Surekha’s relationship with Jakkur Lake began many years before her project through the Negotiating Routes program. From 2008 onwards, the artist had been regularly documenting the changes that had been taking place at the lake. Through her lens, she was attempting to capture two parallel narratives that were occurring around the lake: that of the physical changes taking place at the lake site as it was transformed from a natural geological form to an artificially created one; and the changes that were occurring in the lives and livelihoods of the people who had depended on and lived with the lake for so many decades. The lifestyle of the people around Jakkur lake experience a forced shift from being a farming community to being something uncertain, after the farming land around the lake were acquired for the purpose of urban and residential developments. The lake is currently a site of peculiar internal Diaspora, wherein the change in it has made the settlement and people around it undergo an ecological,
professional and hence a cultural and emotional displacement, while still very much retaining the sense of belonging there, due to the presence of the lake though in a modified version.

At the same time, the Bangalore Development Authority speaks a language of development of the lake, preserving it from pollution, increasing the storage capacity, saving the land from real estate encroachers; and also preparing it for anarticulated public utility. To fulfill these requirements, walking pathways, islands for migratory birds, a boat-jetty and a separate idol immersion tank (Kalyani) have been constructed.

Surekha’s explorations focused on a process of documentation, recording and re-tracing the history of the lake. The intention was to create an inter-disciplinary record and understanding of the changes that the lake was facing, using interviews, empirical history, memoirs, myths and the religious – belief system narratives on video-audio interactions with various generations of villagers, in whose lives the lake has always been an omnipresent factor.

Through the course of the project, the artist maintained an interactive blog which traced her journey and recorded her experiences of learning the Lake’s history. Several persons, including local villages, environmental activists, ecologists, and even members of the BDA were interviewed and recorded.
These recordings were made available on the artist’s website, along with other traces such as photographs, mappings and recordings of the birds that would visit the lake.