The ‘Before the Flood’ documentary starring actor Leonardo DiCaprio set Ajay Raghavan, an employment lawyer in Bengaluru, on a path to create a sustainable and environment-friendly office space in April 2017.
The documentary prompted Raghavan, 43, to learn more about one of the most overused but rarely applied words, “sustainable”, over the next two years, meeting and discovering more on the space. “We didn’t know exactly what, but knew we wanted to be a platform to do stuff around sustainability,” Ajay said.
He met several people that year with the same passion for sustainability and climate change, but a platform was missing to build a community for “impact”– a word that has now become a guiding force for the group. It was in 2019, Ajay decided to start a platform by renting out a 20,000 sq ft defunct factory in Yeshwanthpur. That platform was launched last week. Delays were mostly caused by the Covid-19 outbreak and the pandemic-induced lockdowns.
Bangalore Creative Circus (BCC) is now arguably one of the biggest spaces in the city and has become a platform that continues to attract a growing community of artists, scientists, chefs, gardeners, dreamers and changemakers.
The BCC emphasises its goal to address universal challenges “by inspiring a regenerative culture of living in our home, the city of Bengaluru.”
Bengaluru is among the fastest-growing cities in the world with a population of over 12 million as it continues to attract investments, opportunities in an increasingly globalised village. But the pace of its growth has made it a victim of its success as the city continues to lose its green cover. Rapidly commercialising spaces have encroached upon lakes, deteriorating the quality of air and water, pollution and denigrating the very lives it hopes to improve.
Everything inside BCC is made with reused products. Scrap from Raghavan’s old office make the walls of the cafe, old and unused electronic appliances are now art, Tyres line the walls and beer cans have plants growing out of them. The food served in the cafe is grown in a small space in the back. The office out of the stones they found on the site and a large seahorse that hangs from the ceiling, from air conditioner ducts.
Since the project began in 2019, people from all backgrounds have come forward to help the cause and build BCC into sustainable working space. Manisha Vinod, deeply inspired by environmentalist David Attenborough’s words, decided it was time to move away from her corporate job and contribute towards restoring the planet’s biodiversity.
“When do policies come into play? When they are pressurised by the public at some level. Policies come into being when the affluent, the people in power, entrepreneurs, senior management, when they identify risk and feel the need for a change in policies is when real change will happen at scale. So, platforms like this will at least play a role in them to rethink their business,” she said.
BCC now has Ajay (Manisha’s husband), serial clean-tech startup investor, Alok Agarwal, Siddharth Lakshman, the in-house permaculture expert, Nayantara Bagla, the chef and Lakshman, performing key roles to operate the space.
Lakshman said that as a global community, as well as in our own country, we are faced with a crisis of deteriorating health, socio-economic justice, and ecological problems. At the planetary level, human activities are leading to alarming levels of climate change, extreme weather, deforestation, rising sea levels, biodiversity loss among others that are threatening our very existence on this planet.
“At the level of the human system, we are faced with a growing economic disparity, growing poverty, food insecurity, water scarcity, refugee crisis, agrarian crisis, pandemics, congestion, etc. At the individual level, humans are experiencing unprecedented rates of mental health issues, addictions, degenerate diet and lifestyle issues, etc,” he said.
BCC will monetise its goals by letting out the space for events, holding workshops and from its ‘farm-to-table cafe.
In 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that by the end of the 20th century, technology would have advanced so much that countries like Great Britain and the USA would have achieved 15-hour workdays. But author David Graeber, in his book “Bullshit jobs-The rise of pointless work and what we can do about it” explains why this prediction never materialised: populations across the planet spend a higher number of working hours despite the advancement in technology.
“The standard line today is that he (Keynes) didn’t figure in the massive increase in consumerism,” Graeber writes.
This increase in consumerism has deflected attention away from more pressing needs.
The Earth Overshoot Day which marks the date when humanity’s demand for ecological services in a given year as compared to what it can generate was advanced by a month this year as it fell on July 29 this year.
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