index
Projects
Every project is a combination across the framework: a way of seeing, the subjects it touches, the methods it runs on, and the positions it takes. This ground is Tamil Nadu throughout, so there is no separate column for it. Click a column to filter; click a project to read more.
Seeing the State maps the machinery of the Tamil Nadu government: from the village panchayat and the ward councillor up through blocks, districts, departments and the secretariat — who holds which power, where the money flows, and which door to knock on for which problem. The machinery exists in acts, orders and organograms scattered across a hundred documents; Seeing the State draws it as one navigable picture, with the relationships — who reports to whom, who funds whom, who can overrule whom — made as legible as the offices themselves.
In a region urbanising this fast, knowing how the state actually works is not trivia — it is the precondition for taking part in it. A resident who can trace a stalled road to the agency that owns it argues differently; a ward committee that knows its own powers behaves differently. Civic literacy is infrastructure, and the map is the beginning of that literacy.
Mapping Hinduism charts the temples under the Hindu Religious & Charitable Endowments department — the state's extraordinary, little-examined portfolio of tens of thousands of living monuments — and categorises them by structure and by time: dynasty and period, architectural type, scale, endowment, and the settlements that grew around them. What exists today as scattered gazetteer entries and department lists becomes one queryable, mappable body of evidence.
The temple is the oldest urban instrument in the Tamil country: towns took their street grids, their tanks and their economies from it centuries before planning had a name. Read together on a map, the portfolio becomes more than heritage — a chronology of how the region urbanised, and a live institutional question about how a modern state stewards a sacred estate it did not build and cannot replace.
The Atlas of TN is a curated set of maps for understanding the state as a system: where its people, water, industry, transit and ecology actually sit, how they overlap, and where the potentials and the bottlenecks hide. Each plate takes one question — who lives within reach of rail? where does the monsoon actually land? which corridors carry the industry, and which districts are left off the map? — and answers it visually, with sources shown and methods stated.
The conviction behind it is this practice's oldest one: a pattern made visible becomes arguable. Much of what will constrain or carry Tamil Nadu's next decades is already drawn in its geography; the atlas puts that geography on the table, one legible page at a time, as shared evidence rather than expert property.
Morphological Musings reads the physical form of Indian cities — street grids, plot fabrics, block sizes, the geometry of growth — one essay at a time. The concentric temple town, the colonial cantonment, the bazaar street, the unauthorised colony and the gated enclave each carry a logic; the essays trace where each form came from, what it affords, and what it quietly forbids, in drawings as much as in words.
Morphology is the slowest layer of the city and the least discussed: policies change yearly, buildings in decades, but a street pattern can outlast every regime that governs it. Understanding that inheritance — what can be retrofitted, what resists, what a form still wants to become — is the groundwork for any serious proposal about what Indian cities might yet be.
The Library of Ideas collects graduation theses that examine Tamil Nadu and India with rigorous academic discipline — work that took a year or more of a young researcher's life, earned a degree, and then vanished into an institute archive. Each entry is curated, summarised and properly credited, with the full work linked wherever rights allow, so the shelf grows into a genuine reference rather than a scrapbook.
A thesis is often the deepest study a place will ever get; letting it disappear is entropy winning by neglect. Kept together and made searchable, these projects become a commons of ideas for the next researcher, the next studio, the next municipality — proof of how much serious thinking about these cities already exists, waiting to be used.