#encroachment

At the time, age eighteen, having been brought up in a hair-trigger society where the ground rules were — if no physically violent touch was being laid upon you, and no outright verbal insults were being levelled at you, and no taunting looks in the vicinity either, then nothing was happening, so how could you be under attack from something that wasn't there? At eighteen I had no proper understanding of the ways that constituted encroachment. I had a feeling for them, an intuition, a sense of repugnance for some situations and some people, but I did not know intuition and repugnance counted, did not know I had a right not to like, not to have to put up with, anybody and everybody coming near. Best I could manage in those days was to hope the person concerned would hurry up and say whatever it was he or she thought they were being friendly and obliging by saying, then for them to go away; or else to go away myself, politely and quickly, the very moment I could.

The encroachment and conversion of Bengaluru’s wetlands into alienable property is not a new phenomenon. Until the mid-20th century, a network of engineered and naturally occurring water reservoirs called keres in Kannada or “lakes/tanks” in English extended across the landscape. More than a thousand such tanks  interconnected through canals (today’s raja kaluves) once crisscrossed the urban district of Bengaluru. As anthropologist David Mosse has chronicled, village-managed tanks were developed all over South India four centuries ago in response to the vagaries of monsoonal rainfall and the cultural and political traits of pre-colonial agrarian states.

@inkmassacre liked [+] for a despair starter.