war.  I am not a fan of that.  A little coal dust will be the least of our problems. 

What happens when the world changes?

Unlocking the Nagarathars...

House key for a Nagarathar mansion in Kanadukathan
Placed on a locally made, sun-fired tile

Once the confidents to the Chola Kings,  the Chettiars (or Nagarathars as they prefer to be called) were a significant force in establishing India as a primary player in international trade during the early centuries of the second Millennium. Their original roots have been lost - some say they came from Andrha Pradesh, to the north of Chennai, other claim that the ancestral home was Assam. Certainly, they arrived in the lands that were ruled initially by the Pallava kings and rose to prominence, as wealthy merchants, once the Chola dynasty took over, before migrating inland. 

Demonic mask, hung up to ward off evil
outside a temple, Chettinad, India

At first the Nagarathars  dominated the coastal areas, acting as traders, ship-chandlers,  salt merchants and gem dealers. (Even today Muthill and Vairam, "pearl" and "diamond", are common Chettiar names.)  It was as much their acumen with jewellery and gemstones as their respectful, law-abiding nature and integrity that resulted in the Chola Kings relying on them and promoting them within their courts. Eventually the Chettiars were granted the honour of crowning each new successor to the Chola throne.

Shiva with King Rahendra Chola

However, the Chola monarchs were greedy as well as powerful. It is claimed that in the 2nd century AD the Chettiars felt compelled to move to more hospitable locations in the south, to escape the high taxes imposed upon them for trading out of the great ports of Mylai and Mamallapuram.  They settled in Kaveripoompattinam, which became the great port of the ancient Cholas, but is now a sleepy seaside town called Poompuhar. Nagarathar ships sailed to Malaria and Sumatra and traded with people of the Menam and the Mekong. For a thousand years the Chettiars established themselves as the foremost merchants. The most common Indian words for merchant are Sait,  Shetty or Chetty (which a derived from the Sanskrit shresthi, meaning leader of a merchant guild) - it isn't hard to see how the name Chettiar came about.

Elaborate iron work on
Chettiar Raja's palace gate

The Chettiars grew in influence both in India and abroad, under the Chola patronage. Legend has it that it was a Chola king, in the 13th century, who shattered the relationship by abducting a young Chettiar woman and forcing her into wedlock. This so offended the Chettiars (who prided themselves on their chaste women, upstanding morals and who valued the sanctity of marriage) that they revolted. Stories abound as to how they reacted (ranging from mass suicide, leaving only a few babies, to the majority of the community agreeing to emigrate at the invitation of the King Sundra Pandya). Certainly, a significant number of Chettiars moved inland and started referring to themselves as a distinct group - the Chettiars (adding an "ar" to the  term merchant).

Interior of 100 year old Nagarathar home
built from items secured overseas (cast iron from England, marble from Italy,
teak from Burma, glass from Venice, etc...

Like the Scots, the Chettiars have distinct clans, based around the nine temples that were established in the region where their forefathers settled, around Ilayathangudi in central Tamil Nadu. The nine temples are Ilayathangudi,  Mathur,  Vairavanpatti, Iraniyur, Pillaiyarpatti, Nemam, Iluppakudi, Soorakudi and Velangudi. Even today these temples act as clan centres with family members returning - although the majority of Chettiars have moved abroad or into the larger Indian towns.

A Chettiar Raja's Palace

The hotel I wrote about yesterday is a grand Chettiar mansion created in the 1940's,  at a time when the Nagarathar influence was in decline. It is set in what feels like a discarded film set, made up of atmospheric but crumbling grand houses. Plaster is peeling off walls, vigorous plants are forcing their way through brickwork, villas have been ransacked for their costly materials and antiques. Grand gardens are now being used to graze goats and rough huts of nomads and poor subsistence farmers have sprung up, using old walls as shelter and support.

What happened? The root of the problem seems to be that the world changed around the Chettiars and they realised too late. For nearly a thousand years they went from strength to strength. By trading rice, salt and precious gems and by loaning money to trusted contacts the Chettiars accumulated wealth. Their trading contacts were with leaders and prominent traders in countries where they bought and sold such as teak from Burma. 

A crumbling Chettiar facade

When the British East India Company arrived the rajas and leaders who worked with the Chettiars introduced them to the new rulers. When the British capital moved from Madras to Calcutta the established British merchants and official bodies needed trustworthy representatives in the South and they turned to the Chettiars. Soon the Chettiars found themselves the trusted intermediaries for the trade of imperialists (Frence and Dutch as well as British) across Asia and beyond. The Chettiars started creating affluent settlements in the villages around the temples where they had settled and began referring to themselves as Nagarathar - meaning townsfolk as they stood our from others in the rural area where they had settled.

Pottery horses standing outside Chettiar horse temple

The Nagarathars established banks in countries including Mauritius,  Vietnam and even South Africa.  From the late 19th century until the end of World War I their influence grew. They began building the astonishing mansions that I wandered past yesterday in their home villages. The economic upsets of the Great Depression hit a few (the collapse of Arbuthnott & Co. In Madras hurt as many Nagarathars were investors).  The Chettiars had acquired land in places where the traded - Burma, Vietnam and Ceylon. Attitudes towards friends of the colonial powers were changing in each of these countries. Post the end of the Second World War, when many countries gained independence,  the Nagarathars found themselves ostracised and discriminated by the new regimes. Their possessions requisitioned and trading relations ceased. The world changed before most of them realised the threat to their way of life.

I wonder if we are also living in a time of cusp and so used to our ingrained habits and customs that we too are blind to our futures.

1950's wireless - still in use in a
Nagarathar mansion
(my parents had one I remember
from when I was a child)

An Indian Adventure

“The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.” ― Eleanor Roosevelt

Over the next fortnight I am travelling through a part of the world where I have never been before - Tamil Nadu in southern India. I intend to post short daily blogs about the experiences, sights, smells, tastes and sounds that I encounter...