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Take Back What the Devil Stole

December 12, 2020 By meerasub Leave a Comment

Life leads you, one thing to another, one project to another, one person to another.

While I was a Knight Science Journalism fellow at MIT in 2016, I took a photography class with B.D. Colen. I was trying to hone a lifelong passion of taking photographs into something more skilled than just setting the aperture. He pushed us to take brazen photos of strangers on the street, and create a 24-hour time capsule of our lives (the only photos we would be able to look at for the rest of our lives when we were shot into space). We had to get dozens of good shots with the restriction that our subject and our own feet could not move at all once planted (thanks, Lauren Whaley!). He had us document the 2016 presidential election as it unfolded, imploded, and he documented me the morning after the election, when we bagged classwork to watch Hillary Clinton’s concession speech (remember those?) during class. [Read more…]

Filed Under: photography Tagged With: Donna Haskins, Knight Science Journalism, MIT, Onaje X. O. Woodbine, photography, religion, video

Seeing God’s Hand in the Deadly Floods…

October 28, 2017 By meerasub 2 Comments

White Sulphur Springs, WV. Photo by Meera Subramanian.

 Second in a series of stories for InsideClimate News. An evangelical mountain town in West Virginia lost eight people to flooding from an extreme rain storm last year. Many residents see the Biblical prophecy of the apocalypse, and welcome it, while some are considering climate change in a new light.

Jake Dowdy is a police officer in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, where he lived a block from Howard Creek, a stream so inconsequential you could usually hop-skip across parts of it without wetting your toes.

It was the morning of June 23, 2016, and a heavy rain was falling as Jake went to the gym for a workout. He wasn’t thinking much about the rain, other than that it’d be good for the garden. When he got home around noon, he had lunch and kicked up his feet in the living room, chilling out for a while before his 4 pm shift. He drifted off to sleep on the couch and awoke when his wife texted, confusing him for a moment; she was concerned about reports of flooding.

His disorientation turned to panic when he set his feet on the carpet and felt it squish soggily beneath his soles. He had just enough time to grab the cat and wade through thigh-high rushing water to his truck.

Read more at InsideClimate News or West Virginia Public Broadcasting. 

Filed Under: InsideClimate News, journalism Tagged With: climate change, evangelical, flood, InsideClimate News, religion, USA, water, West Virginia

wnyc: bringing India back from the brink

September 12, 2015 By meerasub Leave a Comment

photo 1

It was with great delight that I entered into the studios of WNYC on Varick Street to sit down and talk with Arun Venugopal, who was guest hosting the Leonard Lopate Show. We talked about the costs of the Green Revolution, of Hindu priests who asked, “What is your duty?” to a farming family considering going organic, of holy waters. Our conversation ended too quickly, and I didn’t quite get to elaborate on my answer to his last question, about the direction PM Modi is taking the country. I said Modi has a choice. What I felt like I didn’t make clear enough is that he can develop India at the expense of the environment, the direction he seems to be heading now, or choose to tap into the exploding number of opportunities to develop in a more sustainable way, providing a model for the world. I’m rooting for the latter, and met the people in India who hope so too.

Listen to the full interview here.

Filed Under: A River Runs Again, elemental india, journalism, News Tagged With: A River Runs Again, book tour, Elemental India, india, New York City, organic farming, pesticides, radio, religion

sweeping air

November 27, 2012 By meerasub Leave a Comment

 

I am overly pragmatic. Each day seems so finite, and there is so much work to do. Big work, made out of endless little work. Schools to construct. Minds to make literate. Wells to dig and water to purify. Inoculations to give and hair to braid and food to feed growing bodies. So many streets to sweep and toilets to build.

Instead, it is time for aarti, the Hindu puja taking place this night, and every night, in hundreds of little temples like this one in Varanasi, India. Someone led me here to this place, tucked into the labyrinth of alleyways behind the Manakarnika Ghat, where bodies are burning. On the way, along the other ghats on the water’s edge, we passed a series of Ganga Aartis – floodlights! amplification! – that attract Indian and foreign tourists alike for the full pilgrimage experience. The masses were stacked on the steps that link city to water and packed into handmade wooden boats just offshore, cameras flashing.But the power went out moments after we passed and we found our way by flashlight to the temple building dimly lit with the inverter’s stored energy.

The Hindu priest is kind, allowing my camera and my curious eyes as I witness the rituals I have watched since I was young. Shiva is the focus here, the stone lingam – more breast than phallus – the centerpiece set in a square of silver embedded into the floor like a pious pit. The priest spends more time in careful preparation for the ritual than it will take to enact it, when three other priests join him and, together their hand bells thunder in unison in rhythm to their chants. As a child, the smell of flowers and fire and the hypnotic sound of the chants would transfix me. Now I can appreciate that this ritual incorporates the five elements into one seamless act. Always I have viscerally loved the moment when, at the end, I can place my cupped hands over the heat of the flame and bring them to my face, my eyes closed.

But I have grown old and I think too much….

Read the rest at The Revelaer.

Filed Under: journalism, photography, travels Tagged With: hinduism, india, pollution environment, religion, Revealer, water

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