In my time with A last week, I find myself remembering what he was curious about, what he reacted to, what he was new to… He was facinated with this diamond pattern that the walking waves would leave in imprint. But they would never walk the same, it is only sometimes that their walking would create these patterns, othertimes, the soil appeared patternless. I appreciate these moments where I am party to such curious involvement. I thank this patternful existence for that.
This yellow grill has been present at the Market-side entrance to Platform 1 of Yeshwanthpur station ever since I’ve been to blr. But I’m yet to find an answer to find why it exists. On the sides it prevents the market from pushing into the road, but what does it stop on the top? Regardless, the moon looked beautiful.

  • I found this cornerstone at a Third Wave in Besant Nagar. It reads as a partial translation:

    Read all the elements in the scene for yourself

    ’TamilNadu Housing Development Corporation Eliots seashore housing development scheme On 6-1-1970, under the leadership of hourable CM Karunanidhi, the Tamilnadu housing minister K. V. Subbaiah and the Central housing minister K.K. Shah opened this building.

    The irony of this building being a full Third Wave cafe is not lost on me. There were no small tea shops, or breakfast places, even near the beach. I was curious about the history ofBesant Nagar and its history with housing, gentrification and the general So-Bo-ification trend that it has contributed to in Chennai. I found this CMDA report that facinatingly chronicles the history of development of Chennai city. The report references the ‘Madras Urban Development Plan’(s) of ’77, ’83 and ’88. These are documents I would like to find. See this world bank appraisel of the Madras Urban Development Project1 2

    In my attempt to find more resources to understand, Vivek helped me find this map of Madras from 1821, which has me completely enamoured.

Mambalam, Choolaimedu are part of the ‘Long Tank’, look at ‘Black Town’, present day Vadachennai and the map showing the Fort right up until the shore, before the port was made. The CMDA report describes it this way: > The building of the harbour was responsible for sand accretion to the south of it and the sea which was washing the ramparts of the Fort at one time was then 2.5 km away with a wide beach between the land and the sea.
It is a common sight to see people waiting for trains to be sleeping in the bus and train stations. This time in Koyambedu they seemed to have been sleeping in a grid like pattern
What would it look like to arrange for waiting rooms with cots in stations?

  • I spent some time working with making multimedia annotated videos and maps. It helped that I was able to make the PGSL site support terrain view.

  • This past week I have been thinking of trust in our society. A printing place that we use regularly has recently centralised and digitized their call-based print ordering service. We depend on apps and ‘aggregators’ more than we do on people who drive the autos and busses. All of these technologies remove human processes by asking us to remove the implicit trust that we had in the smallest of interactions. From how governments may become digital systems continue to force in-person grey processes to how systems that centralise trust also allow the centralising entity to take advantage of the lack of trust. Why do we no longer ask people in villages for directions to the hill that google maps tells exists? Why are some of these systems so opaque, that we feel powerless? If somebody refuses to accept my passport as a identifying document and only asks for Aadhar, I have no control. We now need Aadhar to book Tatkal tickets and more than 12 tickets in a month.

  • I have often questioned why universities and colleges do not encourage students who are registered elsewhere to vote do not ask them to reregister with the university as their permanent address. The student lives in the urban area and in the constitutency for 3-4 years at a minimum and decades beyond that. This question is what led to my work with Linguistic Pluralism and Disenfranchisement in Bengaluru, while unfinished and in retrospect a work that needs much more rigour with statistics, made me realise the reality of how most migrants will not ever vote. The notion of permanent addresses and current addresses is an outdated notion that no longer (or never has) works. People appear to still want to vote back in their hometowns, if they have the opportunity to and want to. So then how can they complain about a city they live in if they have no right to select anybody who takes care of the city? And what is the definition of a permanent address? If you pernially keep moving within the same political unit: Ward, Constituency, State, would it make sense to keep changing your address with Aadhar, Voter ID, Passport, Bank accounts, PAN, Ration Cards, EPF, Driving Lisence, Vehicle Registration and every other conceivable and unknown government scheme identification card. This is not a call to have one place where you can change your address, that is multitudes more scary, but the way one is considered a citizen and given the power to vote should be reconsidered. Are there readings you suggest?

  • This is my longest time away from Instagram, and this is the only attempt in my probably 9 years that I’ve spent on Instagram, that I’ve never felt the urge to get on it. I’ve spent the time happily not forcibly swiping down to refresh my feed, and attempting to keep up with gossip, which I feel is essentially what Instagram is. In this time, I have found myself finding sticking to routines much better.

  1. India - Madras Urban Development Project (English). Washington, D.C. : World Bank Group. http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/368261468051299559↩︎

  2. https://www.dtnext.in/city/2022/10/03/75-families-of-mudp-schemes-yet-to-get-documents↩︎