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. ...

Please join us on April 11th, this coming Saturday for a exhibition of the work coming out of the Techno Biographies course. We have been making use of the archives and resources that the Constitutional Observer has built. A Techno-biography of Urban Dengue Surveillance Mechanisms A Techno-biography of e-ASHA and other technologies of the Accredited Social Health Activist I was a few hundred meters from the Sita river in Kundapura, a few kms from the sea…We were walking towards the bank. Somewhere inbetween two cows stood on the path, grazing, held loosely by a man. Us walking seemed to have disturbed one cow’s peace, and was shaking its head mildly. The man pulled the rope, made it move onto the orchard on the side. The cow got down…and then ran. ran like it was frolicking around. This was the first time I’ve seen a cow not run in fear, or force. Where can a cow run? Have you ever seen a cow run? We have only seen them as slow, lazy walkers in the midst of our dusty roads. They eat the decomposing tomatoes from the plastic covers. They do all this with heavy, tired udders. Or they run in fear. Will you let a cow run in joy? It brought me great joy to see it run. ...

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 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] ...

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. ...