Somewhere along the Hessaraghatta reservoir, we look into water. It is sandy where we stand, sandy enough to worry me that the drizzling rain will make it soft and marshy. We’d only discovered that there is a path after seeing a few other people walking out onto the road from this side.
Near the Durgamba Devi temple, a well and two people.There is a path on the embankment where most people walk. There is also a path below the embankment that gives access to the few farm houses, cattle sheds and coconot/palm plantations that line the side.

  • This Ganesh Chaturthi, there is a remnant of a procession in every street. Streets are lit up, there are some streets that I have never seen so brightly lit with festival lighting in the last few years. Close to my home, there is the Chickabettahalli Jamia Masjid, that is right on the BEL - AFS - Vidyaranyapura - Yelahanka road. The road is a sharp white line of seggregation. You will not find so many muslims on the east side of the road, while the western side is not so fancy looking. The left side is also the Chickabettahalli village. For Ganesh processions, there is a lot of police personnel who have been stationed all along the road. And there is a van of personnel who stay opposite the mosque, all evening, and possibly all night. It is everybody’s wonder why they stay in front of a mosque during ganesh processions.

    There is a growing adoption of Ganesha to be a violent figure to be protected as well.
    One Ganesha procession stops traffic on the Vidyaranyapura road
    Before the chaturthi, somewhere on NICE road,

  • Shivaram Karanth always amazes me with its scale. Not the one that comes from admiring a phenomena for its beauty and complexity, but from knowing that something was taken, and something was given, but not to the same people. Do you remember friends that you never gave back to, it still irks me after a few years, but this is more than an irk.

    The WdHL platform locates a few instances of demolition and relocation from Shivaram Karanth. Read more here [^1]
    An identifying marker of the Shivaram Karanth layout are the green meshes that are being used to border public amenity plots
    The other marker are the great, vast valleys that are now roads and drains. I have not seen such vast valleys, but at SKL, I have been staring and gazing for the past 2 years.

  • My tiny little broken screen of a phone, somehow has the power to break all sense of time. It can somehow make a day feel unlived, as if you have not lived it. In the struggle and arguments between attention, duty and short entertainment, the screen can consume my mind wholly in this argument. It begins by making one tiny tear, one tiny argument that your hands and your thought-less reactionary mind think and respond to. Then, with a million tiny cuts, the whole day is painted with just these cuts. So well frequently these cuts are made, that there is no difference a unlived day and a day full of arguments between your attention and your phone. This was my weekend.

  • Inbetween these cuts, A dropped by for a surprise visit. We headed off to Hessaraghatta for the evening.

    At the Durgamba temple on the Hesaraghatta reservoir embankment. I have noticed that even in cages sitting on the roads, the chicken waiting to be butchered within the stench of death and dust make no sounds. They make no sounds even when they are within the Matrix of the Poultry truck. I wonder what life outside of this matrix they know before they die.
    I have been to the reservoir across seasons in the past few years, but I’ve never seen people readily enter the bed of the reservoir.
    Somewhere, looking into the lake
    The space thrives with Churmuri, pani puri, jola, all in bangalore rates for the visitors from bangalore
    The coconut plantation appears to have been cleared in the front for some reason.

  • I had submitted a talk proposal for the Open Data DevRoom for IndiaFOSS 2025, where I intend to share https://where-does-hate-live.netlify.app/ and the https://constitutional.observer. While preparing for the talk, I have decided that I will not include explicit imagery that has become both the victim’s bane and the perpetrator’s loud speaker within hate movements in india. Instead I have begun making quick illustrations that will stand in for those images that many of us recognise

    Sometime inbetween 1987 and 1992
    2002

1: Demolition drive by BDA in Doddabettahalli, Somashettahalli, Medaagrahara and Lakshmipura - Aug 2021

  1. 1↩︎