- My week began in Chennai. That sunday morning it had rained, it had put off all the sunday morning beach plans, but the karmegangal blessed us with a pause after 8am. Metro work on the Marina Promenade has closed off much of the parking on the Marina, the rain had closed off many people as well. We walked from there to the Adyar estuary, to see the broken bridge. I’ve never walked this full stretch before, so was excited to walk on the pattinapakkam beach (I’ve been to the pattinapakkam road a few times). I was playing catch with the tiny sheets of waves reaching up to our feet. The beach was clean except for something I’ve never noticed before, open defaecation, right on the shore.
I left for Bidar on Monday to work on planning and making a field guide for the Mapping to understand socioecological phenomena in the place. We were capturing videos to describe alongside the essay we have been writing to describe the path of a natural drain that goes out of Bidar City. While making this essay, we have been discussion what it means to call something a stream. If something actively carries water that is visible, and is large enough, it is a stream, it contains running water! But geologically, water need not run on the ground always, but we do not recognise such paths of water with the same weight as a ‘stream’. This stream becomes a way for the city to drump drain water away, so there is water flowing, but mixed with sewage and hidden away behind lanes and buildings and folded into the ground, and most times, conveniently covered with cemend slabs.
I gave a talk at IndiaFOSS this weekend. You can read the slides at here. So did Abhiram on the Sanchari-Kathegara work with Community Networks in Kundapura, and Vivek and Aman on DiagramChasing’s great work with CBFC.watch and other such interesting political work IndiaFOSS is a nice place for the OSM community to meet, this was my third year there, and I find great conversations and frienships there. We have a lot of folks from far away who come down to bangalore. I discovered Sahilister’s blog. I met a fellow vegan, Saswata, there, who has written about their experience transitioning here, “why veganism”. I also got to meet Thej, Nemo and Kartik, organisers of the devroom.
Each year I leave IndiaFOSS with a unexplainable sense of discomfort, two days always appears rushed for conversations that begin there, and they often never go beyond the conf. This year, there was no sense of discomfort, but a better feeling, I rested in the cool air of the audi when I did not want to talk to anybody, sat on the stairs and wrote.
It also gave me an opportunity to talk and spend time with my friends on the other side of the city.
