Between the land and the sea - Notes from #ChennaiRains 6

1.A retro gadget revival
"When power supply went off the radar, we went back to living the way we used to"

The rains have made us face a lot of issues we casually ignored. Waste. The waste that we generated as a city is now strewn across on our face. It's high time we gave it a deeper thought. On ‪#‎SmartTalk‬ today tune in as a responsible organisation Paperman talks on how we could do it better. 


"Given just a few hours to alert residents of impending floods, state authorities struggled to save Chennai from a flood created by itself"

4. Murky floodwater mixes with casteism: Dalits refused relief in Cuddalore

  • A survey reveals that around 90 % of the houses, livestock and crops destroyed in Cuddalore districts of Tamil Nadu belong to the Dalits.
  • One of the reason for the acute damage is that the schedule castes are mostly living either on the edge or close to the river on the low-lying areas.
  • The survey also reveals that in Kongarayanpalayam, people from the dominant caste blocked clean water access for the Dalits.
5. Preethi Sukumaran

Relief materials update - Triphala the wonder antiseptic
A wonderful, completely natural antiseptic is triphala - made from the fruits of amla/nellikkai, hartaki/kadukkai and vibhitaki/thandrikkai.
Triphala is made by powdering these cleaned, deseeded dried fruits and mixing them in equal proportion.
The resulting powder/chooranam is very versatile.
It can be used as an antiseptic hand wash like we do in the Krya factory. It can be used very effectively to wash dirty feet especially after immersion in sewage mixed water.
It can also be used directly as an antiseptic dusting powder on open cuts and wounds.
And can be made as a decoction for cleaning, bathing, etc.
We made small quantities and sent some to volunteers at OFM to use in their relief work. If you would like some and can definitely use it (because convincing a hard core dettol user to shift to this may be difficult right now), please pm. We can produce until we have the raw materials available. More rm expected in a couple of weeks.
Thank you Doc Thirunarayanan Thirumalaiswamy for the learning and info on this.

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