[17/04, 18:54] Adhavan: Sabi dream aur uska realisation ke madhya mein sarkar… Hmm [17/04, 18:57] Adhavan: Pyaar ko bhi… Maut ko bhi I finally got my bike, I wrote this to a dear friend a few days into waiting for the bike to pass layers of government. Registration, transport, realising how much of the bike was just taxes, RTO’s weird requests of ID cards: An aadhar and a ration card and many more anxieties…amidst and after all of this, I got my bike. I do not wish to write about the feeling of riding my bike around. It appears more reductive than speech to write, and less real than simply driving or sharing the ride with you, the reader and the future retrospector who might read the archives of my weeks. ...

தமிழ் புத்தாண்டு நல்வாழ்த்துக்கள்…ஜெய் பீம் Happy Ambedkar Jayanthi. Jai Bhim. Happy Tamil New Year. This week has been entirely spent on a dream that refuses to be realised. Howmuchever I attempt to make it real, the world acts like a parent wanting to teach me patience, hiding it away for a few days, then not giving it to me. I’ve spent many moments of this week thinking about ambition and the wish to be driven… to be both the driver and the driven. I remember the pleasure and happiness of finishing off my mother’s Aviyal - right after I returned having known weightloss from my NCC camp. I remember having known the feeling of passing 12th standard, without failing any subject - I’ve never felt liberation like that after. There have been other kinds of weightlessness - of sunset after a light day, or in the lap of a lover on a September evening. How are these related to being driven? I think you need hope to really be driven, and I think I’ve let myself lose simple hope and the promise of pleasure in the everyday. ...

I realise how far I am away from real things. Physical things. Things that give me joy. I never touch the road that carries my punctured cycle except when I fall. I never have to till the soil that gave me my soya chunks. I mostly never touch my wet waste. And I’m very far away from owning a piece of motor and two wheels that will accelerate me far away from the city on the weekends. ...

It was a fast week. Very fast, very insecure in its form, it did not want to be a week. The days passed on very fast, and it feels too early for March to have arrived. I spent much of this week thinking about friendships in my life: the difficulty of making new friends beyond social ease, taking care of the gel that previously bound you or realising that sometimes, I can let go. Conversations are difficult to continue, lifestyles change, and boundaries are discovered. I often thought and still, to some extent, think that friendships must be able to assert opinion, responsibility and some say/power in the lives within each other lives. This has been in conflict with my cultural-shock in bangalore. There are walls between frienships that i’ve learnt exist by choice. ...

Public News Archives, Living Lightly, Indira Gandhi National Center for the Arts. Animals with Agency, Sollisai Sistahs,

My first weekly notes - The Constitutional Observer, RTIs, Veganism, Chennai Book Fair and others.