Where is your casio, Adhavan? What happened to it? Why have you not looked for it? I have not seen it in a few weeks. There is a new organisation system in my house, but it seems the casio has escaped it. But i’ve not felt like wearing a watch in the same time period. What causes somebody to go through a period of indifference? I am currently indifferent about many things. Like the presence of my casio, I will just assume that it is in my house and move on. I’m not going to search for it. I am not going to wash my shirts, because tee shirts are the only things I am going to wear. I have not felt so indifferent in some time, I hope things get better and there is some direction soon. ...

The most comfortable mornings will begin with the rubbing of the feet. If I don’t immediately open my phone, and don’t remember what awaits to be done that day and jump out, it is a good day. If the rubbing of the feet leads to slowly-opened eye lids looking at the glowing trees outside, and 5 minutes spent like an hour - it is a good morning. But my mornings have been filled with a sense of worry. I do not look forward to sleep, but worry that I sleep too much. The 5 minutes I want to spend, but make it feel like an hour? It becomes an actual, real hour. The real is not so much wonder, but worry of losing it. I look forward to a rubbing-of-the-feet that makes the chest heave with no worry of the future. ...

It was a late night. Everybody had left late. It was a tense day too, wound up in uneven patches of unfinished work. Bidar was also becoming hot and I had not drunk enough water. The morning after, the heaviness of the dinner bears down on me, and the 3 hours of sleep makes my eyes sensitive to the sun. I was unable to focus on one thing, each thing i would do would get interrupted by another action. Drinking water, cleaning the space, planning for the day, reading… There are simply too many possibilities. This feeling was particularly intense after the the sun hazes my sight, it is clear the day has begun, but my mind and body were not ready for it. The uneven patches kept piling on each other, you could resolve in a moment the mass of all the patches present, but you could never say when one patch would end and another would begin to pile in its place. ...

It started with a curiousity to see what the Hesaraghatta grasslands look like… I have been to the dam and the south and western sides… After the conservation reserve notification, i had not been to Hesaraghatta, nor had I seen the northern and western sides. I asked P to join me on her avenger. It was teeth chattering and bladder-squeezingly cold. If any naturalist knows and can name the trees, the plants and knows the history of this western portion of the lake, tell me please! the bed of the reservoir PGs are propping up everywhere Eucalyptus, Agave and cows A borewell on the bed of the reservoir After reading Pookuzhi, I wrote a blog post in Tamil: பூக்குழி நாவலிலிருந்து சில குறிப்புகள் - அரசியல் அமைப்பு சட்டத்தின் அடிப்படையில் (Some notes from the Pookuzhi novel, with the constitution as the basis). I write that much the landscapes and the happenings in the book are new to me, very sharply so… It was a serious lesson that you have to keep reading a language to keep up with the euphemisms, metaphors and even the vocabulary. This printed preamble of the constitution and a rose live together in my topbox for an evening The question that arised from reading Pookuzhi, of the village and why it was not chosen to be the governing unit led me to enquire more. I asked this question to the Constitutional Observer: Why must the village not be the unit of governance? The beginning portion of the EPW article, Nation and Village: Images of Rural India in Gandhi, Nehru and Ambedkar, dated August 10 2002: 1 2 ...

Sireesh tells me that it is the design of some roads to be lit entirely by the light of commerce. This building, now lights up the entire junction, I capture this photo sitting in a new swanky outdoor cafe. Listening to the grand old trees of Cubbon park. We were in the sun and shade of the trees of Cubbon park one saturday. ...

This white headed grass follows me all the way from Ramnathapuram to Bangalore. This photo was taken in Vellore, of the Ponnai River bed, which joins Palar near Ranipet and joins the ocean below Kalpakkam This week has been a mix of sun and very cold days in bangalore. Abhiram stand in the YNC porch. Last year has been a very consequential year. I completed a year and a half with Aruvu and LLN, the experiences and people and places have in many ways rewired my being. We launched Living Labs Institute. We experimented, failed and restarted many efforts. I speak much better Kannada and Dakkani, thanks to the people of the places of Bidar, Kundapura, Channapatna and Bangalore. I have begun to live alone this year and have made it a good home with the help of my dear friends. We engaged with Chennai, in Pallikkaranai 1 2 and in Ennore previously. ...

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 ...