A woman's side of the story

It is true that a woman wants neither power nor glory,
but if she is endowed with it,
she will gladly accept it,
and carry it with grace.

If it is bestowed upon her,
do not accept her to be happy,
and walk around preening.

Because a deep sadness in her heart persists,
for somebody had to bestow upon her power and glory because he had no love to give.
If it is given to her by a woman, she might be happy.

But in our society the chances for that to happen are low.
That is why you meet many unhappy women in societies with no love.
I do not say that men are happy in such societies,
but they must own up that they have the power to change it if they so wished.

A man may argue that there is no power in one.
But he is only lying, because of his unwillingness to change.

I understand the male as much as I do the female.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

write politics

Should a love story be written in this time of no love?

I only want to write about what is happening. It should be possible.

For eg:

On why it would be the Congress's failure if the Left does not come on board. 

What the Modi government's time did to us, is it threw us into an intense tizzy over things. Everything was shaken from under all our feet. In a way, it did bring us together in that feeling, we all felt shaken. 

When that happens, an advantage is -- nobody is on firm ground. 

So though the BJP under Modi/Shah initially went only for the Congress, that was because during the elections and before it, you only need to go after your political adversary. The methods Modi's BJP adopts are brutal.
So, after the election, a few years the BJP tried to keep it in that mode, but like Jignesh says, it started getting boring.
Slowly, slowly they started going for everyone. 

However, getting back to the Congress. So in the time when we feel shaken, what do we do? We quickly get the sense of what's going on, and try and resolve all our internal differences to come together, right?

But the Congress and Left cannot do that without the Congress having to admit that the Left has its value in this country. 

There is a tendency to write the Left off, saying it is a Western concept, and that it has no value in this country.

If the Congress holds on to it current view of the Left, there is no way the Left can join with the Congress. And hence it would be the Congress's failure. 

The Left truly has nothing to lose. It has always been saying the same thing, no matter who the leader, it has a book that it abides by. Its history is as rich in India as the Congress's is. There is no way the Congress can get away with feeling superior in any way, and especially it would not in the name of family now, thanks again to Modi. 

The matter is of utmost urgency it would seem but it is not an issue that can be solved by the sense of urgency. Thanks to the thousands of things that are going on, which we seem to be tiding fine and totally not ready to give up whoever the hell we are, no matter gets our urgent attention for more than a few moments. The next matter comes on, which too needs urgent attention. 
So the onus is not on the Left.
Because the Left is in a good mood to just die.

Petty politics

I have a gift,
and only one to give you,

it is this petty politics of mine,
which i am willing to dress up as a poem

i cannot keep it with me anymore,
please accept it,
as a poem.

to the citizen of this country

I am convinced that your anger against the media is justified, but I feel it is coming at a really bad time.
If you had, like me, totally given up on the media in the run-up to the 2014 elections, you would see that as of now, we are only reaping what we had sown then.
Though you view the media as the fifth pillar of democracy etc, you must understand that more than anything, media will show you the ugly truth. You might have attributed to it, the role of telling truth to power etc. but unfortunately, that is just a role that the media has been forced to play, because you gave that role to the media. Its only role is to tell the truth, not call it out or pit it against power etc.
During the run-up to the elections or I do not know how many years this was going on for before too, within the media and without came these people who wanted to tell truth to power. The fervour of ripping this power apart was fed, the ultimate goal of which was a Congress-mukt Bharat.
All so-called apolitical beings crept in to the important posts everywhere. Forget about being apolitical, these people were even unable to get over the irrational hatred they felt towards one political party. The seeds of hatred were sown then.
(See, I am all for democracy and for having several parties that the people can choose from, but my dears, what is the point of that exercise in our country, where it is not ideological differences that are making up the different parties, but just the difference in which vulnerability in the masses the parties choose to exploit. In this, I must completely keep Kerala away from the discussion as there the two political parties at least began with an ideological difference and nothing more or less.)
In the media too there were many of us, always claiming, that we are apolitical, neutral etc. It was a farce. The moment the corruption bomb came in the hands of the citizens, wow, that was a ridiculous phase, the middle-class was protesting, for the first time in their really pathetic lives. It is you, the pathetic apolitical petty middle-class, that gave media the voice that it uses now. It is you that told the media, so what if there is no justice in our courts, let us get justice on TV.
And so, dear citizen of India,  just like you, the media that is made of several citizens, too has failed. 
I feel any institution or pillar of the institution does not need censure at a time it has failed and is coming to terms with the bloody fall. It must get back up on its feet. If you could keep the volume turned low, the media might be able to do so, but considering it is the loudest time the human race has ever been in, asking for the volume to be turned low is not only an unreasonable, but also a precious thing to ask for.
My advice to you, dear citizen, is to give it a rest.
And focus, really focus all your energies on that which is bringing out the worst in us, that which has finally managed to step out, in its fancy clothes and flaky talk, 69 years after it killed the father of the nation.

Diary entry-January 19 -- a day after achchamma's orma divasam

Joseph Brodsky said in a commencement speech, that one must always look to words as a means to express yourself.
When I was a child, I was told by my teachers that I have a good oratory voice,
a voice that sounds very good when magnified, on the mic.
I know after being told that,
I put my voice to use by taking part in elocution competitions,
where I thought it is just the voice and the way you speak that captures the minds of all,
however, one time, I had practised so much before one particular competition,
that the day of the competition,
I was suffering from a severe bout of laryingitis, or I do not know what the affliction was,
but on the day of the competition,
I had a sore throat,
I do not remember, what the topic for discussion was, or how I had prepared for it
all i remember today is that on that day I did not have a voice
it was funny,
because in the middle of my speech, somebody brought me water,
and,
I knew then that I was not going to win this one.
Bloody hell.

So, not then, but later on many of my friends and well-wishers told me, you must write.
You are a great writer, my friends would say, though I had not written a single thing.

Joseph Brodsky's speech tells me, I did not think then that even writing was a way of expressing myself.
I only thought talking was,
as I had no other talents and could not express myself in any other way.

The period of my life when I stopped listening to teachers and friends has passed me by,
I did not do anything in that period,
because all I wanted to prove was that a human being can survive just fine, without having to make an expression of his or her life.

At this stage of my life, I wonder, if just survival is what a human being was born to do.
I feel I was putting myself through a situation of just survival at all points because there are so many of us who are going through that and hence in solidarity, I too must go through that at all times.
 But is that kind of solidarity helping anyone, I ask myself today.

Where one does not experience what he/she must, because the individual's experience must be sacrificed for the greater good.
Say, even when Marx wrote what he wrote, he was able to do so only because he was living his own life in the manner that life met him. He was not writing about solidarity or coming together in the way it has become today.

Why is it that we only remember the bad from everything?
 ----------------------------------------------------------------------
An infant only remembers, if it does remember, the good. Because it is only the good that has allowed it to survive.
As a child, one starts having the agency
to choose what to remember. The child can survive if he/she navigates through life in this manner
some of us weak ones, lose the agency when we are teenagers,
the period of romance robs us of our ability to discern things
An adult must invoke her infancy, childhood, and youth to be able to establish this thing called memory.
Is it good or bad?
After an adult makes his'her mind up, it is kind of done.
The game is over there.

science

That we are illiberal beings is a lie,
All art, politics, religion, literature is means of coping with the lie.

And of course there are problems when all you are doing is coping with lies.

I believe all life is this effort to cope with this big lie,
that makes our lives miserable.

Please see the truth,

For people, a scientific bent of mind is essential.

Consciousness is no stream. It is a bloody rock.

You can speak honestly only if you speak for yourself.
The problem with our times is that it has become almost impossible to speak for oneself.
There are so many things you have to consider, that having an honest conversation with others is totally not possible in our times because people do not  have the opportunity to talk to themselves, then how can they converse with another?

but having an honest conversation with yourself cannot be compromised with.
Whatever are your ways to have that conversation with yourself, have been taken away in this time.

Here are the agents I believe take away the opportunity to talk with yourself.

1) Denial of god:
If we keep aside every crooked things that have happened with God and religion, we must understand that talking to god is one way of talking to someone you can talk to while looking the entity in the eye.
If you cannot look god in the eye, you know you have failed somehow, and so it is a good check to understand what is going wrong with you.
You really do not need anybody to tell you what is wrong with you.

So when a society as a whole denies god, it is a huge problem.
Plus society offers you many things as solace, so what if you don't have god, it says, look there is superman, look there is your friendly neighbourhood therapist, look, there is your family, ah you don't even want to look that way.
At a point in the individual's life, the lack of honesty will start eating into the person.

I myself deny there is a god,
but i feel that understanding must come upon persons in their own ways.
and all the things that the society does, that you see as a blatant denial of god, are genuinely only forceful ways of telling you, listen, hurry and grow up. Come on up here.
Sometimes the force of it, destabilises you.

That is what is happening to me right now.
I have been destabilised by the understanding that was there in me, from the very beginning. But, I cannot accept it.
I am afraid still that things will go wrong, that is why it has managed to destabilise me.

2) Belief in the existence of god:
This is the one agent that robs you almost entirely of the possibility of having a conversation with yourself.
This belief is something that was instilled in us, early on.
Now, if Hinduism told you from the very beginning that there is no such thing as god, why did you let fear take you towards god?

Why are you fearful, Hindu?

3) The importance of religion
It matters because you can always lean on it as it is a storehouse of knowledge. There is no loss in falling back on knowledge.
Do not fall for the mere sound of barking all around you.
I wondered about the Faustian legend for so long,
why, why is it talking about a person having sold his soul for knowledge as if it were a bad thing?
I would gladly sell my soul for knowledge.

Gladly.

Does the West miss God too as much as we do? Oh dear, I was thinking the West is where reason is. So there is no international court anymore, where I can take my humble petition to. My petition against the concept of god.
I want to fight it out, like my forefathers did, with a healthy debate, which of course has been made impossible. That is why I began writing this thing anyway.

Examining contempt

There are many emotions in us which are of no use to the race.
Of them contempt is something I believe is the most pointless,
irritating, persisting emotion, that needs to be ousted from our lives.

Ousting contempt is not the easiest thing for us to do. But when contempt is getting ousted, there is no point trying to say we will win, contempt will stay. Nothing of that sort can happen, folks, contempt is being ousted, without our knowledge even.
What is happening right now in the world is, contempt is getting slowly ousted,
and all of us, who are attached to that thing, we have called an emotion,
are scurrying up and down,
giving it all we can,
a lost shot at being able to retain contempt,

do not think that contempt will stay,
it is just not the way evolution works,
what has to go must go,

we have found a way to remove the appendix if it gets inflamed,
so have patience, for now,

if all the scurrying is making you tired.
or scurry, because what on earth could be wrong with scurrying?

we must scurry, give it the best we can,
because that is what we do.

Present tense

The thing with hating your own brothers and sisters is you that you know it is okay to hate them, it is only strangers you must not bestow your hate upon.
Though we in our little worlds think that this country is made up of many many brothers and sisters all torn apart and have nothing to do with each other, is because we are living in our little worlds. and cannot see beyond this little world of ours.
We can see sometimes, but pettiness is the master of them all, she comes
pettiness,
in all her prettiness.
And with her guiles and gestures,

Dear god,
I read in the Wire today Gandhiji's third speech during his last fast.

I wanted to tell him it is all going wrong.
Here, in my little world.

As Gandhiji is no more, I think it all makes sense, he knew the truth about India, because he is the father.

We in our little worlds, can worry that it is not turning out alright, and it never can.

or will.

Without having stepped outside my little world, I want to be able to tell, what is happening out there.
I want to know.

Is it possible?

We must hang on to our little worlds too, there is no reason for anyone to be flung out of this great nation.

Yesterday in office, a designer mocks farmers.

I did not say mocked because really it is always the present tense for me.

The beginning

The beginning of this thing is not wrong, it is just the way things usually begin.
You are born not knowing.
Suppose there is one, who is born knowing.
Suppose you are the one, who was born all-knowing.
Then how would you begin?

I want to illustrate this:
You are knocking on the door to a house you have never been to before. The people inside, you do not know. You do not know how many are there, there could be too many, mind you.
You do not know what the lighting or the acoustics of the house would be like.
It could be a dimly lit place, or a bright one with many sounds.
You have absolutely no idea what you are getting into.
Outside this house is a board: Leave your footwear outside, please.

If you are coming to the house with all the tools you need, to know, you are always going to be safe.
You never need to take risks because there are none to take.
Observation is a key tool indeed.

I would not go into the house.
I would run into the outside.

All-knowing ones always run, when there is an unfamiliar approaching.  Some even run on the treadmill.

I have no shame in admitting that my contemporary is the worst so far.
The only reason I have no shame in admitting so, is because I am among this lot.
And I love deriding myself.
And this is the forum I choose to do so.

Can you not tell a story anymore?
What a pitiful bore I am.

All I ever wanted to do was to read.
And you make me write, instead.

So write about houses I will. Imagine a house. This is a test that the author puts to herself, asking herself, can you imagine a house?
I cannot imagine.

The problem with one who is all-knowing is that the person can not imagine anymore. From childhood, I was keenly aware of this problem. I lack imagination. If there were a test, an IQ test for Imagination (you replace the intelligence thing with imagination), I would fail it, gladly. Because even people with a huge deficiency in imagination have a role to play in this society.
They must be allowed to live,
In fact, if I could be bothered, I would have started a support group for all of us without an imagination.
we could meet every week, and talk about our lives that lack imagination.
But in a group, someone always ends up thinking that alcohol will make up for the lack of imagination.
Truth be told, I was part of such a support group. A few years of the group therapy and I could see myself on the way to another support group- alcoholics anonymous. And I have a major problem with that support group. So i decided to quit that technique.

But my love for alcohol is yet to die out completely, and it will be alive for as long as I am. Don't you see? If alcohol can make up for the lack of imagination, why would I need a support group?
Because I am no bloody Devadas, or one of those drunk poets that you have always romanticised and kept a special place in your heart for.
I must die sober. So what if the support group didn't suit my needs?

Come on, folks,
get up and don your gear.

We are totally fine, don't you see?
Personally, I am happy about having begun on the same planet as PB Shelley did. Not happy enough to celebrate though.

Going to office

When we look at the man-woman equation only in terms of sameness, we are doing a great disservice to the idea of looking at the man-woman equation.
So though I agree with all the studies that show we are the same,
i want to start at the premise that we are two.
it is because when we look from the vantage point of it all being the same,
we are discounting the experiences that individuals have in their lives.
All the difference in humans comes from how they have lived.
So if we say man-woman, or rich-poor, or bad-good, we are only looking in terms of lives led.

I have been hesitant so far to talk about the man-woman equation so far only because I believe there are many issues that one can talk/write about, instead.
But in the deeper recesses of my mind, I have this belief tucked away,
that tells me, this is the most basic equation, you see and if you do not or fail to understand how it is the same, despite the experience factor,
you will lose it all.

never can i allow my experience to be discounted, in pretty much the same way as I wouldn't allow a fellow human being's experience to be discounted.

ranting because I want to delay what I must do.

get up and go,
to office (hurrah to the gloriousness of it all)

Yesterday and today

I put up everything I wrote in the past few months on the blog yesterday because I wanted to expose myself on the Internet.
I wanted to put myself out there so that this I can be vanquished.
It is only when I put the I out of the equation that the going is good.
for me.
So yes, I am doing this for me.
In fact, the me is making the I do it.

I have always been fascinated with this entity called the ego -- in the parlance of our times, of course.

I want to see what other names does ego have,

deep thought?
is one of the names too, hats off to the one that came up with that one*.

god?
i still almost hand myself to the ones that came up with that one*.

mental illness?
gratitude to the one who came up with that one, i always feel.

*goethe is god

Poems

Everything i wrote in the past few months,
I want to put up on my blog,
for all to read.

This poem is called Everything as it begins with the word

Everything,
Even what you write
is coloured

I can do this no more.

Beauty of the white
is so close to me

I will not be
                pigeonholed

I will not be
                lazy

This next one is a conversation between a man and a woman

Man: Why I asked who you are, is because I want to know who you are.
Woman:
Before saying who I am,
I would like to know who you are.

Man: Don't you know who I am? I have been thundering and blowing, and it is all there for you to see.
How dare you ask me who I am.
Woman:
Fight me then, if you want to know who I am.
Man: We have suffered for conflicts (drama)
Are still nursing our wounds
The wounds are only healing,
In fact, today morning,
one of them bled
Woman: I bleed alone (drama). Please don't leave me alone (senti). I will let you have the last word.
Man: It should be okay then.
Woman: (in her mind: i win)


Two poems
There is god/good in us,
And there is devil/evil
But, only the good can help all of us together.
And so we must
let go of the evil.
We may be attached to it,
addicted to it
It may have become a matter of habit,
But, you have to let it go.

Society is where we want to live
All its flaws we are aware of
Its flaws too will fall off one by one,
if only you would let go.

I would have written a poem
but that asks of me
the style that I want to rob myself of
For that is the evil in me
That tries to creep in every time I write
in a language I am only learning. 

Anthropocentric feminism

Preface
a) To undo the wrongs of the past most human being resort to another wrong- revenge.
We hear more women clamouring for castration of the rapist, as we believe in revenge, we believe it to be the only justice possible.
My agrument is: Revenge is the worst way forward as it really is not in our hands. Given that we live in a country that is deeply divided (that deep divide is its beauty, mind you), unity of all women -- the possibility of all women standing on a common platform, talking in the same tongue -- is an impossible, if also undesirable, outcome.
It is far easier in our society for persons of different genders but similar social strata to communicate than it is for persons of the same gender but different social strata. You may counter argue that the experience of all women is the same and hence they speak the same language, but you then must concede that the experience of all humans is the same and hence they should be able to speak the same language.
For it to be an advantage, we must leave aside all influences and talk in an Indian context.
Yes we were colonised by English and the process gave our ancestors great triumphs and even greater agonies, it did leave behind the greatest bridge required to the west -- English, the language.
There is no Western thought or concept that is beyond the grasp of an Indian, who can read and understand the language. I mean any Western thought, even if originally conceived in German.
Now this is a privilege, of course, as it like every other resource in the country, is still in the hands of a few.
The past must be paid its due, but we must take responsibility for the present.
So through this study, we must be able to withstand any criticism of the present with the full understanding that the responsibility is ours. We are responsible.

Beginning
I will begin with an illustrative case-study: The dowry system
a) How this still remains a vital consideration for the birth and life of a girl child.
b) What were the hurdles that prevented this system from being pulled out in its roots.
c) How it has transformed into a new form, thereby infecting resources such as education.
d) As the market economy is a fertile ground for dealings of all sorts, dowry too reinforced itself and may soon be unrecognisable.
Random reading on the Internet suggests this is a system we all have become comfortable living with.
While the middle-class continues to live with it because of greed, the lower class is forced to aspire.
If we believe it is a social evil that was born due to the Raj's laws, we can also be able to see it thrived in the hands of the middle-class that is driven by a single force -- that of greed.
Let's say it is in the 80s that the middle class is first born (it keeps being born, while we speak).
While the state is bound by the responsibility of raising the status of its people, it can fail to do so in the case of the middle-class as this is a class of people that is not only hesitant to move, but it may even be bound by it.
Remember that greed is this class's driving factor and hence it follows that the class jealously guards its territory.
It wants to ensure that nobody from the lower class enters. It is also scared of ever showing that in terms of money, it may very well have reached or even beaten the upper classes.
However, as I belong to the middle-class myself, I must insist that this class too has values that are true and noble, but the factors it is exposed to are by the grace of a higher power, altogether too overwhelming.
Dowry was perpetuated as a system by the middle-class. And it ensure that the birth of a girl child can never be viewed as a happy occasion.
This in turn, gave birth to the kind of feminism that is prevalent in India today.
If the entire system saw no wrong in murdering a female infant at some point in time, then for at least a few generations after, it has to put up with extremely disgruntled females, who are in no mood for reconciliation.
But following other modes of feminism, Indian women have got to a point where even the expression of disgruntlement became an act, and after the advent of television and social media, it became an act in real-time.

Concluding chapter
The role of a feminist in Anthropocene*
As a society needs all its beings to be in a condition of harmony with each other and themselves, to function well, we must be able to provide for ways to achieve harmony.
The truth is, however, we are too loud, too vindictive, too sad, too ill, too not-here to be able to contribute towards harmony.
When I say contribute, I am merely giving us agency and not delving into points such as will power or other deeper, darker powers. If we do not be good agents, like a house that is forever getting built, our task too will remain unfinished till we go.
The task began way before us, each generation of women negotiated for its present and future.
If we feel that nothing has changed, we are disrespecting the efforts of those who were here before us.
Those beautiful, lively, industrious, thoughtful women, who are no more with us.
There are many unsung heroes, reach out to them and sing of their glory (resort to religion, in another essay)

*Anthropocene
Is a time that places you in the centre of things. You may not want to be there, but it is a great power and does what it wants.
Even if you are a trained ego-less person, it finds your ego -- chases it down, pulls it out -- and puts it back in the centre, where it belongs.
If you are a consumer of goods, you do not even know that this is happening, for you are busy shopping, and the anthropocene power 'affects' you, only if the AC in the shop/home, switches off for a bit.

Globalisation

Globalisation in a country not yet ready can have effects that the dark arts can have on the very practitioners of the science.
Together the country starts running towards its downfall. Every gets caught up in (struck out) swept away in the avalanche, hence its systems too start failing.
If the after-effects of colonization gave birth to a nation, the after-effects of globalisation may very well bring on its death.
In my article, I want to elucidate the important part the media must play at such a stage of the country's life. I want to look at the current condition of the English print media and what it did to survive the effects of globalisation.
And whether the Internet is one way out, or is it just another bigger web that globalisation has spun.

something i wrote when mandur said metoo.

Recently, there was a terrible stink from the outskirts of the garden city Bangalore. Everybody wondered where it was coming from. The authorities who sent truckloads of garbage to this dumpyard called Mandur, the companies who were supposed to process the garbage in a green manner, and the generators of waste (all of us), threw our hands up in surprise. This is the nature of surprises. They creep up on you. And if you believe in any of the following mantras, all you can do is embrace the surprise.
    ⁃    Ignorance is bliss.
    ⁃    Sweeping things under the carpet and hoping they will lie there.
    ⁃    Siphoning money (In this case, at least you would have made some money)
However, if the surprise is pretty unpleasant, and kills the environment and people and stops making money, you can always try other games such as the blame-game and catch-me-if-you-can. If you have not qualified for any of these national-level games, you can still apply for the state-level debate competitions.
This is one case-study, and a recent one, but from a holistic point of view it is the story of the 'solid' waste management in our country.

What happened in Bangalore.
Many things did, but when a scam this large and shameful comes out in the open, we need to look at the issue threadbare. A city generates waste of several kinds -- household waste is the biggest component of Bangalore's waste – and this waste has to be managed by several bodies. Bangalore's 3000 tonnes per day is being (mis)managed in a private-public partnership model. Which means the municipal body BBMP along with a few private companies are converting the waste into energy (read money). Before you wash your hands off the whole affair, consider this: We propose that it is not only the systemic approach to waste, but even the law-abiding citizen's approach, call it our approach to disposing waste can be explained in one term – taking a dump.
Now before the advent of other sanitation options, what was our approach to taking a dump? Find an open place where nobody lives, and go for it. Our approach towards solid waste management follows pretty much the same model. Unfortunately, the amount of waste generated by the city is growing at a rate that matches the rate the open-spaces-where-nobody-lives are disappearing, so it is time to rethink this model.
It has been time years ago.

Take a look at this map of Bangalore.
The areas in red are places that were dumping grounds and had to be shut down, and the ones in green are the ones still active.


Bangalore Map:
A CAG report says that when Anjanapura, Cheemasandra, Mavallipura and Subbarayanapalya filled up, leading to dumping of mixed waste in the available sites at Doddaballapur, Lakshmipura, Mandur and S. Bingipura. (Have copy of BBMP map)

Yes if garbage is generated, it has to be disposed of. But the taking-a-dump approach towards waste disposal has to change. Let us see who all needs to get potty-trained and how that can be done.

At number three: 
The super-pseudo-clean: Because blaming the authorities is a done-to-death theme and because it is the era of introspection and self-help, let us start with the self. Why does garbage become a problem only when it is actually threatening to blow up in our faces? Because, we do not mind garbage as long as it is out of sight. Let us face it, we cried hoarse about the community bins, and jumped with joy when the door-to-door collection was announced in 2012, only because that would ensure that the waste that we generate would be taken away from outside our homes.
Door-to-door collection was directed exactly at the pseudo-clean in you and me. Let the sweepers and the cleaners take away our waste to someplace far away, where it is only the sweepers or the cleaners who will have to stay live too. 
According to a study on carbon footprint of Bangalore in 2012, 78% of us refused to segregate our waste as it was of course too icky for us, and 85% of the city's population had no idea where the waste was being transported to.
Not saying that one has to track the garbage and keep an eye on it, of course if it goes out in the morning, we need not have to worry about it, but face the truth: It is not being taken care of.
BOX
“Studies have indicated that for every Indian Rs 1000 increase in income the solid waste generation increases by one kilogram per month”
– Visvanathan et al., (2003)

The garbage that you generate is probably being dumped at a spot in the outskirts of your city that as of now is lying vacant, but when the villagers are driven away and the lakes dry up will become a real-estate hotspot for which you will invest and pay EMI almost half your life.
So years later, don't be surprised if an unexplained smell lingers on.

What can we do?
Here is where the two approaches to garbage management come into play. One way is the centralised approach, where one or two bodies take care of the collection, segregation, storage and disposal of garbage. This will ensure we only have to generate the waste and leave it to the 'experts'. As it has been proven that experts are not easy to come by, we might have to shift to the decentralised approach. This means we have to play a role in waste generation and segregation stage of waste management.


Do we prefer a centralised waste management system: where waste is managed by one or two entities
Do we prefer a decentralised waste management Where community participation is a must?


At number two
Private and limited: When the Rs 80-crore “waste-to-energy” power project was set up at Mandur village in Bangalore in 2011, it was touted as a green project worthy of subsidies worth Rs 5 crore from the Union Ministry of Renewable Energy. Three years later, the project had to be shut down as it raised a stink that couldn't really get converted to energy. Apparently the owner of  Srinivasa Gayithri Resources Recovery Ltd
is on the run. So there goes the second P this public-private-partnership model. And with the government body placing the blame on the private body and vice-versa the third P too has fallen apart. The principles of a private company indicate that it has to make some money out of the whole venture. So why do they get into the waste business anyway?
    ⁃    A BBMP paper on waste management says that annually Rs 250 crore is being spent on solid waste management in Bangalore. And the collection and transportation processes constitute about 80–95% of the total waste management budget.
    ⁃    Stages at which the private companies can make money and how it is a vicious cycle.
    ⁃    Graphic: (when BBMP asks for tenders for transportation of garbage and disposal of garbage – it pays a processing fee per Metric tonne. --- a tipping fee per metric tonne – garbage accumulates at disposal site – BBMP issues tenders for companies to take on cleaning work.)
    ⁃    Some of the companies are have a hand in the real-estate pie too, and it is their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) arm that they put into waste management. So they are the ones that 'squat' on BBMP land, making it and land around it unliveable, when people are forced to move out, the landfill is filled up and the place becomes a residential plot.
    ⁃    Bidding and competition makes companies quote very low prices for their waste management projects.

And at number one
The most thick-skinned: When the stink reaches high heaven, even the most thick-skinned amongst us have to cover our noses. Officials visiting dumpyards for the first time in their lives, because it has become a national issue, are often seen cringing and hurrying away after a quick pose for the media. And this is after the quick clean-up (in the case of Mandur, Rs 45 lakh was spent on this) to make it ready for the official visit. Research on waste management is minimal, most corporators have no idea or intention of tackling the issue at root. For eg: In Bangalore, though the waste has a high content of moisture and the preferred way of processing it would be anaerobic composting, what is being done mostly is windrow-based aerobic composting. It just means that even the most basic methods are not being implemented in the right way.

waves

To my dear,
study when u must study.
In youth, the passions are not easily ignored,
They are unbridled then
like waves

May they train you,
How you can ride the waves,

so that by the time you are in your thirties, my love,
you have learnt how to ride them.

And then just ride them,
Do.

Everything will work in your favour, because I pray
all the time.

A poem
dedicated
to my mother's prayers.

He will build you a home, mother.
He will have to build you a temple.

And you will not be reinstated there as the idol,
You are both worshippers.
In the temple, he built.

when a poem ends,
it leaves you fidgety,
around the tips of your fingers,
around the edges of your neurons.

ride that feeling,
you, fullstop

emoji

The curse

When something bad happens to you,
to be able to see what you did wrong even as the thing is still happening to you,

is a curse,
and like any other curse,
i accept it as a blessing,

from my favourite god,
lord ayyappan.

ayappan is the father and brother god,
he says, do not come to me,
when you need me for what I cannot give to you and you should not want of me.

I wonder if you are ready now ayyappa for us to live together?

Ayyappan is god i had thought.
As usual, you've been had Seena.
and my curse asks me -- mockingly, in fact:
when you know there is no god, why did you believe in one Seena?
You are so easy, girl. Gotcha.

This one ends with an emoji, the smiling one.

technology

If many in a country want it, the country takes the plunge into the new.
The problem with the Twentieth First Century is that at several places, people were getting comfortable with the 21st century quite alright. Many of our problems seem to have been sorted.
How this problem becomes unique for the 21st is the advent of technology.
But every century has its share of 'new' one can say,
But these new things impacted the lives of the people in a direct way. They shake you inside out and produce something new out of you, whether you want it or not. But with technology, the ability to do so has been vanquished. In the sense, technology does not add anything to you. It is only the big illusion.
Say for eg, we begin with Bronze Age, Iron Age, Industrialisation, these changes were from within the collective.
With technology, the collective was truly attacked and a battered collective is unable to come up with anything new.
When I say technology, I refer to any technique that removes the ability for the human to exercise at least some part of the human to make something happen.
How dare one think of doing that to the world of humans?
Any human will not think of doing that to another human.
But who said humans were doing all the thinking?
So if technology has come from man, there is no way it can overtake man, I would have said if you had asked me yesterday.
But today, I feel by the time technology is done with us, we will have no power left in us.
Say if in the previous centuries, the new things that came were only to help us out of our misery, in this century, the new thing is making us incapable of feeling misery even. So, there we go.

Crash and burn.

And guess what if a computer crashes, you can restart it, but if a human crashes, there are no restart buttons, other than love.

So if we can't feel love, we are doomed.

I said love, because we seemed to be so good at it.
And also because of the romanticist in me, who refuses to leave, even when I want to write a serious thing about technology.
Ah, well.
I do believe love is all we need, to survive.

Tragedy

It is very important to confront the tragedy that is your life,
Only when you do that,
can you understand that tragedy is okay.

It is totally fine.
Do not block the tragedy from dawning upon you,
shine on you like a crazy diamond.

let it,
shine on you,
see,
now.

India, mine too

The difference between the West and the East (only India, and I choose to say East) as the way I view it now is that the West has had many more confrontations with the question 'Who are we' than we have.
The reason for this is the West was always the exploring kind. We in the East are more of the lazy kind. As of now, I attribute the lack of exploration from the East as a whole, only to the Hindus, of course, because we all know where Muslims and Buddhists stand on that.
I understand fully well that when I say India has not had that many confrontations with the question 'Who are we', I mean the Hindus of India alone.
The time for pride at the fact that the question who are we does not throw us off our feet is long gone.
Forget about pride, even pity cannot come in the way of the onlooker to feel contempt. This contempt, however, is to individuals, to the society, not to the country, of course.
To all Hindus I speak,
Please take a close look, when asked, who are we, we jumped out of our skin, we scrambled for an answer, we tried to pick a fight, we procrastinated, we did all we could to not look into the mirror.
I request all Hindus,
to take a look into the mirror.
Wherever you are in India,
you will only see who you are, in the mirror.
It is okay to not like what you see,
But you must look in the mirror. 
Now, the upside of this is if the entity asking us who we are is an entity that is totally clueless, then the question does not carry any weight.
It is laughable at best.
And I think, go ahead, we surely can afford a few good laughs on the way.

space

A sense I could not give up till now, was the sense of humour.
Reader's Digest fucked with my mind.
It told me Laughter is the best medicine.
And to top it all were the Laughter clubs.

When I came to my thirties,
I understood that a lot of shit passes by
as sense of humour.

That is when I decided to let go of that medicine,
to spit that humour that was forced down my throat
from since I was a child.

I am grateful to you my dearest world
for forcing it down my throat,
Else, how could i have spat it out?

You are the world to me,
and my god,
everything,
you are.

I bow to you and thank you.
always,
--------------------------------------------------------

The thing is, you can always blame it on your parents,
god forbid, if any of your parent is a human.
if both are, god save you.

But both always are.
Poor things,
swaying with the world.
Poor dears,
swaying so much that it is not easy to let go of the queasy feeling.

I love you both.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

To you,
I dedicate this








-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
wondrous beauty of silence, nothingness, space,
the being.

Memory

On memory

It is true that memory is an important thing in our lives. But, unfortunately, the importance of learning things by heart has overtaken learning things by understanding.
What you learn, you remember.
And that is memory.
So if you have not understood something, but still remember it, it could be because you have learnt it by heart.
I want to give you an example,
of my memory:
When I was younger, I used to read a lot,
I read many books,
But I hardly ever, remembered what was in the books.
The reason for that I feel now is that there was a limitation to what I could understand, and all that remained is how I felt when I read something,
so if you ask me who my favorite author is, I cannot tell you who it is and why it is so.
I remember though that The Mill on the Floss moved me,
It was the first book that I remember that moved me to an extent that I was up all night, just to read and feel.
I can tell you what it was that I was moved by,
But I cannot remember even a single line from the book.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Now, there is also this thing, that the human mind, or at least some minds,
remember the bad things more than the good,
this could be because it is the bad that you understand, feel and internalize the most.
I do not know. As for myself, though I remember the bad times in my life, I am unable entirely to learn anything from the bad.
And hence, my mind does not retain it.
If I talk about the bad time,
I am able to remember it too,
But I cannot talk about it much because I do not think they are worth talking about.

Do we lose a lot by not remembering the bad?
Do we, as a race, lose a lot?
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Now, what if nothing bad has happened to you?
I am afraid that is a burden,
you will have to carry,
all your life, 

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Slyvia Plath asks, Is there no escaping the mind?
Of course there is dear Slyvia,
I miss you now.

Bigotryasanillness

According to me the biggest mental illness of them all is bigotry.
Any individual who is a bigot, is mentally ill.
The understanding that this illness will kill you,
your family,
your country,
and your planet,
is what you must understand if you suffer from this illness.
At this point, I must admit that there is a very slim chance that you do not suffer from this illness,
Because my understanding tells me that it has afflicted most if not all of us.
Among inherited diseases, this is the worst as it is coming to us from all the genes before us.
Fathers, forefathers, and in today's world, it is difficult indeed to tell who our forefathers are.
There is no shame at all in not being able to tell clearly, who our forefathers are as some of us only have on record our forefathers to two generations before us.
A mere 200 years back, some of us can go,
But what works in favour of a cure,
is the fact that
Science and religion and philosophy and literature have always been looking for cures.
Why the cure has eluded all of them is not because there is no cure,
the only reason is -- a reason all of the above admit is true -- that its cure has to come from within the individual alone.
There is no doctor, god/preacher, philosopher, writer, who can cure you.
They will help, of course,
for you to find the cure.

If you have been going to these above-mentioned people for help, I believe there is hope.

I feel the hope fading only when I think that maybe we have not been going to the right people at all.

If you want to come together as a society that wants to defeat bigotry, let me tell you, there is no way to do that, unless you make it political. It is only politics and politics alone that gets the people together.
You will have to make it a political issue and not let it just remain a personal or a professional or a communal issue.
The illness, when viewed from the prism of politics, is more comprehensible.
Anything that is comprehensible,
is vanquished right there at the moment of comprehension.

supremacy

Any kind of supremacy arises from the feeling that the other is not able to understand that he/she/they are being used.
White supremacy: Is the white man's belief that any other is unable to understand that he/she/they are being used.
With the Africans, the colonials were able to make this institutionalize this belief.
With the Indians, the colonials never could.
For the Indians it always has been you use us, we use you.
It took us 100 years to use each other out.
After that, there was nothing left but to part ways.
With the Africans, the colonials were able to institutionalize this belief because I believe the Blacks truly view human life as one that can and must be used.

Among the Indians there may have been of course a few who do not mind being used. But they made sure their own was using the other.

For the Africans, the whole world is their own.
However, when the whole thing of using became institutionalized, they rose in a manner that only the divine can.
Dear God, you are in the blacks.

The whites who helped in the black uprising were only doing so because of lesser than divine feelings.
Human, all too human.
Is all the whites can ever be.

The browns, that is us Indians, have the option to swing either way,
we chose to remain human,
dirty shits that we are.

Poem-Dec 11

If you are unable to understand something, or if you do not care about it enough, you just let it go and make many different excuses for letting something go.
Unfortunately, you no longer have the option of letting it go.
Man or woman, whoever you may be.
You will have to ensure that you understand it all.
Otherwise, to hell with you all.
So if we talk about feminism, we must understand it truly.
What we mean when we talk about feminism must only be equality.
If it means superiority of some sort to you, you are not only being untrue to yourself, but also to the cause of equality itself.
Why feminism you can ask me,
Isn't it a man-hating, dreary world - the world of feminism?
No dear sir/ma'am
It is not half as dreary as you imagine at all
I say to all the men and women asking that question.
We have our friends,
And we do have pleasant times
once in a while when our mood permits.

Are you not sick and tired of ism/schism?

Not at all,
I am just beginning to enjoy them.

Between the two genders, a healthy competition is the only way to interact.
It keeps both on their toes, always.
I must always be competing to be in the game.
called life.

I say compete, because both must be at the top of their game to make it together as one.
And the only way is to forget about the flaws of each other and get on with it.
So for me feminism is this,
I will not be blamed for any mishap
to ensure that I am not blamed
I must not be to blame.

So for me feminism is this.
There is no way on earth you can put the blame on me.

That came out strongly because of this slight kapha dosha I have, please pardon.

And because I was born a woman, try as I may to lie, I cannot be a man.
Feminism allows me to be a woman.
That's it.

If when we talk about oppression in the past, you wince,
that is only because you may have been guilty of it,
If you laugh,
I understand you have noticed it.