Under the Blue Hood

The building in the neighborhood has almost completely been taken down. This can be barely noticed under the blue tarpaulin hiding the work that goes inside and effectively keeping away the dust from the demolition. Now, at the last phase of demolition, they need to take away the car shed. The bad news is that the car shed (almost) shares a load bearing wall with my car shed.

For the last few days I knew that they had made great progress, but had no awareness of how far they had progressed. Now there does exist a chance that there will be damage to the car shed which will result in the initiation of heavy repair work; not to mention thoroughly strained relationships with the neighbor.

With the help of a close aide, I have kept watch on the work for most of today and am informed that the supervisor (again) was not present while the workers (who probably have never been to any school sadly) were sledge-hammering the car shed. I have warned that there will be legal (and more than legal) action taken if they were to attempt anything stupid without proper guidance. Further, the house owner has also been warned that the city municipal authorities will be notified if a single crack shows up.

The reason I revisit this demolition is, people seem to need constant monitoring or would get back to their old ways of doing things. In this case, the old way is irresponsible, clumsy and dangerous to self and others. The owners of the neighboring land have also shown a little less than callous attitude towards addressing this.

They have the most to lose or gain. The more clumsier and uncontrollable their contracted employees; the less the chance of a good "building" and "timely completion" of the work. Worse still is their social image in the neighborhood which already has taken a bit of a fall.

All human beings seem to operate with the ideal that once they are out of sight, no one is watching. That means they have the freedom to break every law (if it were man-made and could be broken) and fall back on every word they gave. In simple words "honor" is a lost word in society. "Honor is what no one can give you and no one can take away." - Rob Roy. People who would rather appear to be something they are not do not hold integrity. By that, their place in society is questionable. Inaction of society too can abet the destruction of society. That is precisely how the society allows people of low (or no) integrity to survive and in some sense prosper degrading society itself.

This problem of a simple building demolition with no consideration to the neighbors is probably nothing in comparison to what people are capable of doing in their own self interests. That would not mean that it is palatable and passable in society. This is just how we add on to society's woes which we finally never get to solve, unless we go "John Woo" style.

Sourcery

This weekend was spent tinkering with a lot of code and updating systems. I also have a visitor at home for the weekend which is really nice (as I tend to be alone most of the time.) I have also taken up the task of getting FreeBSD installation CDs from the web. My only concern at present is which of my boxes is to be converted. Unlike my earlier days, I now have to take these decisions far more carefully because I have lots of data stored all over the place and would really miss them if I ended up formatting or slicing things again. I have decided to postpone the decision to the end of the week.

The other news is, after a lot of talking and contacting, the neighborhood demolition work is being done professionally. I haven't had to worry too much except about the dust plumes from the site. The coming week would be really important as there are a few of my teammates shifting; and therefore throwing parties out for the same.

An Accident in the Neighborhood

With the demolition work going on without any engineers or supervisors involved, just goading people to "finish" work as much as they can for a measly some of less than 80 INR per day (a little less than 2 USD), one of the younger workers, probably a person less than 15 years of age fell down. Lucky for him he didn't have major bruises, but had to taken to the casualty ward at CMH (Chinmaya Mission Hospital.) A passer-by almost got under the debris but was just a few seconds away. It was nothing short of a miracle that no one was badly injured.

After a long conversation with the workers (with the supervisor and the owner of the house conveniently absent from the site), I found that this was a clear case of labour exploitation against the labour laws of India. Furthermore, the supervisor (or contractor as they refer to him, although there is really no binding contract) has been telling them that if anyone were to be harmed, the "exploited workers" would be held responsible.

Part of the problems to humanity are created by being insensitive to what happens within one's circle of influence. Today I have made sure that I enough people concerned with the problem have been informed. I can only take this one step at a time. The first step is to ensure that those who are working for two square meals a day, have a life to live after they finish this.

After safety, I shall evaluate and take up my concerns on their exploitation.
This might be a more endemic and deeper problem that cannot be addressed in too small a context. I end this day on a happy note that I have done something however infinitesimal (and irritating to some) to make life better for some others whom I have had no prior knowledge of.

Debris Field

The house neighbouring mine has been having some demolition work in progress. In Bangalore, I am apalled to see complete disregard for other people and the neighborhood and the workers' own safety standards when they work on a demolition/construction project. None of the workers wear helmets, so I assume they like playing humpty-dumpty.

Worse still, the only separator they have across the houses is a torn piece of tarpaulin. There are no other safety guides. Yesterday I took some photographs of much of the debris fallen onto where I normally park my car. The caretaker of my house had been careful enough to suggest that I park outside to prevent any mishap. I had followed his direction.

Finally, I tried to speak reason to the workers, their supervisor (who can't speak a word of english nor is familiar with the term engineering) and the owner of the house who has no regard for safety. I believe that I will finally have to take more stern measures. The workers can't even speak any of the local language as they are immigrants. They have been hired as they are the "cheapest" to hire. However their capabilities of demolition and suicide have not been taken into account.

The neighbour who owns the building and has commisioned the work has the gall to tell me that the police and law is corrupt in this city, and therefore I am not going to have any say in the matter. I think I shall put his statement to test as I am not turning my cheek for any neighbour who'd rather be an insensitive clod. If I have debris falling anywhere near the house, I can very well repeat the favor.

Noisy Neighbourhood

This Saturday introduced me to a big change in the neighborhood. The building next-door is going in for reconstruction (preceded by demolition of the existing edifice.) The owner has involved a team of noisy people (who chatter louder than the work they do and become a nuisance day and night) to complete the demolition. I have been facing a sudden change in ambient noise level and dust level. They have yet to construct a partition between the houses that would at least serve as a barrier for the dust.

To add to the adventure, there was another group of people taking down nature's edifice, the tallest tree in the neighborhood. It was heavy and it was taken down in heavy intermediate modules. One of them knocked off part of a barbed wire fence on my house's compound wall while being "safely" taken down. The enormity of the tree and the way it was taken down gave quite a few people a good scare of what could happen if nature came crashing down. This made me more worried than the man made edifice generating noise and dust plumes for now on another side of the house. The task took almost after sundown to complete. Recapitulating, a branch from this tree had damaged a window in my house during a storm.

The noise change did have an impact on my sleep. I was so annoyed by the "new" noise that I decided to try and sleep off earlier, which actually didn't work straight forward. It took much longer than that. I used to live in a flat off one of Pune's most noisy highways. At that time nothing in the morning 8:00am rush could take me off my bed as I was so used to it. But a change in the noise levels when I moved to a new silent neighborhood in Pune made me extremely sensitive to noise. I have begun to understand that our brain tunes itself on the basis of ambient noise available near our habitat and our workplace to help filter out the excess and remove any stress related to that. This process is however not instantaneous and takes a bit of time (something like subconscious learning.) Until that is done, I will be extremely aware of this new level of noise in the neighborhood.