In 48 hours, I had felt the salt of the Arabian Sea, the sand that is its companion, the rain and the mountains that lead to it. I had heard birds of the western ghats in their daily routines, the morning, the hot afternoon and in the nights. I had heard the crushing sea, the sweet diesel exhaust of trucks climbing and being stuck in traffic jams in the ghats of Sakleshpura, and the morning rain in Kasargode.
I had left by 10am, and drove through Hassan, Sakleshpura to Kasargode. Except for the afternoon sun on the bald Mangaluru highway, it was a beautiful ride.
I reach Kasargode by dinner time. The roads are impeccable, and a shower takes off the grime and gets me ready for dinner inside the city. It is humid, I sweat while I walk, it feels like Chennai, but Chennai can never feel like this, like a small town. The next morning, I drove to Bekal. In Bekal, I heard the rustle of the individual petals of the leaves of the coconut groves, which were spread everywhere. I touched the laterite of the lower western ghats and the concrete of the new Sakleshpur roads. The laterite here is quite slippery, with bigger pores and are darker.
I wish I had the time to walk around without care for time and memorise the names and sounds of the birds inside the fort. I am awfully bad with remembering or memorising birds, even though we have many avid bird watchers / people who can recognise within the living labs network. I wish I had the time to know the sounds of the leaves, maybe even the sounds of the motors that run the boats, or at least the motor that cuts the overgrown grass inside the fort.
In an essay on Franchise, Dr. Ambedkar quotes Bryce while arguing for universal adult franchise.
Talking has this advantage over reading, that in it mind is less passive. It is thinking that matters, not reading, and by thinking, I mean the power of getting at facts, and arguing consecutively from them. In conversation there is a clash of wits, and to that some mental exertion must go……But in these days of ours reading has become substitute for thinking.
I would like to interpret this quote in a different context. Attempting to remember from observing, observing the birds and the sounds of the leaves and the sound of the sea requires a mental exertion of a certain kind. It requires a conversation of similes and metaphors with one’s existing memory, it must be re-remembered every so often, it must be recounted to oneself and in conversation with others.
I must remain persistent with this attempt to remember the qualities of what little I see and do. I was caught by the tug of other commitments while I was there. Sometimes it is initiated by a subtle jealously, sometimes by the responsibility I hold towards completing something, or a few hundred things that have not been seen through till their completion. And these feelings do not force me to get off of procrastinating, but somehow only visit when I am actively not working…
Who you think stands out in this collage is always going to be an interesting answer!
I read Tragedy of the Commons, an essay by Garett Hardin, written in 1968. An otherwise a concept going much before him. It is a phrase of which I’d not understood the politics of. Now, I am beginning to. Have you read it?
An implicit and almost universal assumption of disscussions published in progessional and semipoular scientific journals is that the problem under discussiopn has a technical solution. A technical solution may be defiuned as one that requires change only in the techniques of the natural sciences, demanding little or nothing in the way of change in human values or idea of morality.
What it reminds me analogously in the contemporary is the solutionist approaches that gain popular opinion and provenance within civic-urban-government-data spaces in India. In this context, I will continue the quote from Bryce from the earlier paragraph.
[…] But in these days of ours reading has become substitute for thinking. The man who reads only the newspaper of his own party, and reads its political intelligence in a medley of other stuff, narratives of crimes and descriptions of football matches, need not know that there is more than one side to a question and seldom asks if there is one, nor what is the evidence for what the paper tells him. The printed page, because it seems to represent some unknown power, is believed more readily than what he hears in talk. He takes from it statements, perhaps groundless, perhaps invented, which he would not take from one of his follows in the workshop or the counting house. Moreover, the Tree of Knowledge is the Tree of the Knowledge of Evil as well as of Good. On the Printed Page Truth has no better chance than Falsehood, except with those who read widely and have the capacity of discernment.