CHENNAI: What river supplies the water to your home?” PhD student Vijayakumar Solaiselvam posed this question to several friends before drawing the conclusion that most people are not aware of the same. The disconnect between the geography taught to us in classrooms and the local ecology in which we live was apparent to the then Virudhunagar district dweller; it had been so from an early age.
“We were taught about the Western Ghats, Eastern Ghats, dry and moist deciduous forests but no one (teachers) showed a hand to the Western Ghats that could be seen from my school in my village. Everything was theoretical even though we lived as a part of a dry deciduous forest,” he explains. Not wanting to just point out the gaps in our education module, Vijayakumar decided to put passion and purpose to work, creating the Twitter handle — Tamil Nadu Geography — in late January to dispense consumable, surface-level information about the land we live in.
Short and sweet
In only a few concise lines, Vijayakumar introduces people to lesser-known facts about rivers, islands, unique geographical features and more of Tamil Nadu (and sometimes, beyond the state). To do the same, he makes the most of the Internet and open-source platforms in India. “When I was younger, everything I learned about ecology was from newspaper articles. Then, when the Internet came about, everything changed. Google Earth offered a view of various parts of the world. I also opted for microwave imaging as my PhD topic and I could look at various satellite images.
India also has a lot of open-source materials by the government and organisations for research — National Water Research Information System, Ground Water Data, National Water Mission — that I use but they are not in a consumable format,” he shares. And that’s something that requires change, he found, even with his own methods of presentation.
Currently, his Twitter account is filled with not just information but several pictorial and graphical aids to ease the mind into the subject. While he began his endeavour years ago through long pages on Quora, he found that Twitter was the ideal platform for him to fulfil this mission as it forces you to put together diverse information in 280 characters and caters to the short attention spans of readers. Furthermore, he would be joining Tamil Nadu’s active community that speaks of weather, water and planning on the medium, he reminds.
Despite only having established the repository of information a few months ago, Vjayakumar has gained a considerable following of 13.2k followers. “I get a lot of messages where people say they didn’t know about such geographical features in their own area. People pass via a road a thousand times without knowing that it is the spot where a certain river originates. So, they say it is interesting to know,” he shares.
The local eye
While generating interest is one of his aims, he hopes to create a deeper connect that could build a sense of conservation in the locals. When asked what he hopes for people to take away from this information, he says, “I want people to understand the diverse ecosystem, the natural beauty, and the wildlife. I want to give people the feeling that it is not only humans who are from Tamil Nadu but also birds, animals, insects are a part of it. I hope people get the feeling that we are a part of the state that has unique things and that it is our responsibility to protect it.
This, without an ultra regionalist approach that ours is the only beautiful state.” To accomplish the same, he also emphasises on a need for a change in our learning systems. One that provides more localised chapters for people of different states as opposed to the standard textbook across such a diverse country and one that goes beyond the pages of a book to explore the ecology in its true form.
And there is so much to see and preserve in Tamil Nadu, he exclaims.
People mistakenly focus only on the flat, dry areas, he observes, but the state is enormously diverse. “From desert to thorny dry forests to wetlands to beaches, the diversity is amazing. Even our beaches are unique. We have the Coromandel Coast from Nagapattinam to Chennai-Pulicat, we have Palk Bay, which is a shallow, lagoon-like beach. Then, we have the Gulf of Mannar, a rich bio-sphere reserve, an important sediment sink and then the Arabian Sea.
The hydrological dynamics for all these are different. Then we have the mountains and forests. The Nilgiris itself have three climatic rainfall zones. We have the west-facing valleys that get southwestern monsoon, the east-facing mountains that get the northeast monsoon and the northern, dry area. So, whenever you visit, you can always go to a place that has rain, barring a few months,” he explains, adding that the state is also home to south India’s tallest motorable point in Doddabetta.
The geography of a place also decides much more of our life than we give it credit for, he observes. “Where I am from (a village in Virudhunagar district), it is a water-starved area. So, people are a little tough, the slangs are rougher, since it is a tough life and things don’t come to us simply. There is no time for pleasantries in a tough life. Geography (and geology) has decided our lives, the way we interact, even the language we speak. If you notice, there is no complete equivalent of veyil in other languages and this is because of our ecology,” he states, concluding that geography is not only the landscapes, water, and air but how they interact with each other and how we interact with them.
To know more, visit @TNGeography on Twitter