V asks me if my notes are a direct, full, exact representation of my life, so much that what are my notes is my life, and my life are in my notes. I wonder if they are so. Memory and associated feelings are a crafty construction, so are my notes by extension. I feel that I craft my memory, I choose what to remember, what I associate with it and my weekly notes have been a handy tool for that construction. For example, in the past many months, in the many times I spend by myself when I would rather not, when the dull evening sets in and you do not want to wash your face, but mull and rull in the comfort of your companion chair, my only living companion has been Floyd. She would get up on her front legs, and express with the most vulnerable eyes - But she has never made it into my notes with the gravitas that she holds in the rhythm of my life.

Pink and Floyd are comfortable inside. They find themselves at home, they stretch, sniff around, run and refuse to leave when everybody leaves for the day, and also lie anywhere they want to

I have seen few such human eyes, but in the recent past, the only such eyes have been in Floyd. The meaning of that expression is that she wants to be stroked and pet. She would get her pets, and then go lie in a different place. Over the course of the day she would have spent sniffing around the same mat the entire day. For such expressive eyes, I wonder what it would be like to hear them talk as well.

On Diwali, Floyd whined to remain inside. She did not want to go out. She and Pink would run and find the furthest corners to lie in and away from the sound of the crackers. In the past few days preceeding this I was very sad about the state of animals in the human-formed world we have made for ourselves. Dogs and cats lie dead in our highways, grazing lands are cut, and dogs have been bred to live close but outside of human houses. It is a wrong of grandly sobering and unnerving proportion, to breed them for millenia and treat them to their present reality.
Somewhere on the backside of the Yelahanka Railway Station, tied goats and street dogs share the same plate of food from the street - from the garbage
Post diwali, the firecracker shop that propped up on an unused plot of land closes. In all irony, cows rests in front of it the next day.

  • I was in Bidar for two days. I missed being on a bike, for the entirety of the two days, we were doing fieldwork in bikes. I felt at peace in the company in contrast to the solitude of my home in bangalore.

    A steep drop after the plateau inside the Bidar Fire Station.
    Huge snails rest on the poly house in the horticulture nursery

  • We hosted the second instance of Kalyana Karnataka Karwaan after a long time.

    M captures this photograph with me behind the projector and people waiting for the group photo

  • I watched Bison. It is a movie that has made me even more curious about South TN. I have not spent any time in my adult life there, maybe I will go there in December. It is a difficult movie to pass an opinion on, it needs none, as long as one ponders on it. I found Kittaan incredibly silent though. Almost unbelievably unopininated in other spheres of life, for love, and for most things other than his game and his father. The only contestation he engages in is physical, not that he had a choice…

  • I rediscovered Malaika, a popular Swahili song. Miriam Makeba is the singer whose rendition of the song brought popularity to the song itself. Her anti-apartheid activism and state-lessness is an interesting read on Wikipedia. Lata Mangeshkar has performed it in the 70s in Kenya!

  • I have been walking to work, some 2.5kms one way. It has been the greatest relief from the dull evening and a beautiful and a happy pick-up in the morning when I have Harris playing. I daddle and have a dance in my step.