It has been many weeks of great company. It has also been many weeks of great learning and great teachers. The rain has taught me to drive slowly, calmly and most importantly the gentleness of a focussed mind. My eyes naturally enquire about the grasses and the trees, and my enquries are answered. M and H annotate those enquiries. H particularly takes an interest and questions me later, so that I remember. I have cooked food many times and have had food cooked for me many times. It was a particularly warm set of weeks in the unusual cold of Blr.

I am lost in the depth of this photograph. I will print this in a large size, you too must see this in a large screen. I was with Naveen and others beside the Gantiganahalli Lake, walking and noting in my fresh new journal. This grass that begins growing after the tall grasses at the beginning of the trail, tends to blow into each other and mat. Their florets seem interlocked and sway in the wind together. See the grass bend towards the left?
Ants eat a snail, on the YNC boundary. I have no idea if it remained alive inside, but the ants and shell disappear by the evening. M says these might be Yellow Crazy Ants, a species that is apparently on the list of the 100 worst invasive species in the world.

  • Naveen hosted a small activity for PhD students at SMI that I attended. It was framed after ‘An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris’. It is a small book of observations from three sittings that George Perec, the author made in Paris. He observes the mundane that goes unnoticed and notes meticulously. You stand and observe beyond what your usual lenses are, trying to ensure the mundane beyond our lenses is captured. It was a good excercise for me to slow down and notice much more ecological behaviour. The palm tree bark patterns and this behaviour of grasses to mat together continued to facinate me. We were in Gantiganahalli Kere, visiting the same stretch I had visited with students in Note 45-46.

    Grass yet again, inverting removes the usual brightness of the sky and makes the shapes of the florets and leaves much more prominent
    Men fish in the Gantiganahalli lake. Left to Right you can notice the trees changing and if you zoom in, the upcoming metal structures also become part of the skyline.

  • This Hyderabad Karnataka Karwaan, we experimented with paper. We wanted to disentagle the ‘categorising’ with the learning from the landscape of the place we were mapping. OSM brought with itself an inherent need to categorise, even if we do not what it was, it is not a convenient place to wonder, but we thought paper could be that.

    We had Dr.Sidappa Setty and Vinay Malge warm us up to water, grasslands and what it means to imagine conservation and livelihoods together.
    If you look at the terrain in the map that people are pointing at, you can be lost in wonder for many hours, following the terraces that slope down to reservoirs that are sometimes surrounded by shrub savannahs. You can follow the streams leading to the reservoir in reverse and then lose the trail once the vegetation surrounding the streams stop, and then wonder how water flows then. I want to record videos in the monsoon, to capture how these drains, streams, hallas, nalas carry water.
    Colour pencils as we map what are grasslands, farm plot boundaries. A conversation ensues with the watch wearer on the right, she maps and titles portions, ‘Native grasslands’, but what are ‘native’ grasslands? The glossary we produced lists it as such…
    From the glass outside Samagata. It is a nice space with a well thought out set of arrangements for many kinds of events. This was my first time there
    Dr. Siddappa Setty shows us his work from ATREE
    The first time I’ve parked on Church Street
    M and I realise that on MG road, DH has a display case with the day’s paper. We had just discussed about BRT Tiger Reserve at the Hyderabad Karnataka Karwaan, and we found it referenced in the day’s paper.

  • I rode from Chennai to Bangalore in 7 hours to the second, Chennai -> Ranipet -> Chittur -> Hoskote -> Satellite Town Ring Road -> Devanahalli -> Yelahanka. It rained inbetween and only my gloves and thus my hands were wet and cold for a while. But the cycling rain gear kept me fully dry, especially the BTwin pants, with their shoe covers, they kept me dry from splashes.

    I am finally getting a hang of packing with a topbox. I realise that the overhang is a bit too much with the topbox, I must adjust it to be a bit more forward. I have begin to teach myself to enjoy the cruising speeds in each gear, it is a very comforting buzz and energy as the engine evenly and without much change chugs at 60kmph in the third gear

  • It has been sys-admin week at work with figuring out federated nextcloud instances, managing email syncs to move between servers, realising how upstream React vulnerabilities came down to affect us. I will have to set up systems to monitor better, for I discovered this vulnerability reading reddit :stupidme:

  • An ajji, an anni, an anna, an atthai and a kutty R stayed at my home for a day. The mechanics of a family staying at my home made me realise how different lifestyles can be. I am glad they found it comfortable (so they say).

    R looks out of the grill onto a tree I could not identify. She clings onto the grill. She finds bangalore cold, socks are worn
    Plastic milk packet with bananas at a gated doorstep to a statue of a god. A temple in Vidyaranyapura.
not so puffy cats in a confectionary shop

  • Parts of Shivaram Karanth Layout have fully laid roads, pavements, gated commons. The roads have become shorter paths inbetween certain high volume roads.

    In previous photographs and videos of Shivaram Karanth Layout, you must have seen the green grills. They are often easiest way to identify the layout which sprawls so widely, snaking inbetween other developments.
    What kind of vegetation do you notice in this?

  • I add an article to the Reading list on Veganism in India. Shared by M on the recent fire accident at a nightclub in Goa: The expensive fantasy of Goa displaces Goans and runs on cheap migrant labour by Kaustabh Naik

    This economy in Goa also needs a service industry that mows the lawn of the settlers, cooks their gourmet meals and works in the vegan cafes where they pretend to work. The elites bring with them a demand for a service ecosystem that bends to their will. This is where migrant labourers enter the tragedy. `