About me

 

A bit about me:

I'm Vansh kothari, a teen from Bangalore, India.

My proclivity for gardening and love for nature germinated 10 years ago from mustard seeds. I was in 2^nd grade, artless and impatient. After I returned home from a class on germination, I sowed mustard seeds in a chocolate tray. Two leaves that popped out of the soil a few days later, filled me with exuberance. Watching the leaves multiply over time kept me brimming with excitement. Gardening became my first hobby. Though I was just 7 years old, I felt like a father to the mustard plants. These seemingly inanimate creatures induced intangible sentiments in me, which were far beyond my years.

 Over time, the turf of mustard progressed into pots of jasmine which alleviated my evenings after sultry summer days, hibiscus that has been coloring my balcony since 7 years, insulin plant (costus igneus) that helped to control my father’s diabetes, and the list goes on. Every year I had to trim the plants, sometimes down to the stem, yet they regrew greener than ever. I observed the ants carrying food and nurturing their eggs in the crevices of the stem, bees playing in the petunias and passion vines with the onset of spring, the colorful spiders rebuilding their webs multiple times without feeding for days. Swallowtail butterfly has fascinated me the most. To enjoy few weeks of freedom as butterflies, the vulnerable caterpillars feed for a month. Out of dozens of eggs it lays, only a fraction of them become butterflies, rest die in their early stage or their cocoon gets infected by chalcid wasps. The unity and perseverance of the ants and bees, the spiders’ persistence in spite of sharp vicissitudes, and purity of the plant kingdom has inspired me greatly. In an unspeakable way, the plants and insects have taught me patience, optimism and perseverance, which now seem to be innate traits in me. It’s like the big bang theory, my love for nature, entomology and gardening started from miniscule mustard seeds and still growing as I write this.

How I take Photos and videos:

I do not have a professional camera. 

In 6th grade, I found old broken microscope collecting dust in my school's biology lab. The eyepieces seemed perfectly fine, so I asked the lab incharge if I could use the eyepiece, the lab in charge was very generous-she said I could keep them! Since then, I have been collecting lenses from Binoculars, optical instruments and magnifying glasses in box. 

optical instruments: left-magnifying glass(5x)

middle-Eyepiece(10x)

right top-starscope finder

right bottom-eyepiece(20x)

It started with ants- to observe them closely I used the eyepiece. I had to put my head very close to observe them. It struck me that I could use my phone to see the ants with the eyepiece. you can guess-I taped the eyepeice in front of my phone's camera and zoomed in. I observed a whole new world on my phone screen. It is a bit inconvenient to hold the eyepiece in front of the phone camera, perfectly aligned and at the right angle to avoid chromatic aberration, but its a good Jugaad

A professional camera was too expensive, and the eye-peice worked perfectly well for me. It was the an ultimate jugaad!

Juggad is a hindi word that means:"flexible approach to solve a problem, that uses limited resources in an innovative way."

This word was added the oxford dictionary recently

Doing Jugaad