journal
essays and field notes.
notes from the work, as they're ready.
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bioplastics from the culm
a bamboo molecular bioplastic with tensile strength above polyethylene and full biodegradation in fifty days — if the recent result holds, the question is how a village workshop in aizawl gets near it.
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the story you take for granted
a few months with a Khiamniungan-led workshop in nagaland, and what it taught me about finishing, naming, and the gap between a beautiful bamboo object and one a buyer outside the region will actually pay for.
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five species, no metal
a bambu-only scooter built at the bamboo u campus in june 2025, drawn from the mizo *tawlailir*, and what it answered before any engineering question could be asked.
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every dancer a conductor
on cheraw, on movement as music, and a space ringed by mautak that calls the orchestra up out of the air when a body steps in.
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the regeneration model
on the cycle that organises the studio's work — grow, treat, build, livelihood — and the case for treating ecology, culture, and economy as one regeneration rather than three separate trades.
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the forgotten economics
₹66 lakh versus ₹1,000 crore — how value leaves Mizoram every day, and what would change if it stayed.
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listening to mautak
on the absence of an acoustic record for the dominant bamboo of Northeast India, and what its arrival would change.
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the mautam paradox
on the flowering cycle that organises a state's history, the famine unfolding right now in its fields, and the gap between what is happening and what has been studied.
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bamboo is not timber
a primer on the biology, the grain, the water, and the modes of failure that no spec sheet will tell you.
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acoustic data for bamboo: what exists, what is missing
three research groups in the world have published systematic acoustic data on bamboo for musical-instrument purposes. none have studied a south asian species. none have measured melocanna baccifera. this is what they did measure, and what an equivalent record for mautak needs to look like.