Uploaded on 2020-06-15 by Amrutha Viswanath

This is photograph of a street in a city in the Southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, India. The city is Kumbakonam, and is known for its numerous Hindu temples and other places of rich cultural heritage. This particular street displays visible information of the buildings, street lights, traffic dividers and to some extent, people. A particularly unique practice that the streets of this city has are makeshift shops in the middle of roads, mostly during the evening. The invisible information that can be extracted from this scene are 1. Economic activity of makeshift stalls and shops 2. The kinds of goods and items being sold 3. The number of human interactions 4. The impending traffic blockade and how many vehicles could have potentially passed through without the stalls. I am particularly interested in the economic activities and how they are overall contributing to the local economy there. The money paid by tourists versus the moeny paid by natives/localites, and the disparities between them can reveal the amount of tourism it attracts. Moreover, we can also conclude how self-reliant, resilient/sustainable such economies can be in the absence of tourists.