It has been a long, muddled two and half something weeks. It has also been a diverse few weeks, we ended the year, had our annual break, I drove for 1400kms inside TN… Inside the motoroom of the old busstand, Bidar. This is connected to a well on the left I was in Bidar for a few days. I was in Bidar for a few days. Yelahanka station in the december fog/smog of bangalore This African Tulip Tree in the Horticulture Nursery in Bidar City has been shedding its leaves with no being to remove for many seasons. Your feet drops in as you step on this floor The roots of a tree I could not identify. There is a text-only corpus of TN, UP, AS and KA state legislature debate archives available for download at https://github.com/Constitutional-Observer/Scraper-India-State-Legislatures/tags. We made this to test out multi-lingual search across the entire archive. The archive is now at a new url: https://archive.org/details/legislaturesofindia ...

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. ...

M tries to recognise these ducks at sankey tank, technology too fails, but we walk on with our conversation. I’ve always disrespected what Sankey Tank represents. With its cement embankment and an almost flat, lifeless water except for the occasional Mallard (as we would later learn are the ducks in the water) and the fish. M leads me to one corner where she likes to watch the rats scuttle inside the rocky embankment. At the Shanti Nagar busstand, Chennai bound busses pause thankfully close to the toilets. When leaving, they are convenient. The board saying urinals are free to use is hidden with this very convenient contraption My bus was late because quite sadly the KSRTC conductor had suffered a heart attack, KSRTC replaced both the conductor and driver with people who had not been on this route often before. We lost our way at 3am, heading into the new Chennai-Blr expressway under construction, instead of heading down from Chittur to Ranipet. We reached three hours late, at 9AM ...

In the morning, my phone is unable to capture the bright lights adorning the Hazrath Syed Madar Sha Wali Dargah, near Mohamed Sab Palya. My phone camera’s shutter speed is faster than the light’s frequency. It is the annual Urz, the annual gathering around the time of the Sufi peer’s death. My ImageMagick installation is unable to convert that into a .webm video without the artifacts I know 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and more people who have been down with fever, cold and/or other things. The 6th is me. I thought it was all fine once the fever went away and I could walk somewhat in the sun without being tired. But looks like a hot body needs a lot of water. Dehydration brought me to a night at a hospital with IV fluids. Dawn rose and in the room whose window doesn’t even tint yellow during dawn, the only marker of morning was the loud shift-handover conversations. The doctors and nurses were kind, and the room was ...

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. ...

Deepavali has always begun with vadas fingerprinted with my amma’s hands. The crests of the prints burn more so they are nicely contrasted. They also fill your stomach for the day, I have had a bad relationship with food for a long time, but these past few weeks they have shot up. I like to eat, eat without limit until I feel full and sleepy, which is when I feel good. Pigeons sleep/hide/stay on the ledges as the city breathes in the smoke of deepavali. Somewhere on the wetlands at the Poondi Neer Thekkam (reservoir). I’m riding in the front of a 4 wheeled mini truck, with 2 other passengers and a kind driver. My face is grimy from over 300 kms of driving on the bike, and 30 seconds of an accident somewhere 40 minutes before this picture was taken. All the cool wind of the just-rained highway could not make me feel calm as I begin to unravel, in my mind, the implications of the disabled second passenger on the truck, Karmegam. The most calming evening of the week, was when this young visitor chose to sleep in my lap. Sometimes he moved my arms to coop inside and sleep, sometimes his hind legs would slip and fall for me to coop him back up. Caring like this is something I’ve not done in a long time. The days appear to fly away. I settled into a routine that made me skip my weekly note last week. There was a lot happening, there were many kinds of work happening in the collectives and inbetween all this, I hear something in a passing conversation where we were deciding where to eat dinner: I hear, said as a joke about me, but something I’ve not stopped thinking about… anyways he [me, adhavan] doesn’t have the time for all that [relationships, love, socialising] ...

The middle portion of the laterite bricks were melting onto the next. The laterite here was already slippery, but smooth steps going down into the well? I was scared, so I held onto the sides and attempted to find newer bricks that were placed here and there. This is a well in Bekal, Kasargode. 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. ...

The over head metro tracks beside the airport expressway have never seen a train, but they already have water flowing all over them. It flows all over, over the bumps of the cast concrete, curving like the concrete does, but deciding where to fall. We were stuck for over 20 minutes My father asks me about the tone of my talk at IndiaFOSS last week. The imagery, the political perspectives and the choice of examples, are all things he pointed out to have been somewhere inbetween being direct, and a slippery, unclear direction. Neradiyavum sollala, ennavo solla vara, aana maluppura… There is concern, why need I talk about all of this? I realised that I use big words that act as euphemisims/placeholders for more direct speech. I like to say ‘context’, I like to end sentences with enquiries and questions rather than certain statements. With all of this in mind, I saw 12th Fail and Homebound on the same day. They are both good movies within their efforts and both feel very real - with simple, clear scenes in language that does not attempt to assess or require much esoteric thinking. My mother said this out aloud: that for all the accessibility I advocated for, the language itself was not accessible. Greens in a small truck with their roots hanging out, they also wait with us, along with all the other vehicles stuck in traffic Shoaib and Chandan in Homebound talk with an interesting mix of words, I learn that it is called Lakhnawi Tehzeeb, ‘~ Lucknowhi Culture’. One uses ‘hum’ instead of ‘mera’ to talk in first person, along with a general difference I noticed in their zubaan, ‘~ language’. I found this blog of anecdotes of Lakhnawi Tehzeeb a nice read. ...

Beautiful Khoutis, often homemade blankets from old clothes hang in this street next to the district jail, Bidar 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. A reluctantly walks with us A temple, and dargah? on the shore Kannadikari Mariayamman abode/temple. Glass wala mariamman. Glass Mariyamman? 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. ...

While the talk’s original proposal contained the title: ‘Let us make accessible political archives on the internet’, it morphed into a pitch to make political archives outside of the internet, because the definition of ‘accessible’ is my mind is to really take these out of the circles within which these often get shared: The internet, public policy circles, bangalore and so on. See the slides here The recorded talk is available on YouTube ...