Happiness is

Biting into a spicey wada pao

And contemplating a setting sun,

A tiny care free break 

Just before the deadline,

A pair of stray puppy dog eyes

That expect to be petted,

A spoonful of gulkand ice cream

Melting on your tongue,

It is all these ephemeral

Unexpected moments

That catch you by surprise

And transfix you

Like a rabbit caught in the headlights.

It is sweet, and sour,

With a hint of bitter.

It bumps and thunks

But you don't care 

That it is rough around the edges.

Things I refuse to learn

I think today I want to talk about some of the things that confront me in my life, which set me thinking 'maybe I have this to learn in life'. But no matter how many times I face them, a very stubborn part of me just refuses to learn the lesson.

I think the hardest thing from me is to maintain a sense of calm humility in the face of stupidity. Sometimes I honestly wish I could prevent myself from throwing a fit of anger when I perceive someone as being insincere or just plain block headed. There are days when I feel like I'm making progress on that front but its more like one step forward and two steps backwards.

Another thing I cannot seem to get a hang of is how to stay on schedule. I keep thinking that if I can organize my time a little bit better I'd have more space for all the things I want to do. Doesn't happen though. I'll stick to it for a bit and then things will wobble. Take this blog for example, I was posting more or less regularly for almost a fortnight - even if I was in the field. And then nothing for a week.

Focusing or narrowing it down has its issues for me. I can never - for the life of me - choose between things to concentrate on. I want to write, and read, and crochet, and learn music, and travel, and learn a new language - two actually. So you can imagine, the progress is a tad patchy.

Does that bother me? There are times when I think if I was a little more organized, or calmer or thinner or shinier, I'd be happier. Does that mean I do something about it? In my case it is always one step forward, two step back.

On Confessing, Hoping, and Connecting

Last week has been mad: in the past three weeks I've been in five states and have been massively sleep deprived for the past 4 - 5 days. Its also been a bit of an emotional roller coaster because I was meeting some friends after 3 - 4 years and that has its attendant realizations about how people/things change and how they remain the same.

Yesterday I finally had sometime to catch up on the reading and I read this brilliant article by the Greek Finance Minister, Yanis Varoufakis. This article was directed to me by the redoubtable Ritwik Agarwal whose own thoughts can be found here. Varoufakis about how Marxist thought shaped his understanding of political economy and how Marx's prime contribution to political thought was that to highlight the conflict that labor cannot be cannot be completely defined in commodity terms and hence can never be completely reduced to a commodity and while the capitalist system constantly tries to do that, the moment it achieves it, the whole system will collapse.

One of the things the kinda tangential things that got stuck in my head from the article is when towards the end of the article Varoufakis talked about how it is easy to fall into a sense of complacency and "how easy it was for my mind to be infected with the sense...that nothing succeeds in reproducing itself better than a false sense of entitlement" He completed the article with the humble suggestion that "Radical confessions, like the one I have attempted here, are perhaps the only programmatic antidote to ideological slippage that threatens to turn us into cogs of the machine."

This last thought reminded me of this TEDxDelhi talk by Shabnam Virmani where she talks about her journey exploring Kabir across the subcontinent and in the end she shares this song that tells this tale about a tiny bird that is trying to save the tree she perched on from a forest fire. In the face of the face of the enormity and the hopelessness of the whole enterprise the tiny bird had only this to offer "I'm doing what I can" and I think that is such a powerful message and it fills you with hope for possibilities. 

I could go on and keep talking about half a dozen thoughts buzzing in my head right now but I'll sign off and get back to the real world because as the poet, Robert Frost put it:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

The Wheezing Old Person that I am

I think my one big learning today is that I set myself up for sabotage. Also cosmos is a bitch - but that I've known for sometime now.

On the question of self sabotage, consider for example how I travel. I tend to plan my travel with relatively thin margins of error. Sometimes I don't know some crucial information, for example if the autowala asks me "station ki kis taraf jana hai?" I will draw a blank. And since cosmos is a bitch, I end up on the wrong side of the station and end up running to the other end laden with luggage and 7 minutes to go.

It is at this point that breath comes in short, sharp, painful bursts, your brain is working at a furious pace but your limbs don't seem to move at the required pace and you know you've set yourself up for sabotage.

Reaching 30 seconds before due departure time doesn't mean you've won, it means you're not good at sabotaging yourself.

On Striking a Chord

Image Source: a_tart

There are strings in the human heart that had better not be vibrated.

- Charles Dickens (Barnaby Rudge, 1841)

The Great Indian Jugaad

Delhi saw a deluge of battery operated rickshaws on her roads during the Commonwealth Games. They were all imported from China and assembled in NCR. After the games the Delhi govt didn't kind of ignored them for a bit and then banned them for a bit because their numbers were growing and they didn't fit into any definition neatly enough to regulate them. I think they are happily plying 6 to 8 people on some roads of Delhi right now.

Image Source: a_tart

Some of these things have made their way all over UP and one can see them in cities like Muzaffarnagar and the humble tehsil where yours truly is currently stationed.

The problem with these things is they need high quality power (read no crazy voltage fluctuations) for a good 8 hours to charge their batteries. And at the risk of sounding like a parochial chauvinist, where is the electricity in UP? And hence the stage is set of the Great Indian Jugaad to do its thing and voila! We have something that has the horsepower to carry two, maybe three people saddled with some rudimentary seating and carrying a minimum of four people, not including the driver.

Long live the Revolution.

The Guessing Game

The internet is a wonderful place where you can stumble on some really incredible things. For example, last night (technically it was today) I found out that at quantum scales time can move backwards as well as forward. You can find the whole article here:

http://metro.co.uk/2015/02/11/time-actually-goes-backwards-scientists-reveal-5058265/

Time travel is still not possible because they basically played a guessing game about the quantum state of some microwave photons in a microwave box cooled to absolute zero and they found that 'predicting' their guesses worked backwards as well as forward and they could predict with 90% accuracy.

Of course time travel isn't a thing yet. As Professor Kater Murch of Washington University says, 'It takes 20 or 30 minutes to run one of these experiments, several weeks to process it, and a year to scratch our heads to see if we're crazy or not.' If he was onto something on the time travel front, he could've saved himself a lot of head scratching for sure.

Anyways, this is exciting coz now we need to figure out why this doesn't happen at our scale and why entropy in the universe always increases - that last bit always bothered me. All the laws of conservation spoil you with their symmetry and then you get stuck with this one quantity that always increases. Finally some wiggle room.

An Ethical Nihilist

Image Source: a_tart

I'm in the middle of Meta Maus, which a friend of mine very kindly lent me. If you're familiar with Art Spigelman's Maus, you may remember that his therapist, Pavel (also a Holocaust survivor) featured in the work.

In Meta Maus Art touches on his relationship with Pavel and while I didn't pay much attention to him in my first reading of Maus, I was literally blown away by some of the things he said. For example according to him:

neurosis is just a solution that has become a problem.

My favorite part is about his philosophy in life. He told Art that he was a nihilist and Art questioned him how could he explain 'being so available to patients way past the point of it being good for his health' and he replied:

Well, I decided that behaving ethically was the most nihilistic thing I could do. That was pure gold.

Other very interesting things are coming out of this treasure trove of what want into making Maus. The Word of the Day goes to Holokitsch and refers to anything that seeks to over sentimentalization and kitschification of the Holocaust. Pure gold I tell you! Pure Gold!!

En tu casa o en la mía

Your place or mine?

I've been trying to learn Spanish using this app called Duolingo and I recently earned enough "lingots" to unlock a lesson for pick up lines, so this is my one big lesson of the day.  Now I can ask you if you want to dance with me (tu baliar conmigo) or if you want to go out with me (tu salir conmigo). I can even tell you that I like you a lot (me gustas mucho) and ask you for your number ( me das tu numero?). And a few other things too cheezy to mention. But most importantly I can ask "en tu casa o en la mía?"

Buenas noches. Adiós.

The Sweet Stuff

Enroute to a community meeting we stopped to see jaggery being made. It was a family run operation where they make jaggery by sequentially boiling cane juice in three different vats.

Our driver warned us in advance that we may not eat jaggery again if we see how it is made. But wasn't particularly dirty. They use some sort of local grass for cleaning the jaggery. The grass is shredded and soaked in water. This makes the water viscous. This is added to the cane juice in the first two vats. Scum is removed from these vats as it froths up.

By the third vat the syrup has the characteristic yellow color of jaggery. The smell varies from that of fresh cane juice to that of overpowering sweetness of of thick syrupy piping hot jaggery. The steam rising from the vats permeates everything.

The best part was of course eating the warm jaggery. The sweet stuff is the good stuff.

Shitty Matters

Most of yesterday was spent in transit and when not in transit, we were talking shit - quite literally.

I have a project in UP and the soil here is silty-clayey, which means it doesn't absorb much water. The regular sanitation solution in the area is to take all the water and to throw it in a water body. Our site is low lying and that isn't really possible so what do we do?

We considered recharging but the water table is high in the area and we run the risk of contaminating the aquifer.

So far the idea evolved involves household level pre-treatment and percolation in the top layer. Again this is doubtful because we're not sure all the water will get absorbed by the top layer.

This is still a work in progress.

tired rhyme

Nothing of note
To report.
Just the hangover of
Moved by Love
And that stiff backs
Have no quick hacks.

Of Moons and PMSing

One thing that I've learnt - very slowly - over the past two years or so is that scientific knowledge has its boundaries. Its strengths and limitations stem from the fact the it depends on verifiable and reproducible evidence to make sense / come to conclusions. I've started paying more attention and respect to things that I would've brushed off and trampled on as superstition mostly because I'm developing a better awareness of science's boundaries. Today I came across an article about 'mensuration and the taboos associated with it' that brought back this lesson to me.

https://mythrispeaks.wordpress.com/2014/03/26/menstrual-taboos-and-ancient-wisdom/

While I don't agree with everything in the article, I appreciate the fact that the author's is trying to be sensitive to young girls, their self esteem, and their religious beliefs. The part that hit me the most though was where she talks about Pre-Mestrual Syndrome. 

"The crankiness, impatience or annoyance so infamously called Premenstrual Syndrome, that we may experience in the last two weeks of our cycle, is really more about the feelings you have because you are not flowing with what you body really wants you to do – that is slow down, withdraw from the busyness of the outside world and look after yourself, not everybody else."

Source http://www.moonsong.com.au/spiritualmenstruation.html 

I'm guilty of the same - even though I was miserable, I've told myself "Its nothing, you're just PMSing" and tried to move on the best I could. To think that something that happens to every woman every month, as a matter of fact, is called a "syndrome" is a testament of how insensitive we are as a society and how ingrained it is in us to privilege one form of knowledge above the other. 

Moved by Love

I spent the day volunteering at the Karma Kitchen. We started at 10:30 in the morning and prepared dinner for about 150 people. The main aim of the event was to start a dialogue about a culture of Sewa. Cutting and chopping for 150 people was a learning experience in itself but I think the highlight of the meal was that the entire spread was made without a speck of oil/butter/ghee etc. The meal had bajra and moong ki kichdi, makai ka rotla, tamatar ki kadi, salad, lauki ka halva and gajar ki chutney. Overall it was a lovely day and everyone appreciated the efforts.

Decentralization

વિકેન્દ્રીકરણ (Vi-kendri-karan): Decentralization

My gujju development vocab has been making steady progress. No points for guessing that today's addition is Decentralization - we are promoting decentralization of services or મૂળભૂત સુવિધાઓ નો વિકેન્દ્રીકરણ ને આગળ ચઢાવીએ છીએ (moolbhoot sevao na vikendrikaran ne aagal chadhhaaviye chhiye)

Other big words in this august company include:

અમલીકરણ માળખુ (amalikaran malkkhu) which means implementation framework and આંતરિક વિસ્થાપિત લોકો (antarik visthapit loko) which means internally displaced people. Totally unrelated. Totally badass.

Dahi Baingan

Yes, everything in this blog isn't going to be 'profound'. In fact a significant chunk of it is going to be about food. Its funny but for me knowing a city is about weaving together a web of stories and eating places - you pretty much own the city if you can get to a place, have good food there, and tell an amusing story while you're digesting the meal.

Getting back to the eggplant trajectory: I had the two chief ingredients sitting around in my refrigerator and they had begun to piss me off and they had to go. Except half my family is vaishnav baniyaas and that means I'm genetically hard wired so that I cannot throw stuff away - they had to go in my kadhaai and then to my plate. The only problem was I didn't know how to cook Dahi Baingan and mom was busy so I couldn't ask her. I ended up asking google but I realized that everyone from the bongs, to the odiyas, to the kashmiris basically plonk fried eggplant in a yogurt gravy. So that was the one thing for today: fry and plonk.

I thought the end result would've done my maru grandmother proud. I kid you not, it tasted like a sweltering mid-May afternoon in Rajasthan (I could almost hear my maami exhorting us to eat hot rotis fresh off the stove "garam garam roti khaa lo!!" Come to think of it, I never really did understand her obsession with garam rotis and why I had to eat them.) My mom however said that she had never heard of Dahi Baingan and we make no such thing - she left out the part about me being an abomination. I Love you, mom. 

Random Day First Show

I've been meaning to start this blog for some time now and I keep thinking to myself I'll start on this occasion or that but it never ends up happening. So here it is: Random Day First Show

What did I learn today? I learnt that people depend on motifs to give them a sense of familiarity and one can use that to manipulate how they feel about a certain thing. I guess I knew it at an implicit level all along so I can say I relearnt that today.

There is so much we know but may be because we're not paying attention or may be because we're too lazy to think something through, we fail to connect dots and our knowledge remains half knowledge. May be that is the one thing I learnt today.