These past weeks, I have been as filled as a leaky clay pot would. I can accept all the water I can, but I would and am still leaking and evaporating all the excess water. I would hold to lose, remember to process and forget. It has been a full many weeks! That is what it has been. I have been working on the Constitutional Observer, packaging for Manesiri, a freelance work for Repair Cafe India and in general the mind has been full with many things. ...

My first attentive introduction to the person Dr. Bhim Rao Ambedkar is, is with the Constitutional Observer, I am learning who he was, and what he is now to people from the places I visit. I did not grow up with such a consciousness, so I must learn now. I must also learn what he means to my own politics. This is simply a collection of my own experiences during the Ambedkar jayanti Celebrations this year. Of course it is a lot of questions and observations that only people who have lived in Bidar may fully understand. ...

The Technobiographies exhibition happened last week. I was very happy with how we have planned out and finished the course. The learners engaged with material behind the Google accessible as a result of some of the work we were doing with making the National Health Mission’s website materials available by search. We used paperless to search a downloaded archive ofover 140 GB of media, documents, excel sheets, which provided rich material. Ofcourse we also used the Legislature Debates archives and the Gazettes archives. ...

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 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 ...

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 ...

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. ...

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. ...

I walk with A, who has just finished school and is probably taking a break year from college. Every few meters up the ramp on the Anna Nagar Tower, we would witness a pair of feet on the shadow-side. Or a lap and an head. Or just hands entwined and legs. Walking forward, it would be a couple. In A, I saw a smirk, and I shared my happiness with him, that love finds more public places these days We had walked down the corner of the Dargah onto the embankment of the Solpur lake. The raised ground hid the enthrall behind, and it only grazed towards us when we reached the bund. It was cold and the drizzle on our shirts had not dried before the rain caught us. We hid behind a shrub, trying to save one side of our bodies, all huddled together. We made the decision to run to the temple, and the rain stopped soon after The fort from the backside In the little I know of Chennai, I tried to see more. A, learnt of the Otteri Naalah, I learnt of Binny Mills and what is happening there now. We both learnt of what Broadway is, drove through the Periamedu market and I understood Chennai’s heat a bit more. There is a lot of names on the walls of the Anna tower, but I curiously found them all in English, and most often names of lovers and friends and other remarks. But this I found uniquely placed. 15G runs to Broadway / Parrys from MMDA Colony. The nonfunctional lift room on top of the tower now, now remembering names of visitors I boarded everyday from opposite the Anna Nagar West depot for atleast 4 years. I travelled mostly in the big 10 - 13 seaters, yellow and chuggling along (chuggy - like a good old enfield and juggling). I have a collection of photos going back all those years, of colourful seats and passengers on the share autos At the corner of Broadway depot, sacks, or ‘sacku pais’ dry on the footpath next to the market We walk through two pillars, made with grand intentions seemingly, but nothing joined them together, no gate, no compound, just an imagined arch… on what was filled with smooth rocks and marsh. Rocks smoothened on what once flowed there. Maybe blue and green in colour, going by what the water in the nearby well looks like. The two pillars I’ve written about what the magic of the water felt like on week 18-19. This photo shows a bit more clear what that magic is. Straight lines are what humanity desires. Straight poles, straight wires, straight buildings, flat floors, and flat ground. It is funny that ground is also a unit of measurement in tamil. A flattened ground with the previous level of soil visible at the bottom of the electricity poles Tilling implements rest on what is grassland now, and what was farmland before, what is to be? We will know soon. It is right next to the Solpur lake, farming is not permitted, neither are layouts JCB side Smooth side Straight lines of weeds and grasses, tilled by the unintentional treads of the machine of this decade A Nizam era drain path, through which a first order stream flowed once. Now it is a road. Was it both a road and a stream? Decades of cartwheels have driven paths onto the hard laterite above the Naubad basin Lakes exist so wells can access ground water. Or atleast they used to. Now lakes exist in cities so they can directly be accessed by machines. Machines access so that humans have running water in homes. Now machines also serve other machines. Chaukandi looks majestic from this side. As if the hillock is crowned. It is indeed a crown. The Ashtoor toombs can be seen Marakal Lake with layouts right up to the boundary ‘Lakeview’, notice how close the layouts begin from the lake. I found myself tired and lazy to run beyond 3kms this week in Bidar, I think that my supplement routine - B12, D and Calcium make a big difference. ...

Harsha captions a photo of himself: “Bhed ki sath bakra jaaraha” A huge cast-iron weighing scale to weigh logs A telephone pole appears to use an old cast-iron bollards/posts A family of pigs sleep near a nali and a natural drain. The Bidar City is building drains (hybrid as somebody coined it, both drainage and rainwater use the same drain here) to flow into this natural drain I have been facinated with Ram’s films. I have not liked a director so much to follow their trajectory so far. From Kattradhu Tamil and Taramani to Peranbu and Parandhu Po (both of which I watched this week). I will passionately wait to encounter some of these characters in my life. There is great care, love and patience in many of his characters. Some things I hope to be, some things that I hope nature bestows on me. ...