Reading March 2024

It’s been a tough last week dealing with a virus all over again across the family. This is probably the curse of living in Bangalore and with parents who don’t want to consider any other options.

Articles:

Arundhati Roy writes on Gaza, and how we’ve failed a people all over again.

M Rajshekar traces the story of the younger Ambani’s elephant collection regime and what it portends for India’s elephants and wildlife across the world.

Margarent Renkl writes about Flaco the Eurasian Eagle Owl who escaped the NY zoo and spent a year hunting in NY and was found dead. The cause of the death was found to be rat poison accumulated over time.

Books:

The War of the Worlds, HG Wells: Mars attacks, and in a few days they have humanity running for cover, before bacteria and viruses make mincemeat of them. That is the long and short of it. It is considered the first alien invasion novel.

Talking to my Daughter About the Economy- Yanis Varoufakis. This is almost a primer on how the modern economy works – debt, government bonds, currencies, how all these oil the modern economic wheels. Essential reading.

Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives: Siddharth Kara. Kara goes deep into the provinces of Congo with the highest deposits of Cobalt in the world and sees how the metal is mined. It is a distressing tale, where all our smartphones, and EVs are dependent on child labour and massive exploitation of locals. It is a sad state that those countries which have the most minerals also have to face so much poverty and exploitation – be it Nigeria, Congo or Bolivia. And the person who benefits will be a Billionaire sitting far away.

Newcomer: Keigo Higashino. A quirky murder mystery where a woman is found dead and the detective on the trail runs around the different threads of the case before finding the culprit. Typical Higashino with a humane take on even criminals.

I wanted to read one more book, but last one week I’ve been mostly pooped with the virus.

What is not coloured Red?

In Cobalt Red, Siddharth Kara travels deep inside Congo to look at how Cobalt is mined. He tells us that Cobalt is the element that runs our smartphones, tablets and laptops, providing stability and slow release of power from Li-ion batteries. But, the biggest use for Cobalt now that these batteries are super-sized is from Electric Vehicles, where a 50g smartphone battery with 8-10g of Cobalt can be scaled up to 50Kg of Cobalt per 100 KW!

But the book is mainly about how this Cobalt is extracted, through “artisanal mining” where basically locals go and dig it up with their tools with little safety or protection, and have to sell it to depots manned usually by Chinese to take home a pay of around 1$ per day after working almost all daylight. And eventually all this fuels into phones and EVs that earn their bosses millions of dollars with hardly any risk.

Kara goes into painstaking detail about the risks undertaken, about the families that are broken, about the local environment where villages where people managed with some farming and schools are now completely broken, taken over by mines whose profits go almost entirely to Chinese companies, and the amounts they pay as royalties or tax go to politicians higher up, with the locals left with nothing.

This sounds eerily identical to pretty much every large mining operation, be it for iron ore in Bastar, coal in Surguja or Bauxite in Malkangiri. Lithium in Bolivia, oil in Nigeria, diamonds in different countries of Africa, the list can go on and on. What is common in all this is how the mines are all in the global south and those who benefit are elsewhere, except in India where we have internalised colonialism within our classes.

It makes you wonder if there’s anything at all that is got in a fair fashion where the producers are paid a fair rate and manage to earn a decent livelihood. The food we eat is produced by farmers deep in debt. The clothes we wear also not only produced by farmers who can’t earn a livelihood of it, but also stitched by workers working in sweat shops while “brands” take all the cake. Our houses are constructed using exploited labour – look beyond the skilled workers and masons, those delivering your iron bars, bricks or granite.

It is an economy sustained by those who are regularly exploited, and the spoils flow to a few at the top, while those who pay have to pay to wear names, or experience food.

Coming back to the book itself, there’s a lot of movement of EV batteries away from Cobalt since the book came out, and since the human rights abuses became common. Tesla and BYD, the largest makers of EVs are transitioning away from Cobalt based batteries to LFPs. The price of Cobalt is likely to crash. The human rights abuses will vanish as the mining sector in Congo will likely collapse. Elon Musk and BYD can pat themselves on their backs for solving an inconvenient problem, never mind that they were the ones who caused it in the first place. Companies will move on to other minerals which will rain its own misery on those who live above those ores.

But, what becomes of the people Congo? Those whose lands forcibly taken and dug up, whose water sources and air poisoned, whose forests cut down, whose schools closed, whose children left with nothing but broken bones. If the prices of Cobalt crash, they will be left bearing the brunt of it, and might even have to pull more children out of schools to earn a living wage for the family.

Sometimes I feel there is only one option – to burn it all down, one billionaire at a time and rebuild the political economy from scratch into an equitable and just system based on fair prices. It is also what is likely to save the vast majority of us too.

Reading February 2024

Articles:

This has been a month of somewhat odd reading.

Margarent Renkl writes about squirreling things away and finding them decades later. There is also the feeling of growing up and old in the same neighbourhood. While there is the joy of the memories over the decades of bringing up a family, there is also the sense of loss as neighbours die, their old houses are torn down to “make way for the new”.

Derek Thompson writes in the Atlantic about the breakdown in direct social contacts. Fewer people have close friends than before, fewer people hang out. He traces this phenomenon to two things – how our cities are growing with people living farther and farther away from their friends and extended family, and the rise of social media and online content – more time watching Netflix and Instagram reels means less time to hang out or even play.

Gana Kedlaya writes about the language that is used when reporting on man-animal conflicts and how that makes all the difference in how we drive perception. Gana has been reporting on man-elephant conflicts for many years now and is an essential voice to follow to understand the nuances of a very complex issue.

Books:

I started the month with Margarent Renkl’s excellent “The Comfort of Crows”. The book is a week-by-week chronicling of a year observed in her surroundings – her backyard and her surroundings. The chronicling is about the changes that are seen in terms of birds, insects, plants and trees. While the author cheats and some times veers to her past with a tinge of nostalgia, it is usually a welcome take. After all, even as we observe a summer now, we cannot but remember a summer past.

I had to pick up a library book after this, and it was P.D. James’ “The Lighthouse”. Loosely based on Agatha Christie’s “And then there were none”, it is a murder mystery set on an island where everyone is isolated without signal (this is a modern day mystery). Adam Dalgliesh is now a top-hat in the department and is assisted by two other detectives.

Arundhati Roy’s “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness” is her second novel after “The God of Small Things”. While expectations were high when the former was announced, it was mostly led down by comparisons to the latter. The book isn’t as great as her first one, but it wasn’t as bad as it is made out to be. There is more tell than show, which can grate at times, but it is still a necessary novel. In fact, there are two different threads in the book, each of which can make a novel by itself.

Sujatha Gidla made the news a decade back when her book “Ants among Elephants” was published. She was invited to a literary festival where she called out a lot of practices for being too religious and having no place there. Needless to say, it generated a lot of controversy. The book itself is a memoir of her family, her mother and uncle and their struggles. Her uncle was one of the founders of the People’s War Group which became the Maoist/naxal movement in India. These are necessary stories that need to be told, and its good that she chronicled it.

Remember this date

This might not be a great post. But this needs to be written.

I was 12 when the Babri Masjid came down. We lived in Chamarajpet, the last Hindu compound before the “Mohammedan Block” began. The city and the locality burned for weeks after that, we huddled against the violence that was unleashed. Shops that we knew were reduced to ashes – the bedding shop, the old papers shop – while their neighbours opened after the curfew and continued as if nothing had happened. But it was still considered a matter of shame. Amidst the chest-thumping that followed there was still a feeling that something was lost, and something deeply ugly had happened.

This is 2024, 31 years have passed. Today marks the culmination of what began that day. In terms of space, we now live in a layout surrounded by people “like us” – upper caste Hindus, occasional Christians (who are frowned upon, but tolerated as they give the area a semblance of liberality). The arrival of “those people”, however, is still looked upon with surprise and some concern. Visitors from my own family can be heard commenting, “once ‘they’ start coming, they’ll take over the area”.

The area is awash with saffron flags, but I still have to drive more than half a km to see them. Little mercies. Cousins complain about apartment associations on overdrive. An uncle and aunt I visit feel proud about the activities undertaken by their association for today.

It feels distressing, a bit scary too. It is like those neighbours, friends and family, those you live amidst and grew up with have suddenly sprouted longer canines and cannot stop baring them. But this has been the norm for a while now. It started with 2014, but was hidden behind homilies of “economic development” and a hyped up “Gujarat model”. You retreated as the fangs came out for a bit in 2019. Now, the fangs look like they are here to stay, well into the future. You are still family, they are not bared at you, but you know the look you get, as someone different, someone who has been defeated and they’re trying really hard not to gloat – “it’s only a phase, (s)he’ll come around.”

As Sachin puts it so eloquently, “this is a country which is smug. It does not know how to handle success well. It celebrates success by being a bully. It does not know how to take failure well.” And like true bullies, this country has lost its way and does not know or care about what real success is anymore.

I like to think that these are waves, and that eventually things will turn the other direction, but it needs to be acknowledged that the battles are not just electoral, it is for the soul of the country. A win here or there is not going to make much difference. Cases in point, this, and this.

For those who still can, this is my only advise:

25 minutes of bliss

It has been close to 3 months since I went off twitter. The day the name and logo changed to X, I decided enough was enough, I don’t want to be around in a platform run by a maniac. And staying away has been surprisingly easy. The toughest part was suppressing the feeling of putting out any “clever” thoughts I got. That no matter how interesting or funny something I came up with was, I just had to content myself with being the single member audience for it. It was tempting to post it on Threads, but I chose the hard path of foregoing this kind of engagement, and over time I have been freed to a large extent of it.

Anyway, now that twitter is off, this blog should probably resume. Shoulder issues over the past few months meant that I have resisted sitting in front of the computer for too long. Now that that seems to be healing I hope to put more stuff out here.

***

I remember stumbling upon this video some 5 years back while I was going through the content of First Edition Arts(FEA) on Youtube. FEA are mostly a Hindusthani based channel with a few forays into Carnatic, mainly through T.M. Krishna. The best part is the content. The songs are all separated and are produced with really good quality.

The song itself was something I had not heard before, on the “vanilla” ragam Mayamalavagowlam. Over time the biggest question I’ve had is why we use MMG to teach the basics and not the more vanilla Harikhamboji, or Shankarbharanam which covers the most common swaram combinations seen.

The beauty here is how lost TM Krishna is in the song. There are some songs where he’s good and there are those where he elevates himself – touched by the divine, you could say. At one point, around the 9 minute mark, he stops with an “aaha” and sheds a quiet tear contemplating on the beauty of the song, but the magic continues to flow, through the “Maya shabalitha brahma roopam” neraval.

Akkarai Subhalakshmi gives perfect support on the violin. Praveen Sparsh and Chandrasekhara Sharma are incredible on the Mridangam and the ghatam, complementing the singing without overstepping into it. Once again, the quality of acoustics and recording is not something you experience usually, so kudos to FEA’s team for this.

Anyway, here’s the song. It is 25 minutes, so find a quiet place and use headphones for best effect.

Maamannan and Caste Pride

I finally managed to watch Maamannan on Netflix. Given that it is a movie by Mari Selvaraj of Karnan fame (if you’ve watched Kaantara, that is pretty much the adivasi version of Dalit Karnan), caste was central to the movie. Am not complaining, for far too long we have wallowed in glorifying castes in the form of movies like Chinna Gounder, Naattamai, Thevar Magan etc. It is about time the shoe goes on the other foot and those stories get told.

Speaking of Thevar Magan, the contrast and similarities couldn’t be starker. Fahadh Faasil as the younger sibling in all whites, trying to hold on to his father’s legacy, while also having to manage a bungling older sibling stands out. It really needed an actor of FaFa’s capability to bring the intensity needed to give the other side of Kamal’s Thevar (benevolent) landlord.

It is also telling the MLA is played by Vadivelu, the same Vadivelu who played Isakki in Thevar Magan, the expendable worker who becomes collateral in a family feud among the landlords. It takes a while to get used to Vadivelu playing a senior and serious role, but after a point you cannot imagine anyone else playing it. The man is a talent that the Tamil film industry hasn’t explored deeply enough. Hopefully this movie will mark a change.

Of “Beef” and the void

It has been a tiring few weeks. I think weeks but it could be months. I try to remember when was the last time I didn’t feel so tired, and I can’t remember exactly. Probably last year? I don’t know. I don’t care. What difference would that make? All that matters is that I am tired.

I sat through an interview of an intern as he enthusisastically prattled off about all his work over the past 3 years, and I realised I had no questions for him. It was a friday evening and I was tired, and I got even more tired just listening to him talk. I cannot remember a time when I spoke that much. I probably never have, definitely not in interviews.

Yesterday I finished watching the Netflix series Beef. It was supposed to be a dark comedy, but I did not find myself laughing at any point. But I got the “dark” part of it, except that that feels like everyday now. I just found it amazing that someone is still outside of this framework and able to label everyday reality as “dark”.

The main thing is that adult life has become a hustle. You work, you work, you work, and you work insanely just to hold on to where you are, while you keep getting less and less out of it. It isn’t just a hamster wheel anymore, but a hamster wheel whose speed gradually increases with time while the rewards stay the same.

But then, this isn’t about only jobs and what they pay, or your boss and your relationship with them. Your health, your family’s health, your relationships, finance markets, your country’s economy, your city’s economy, your region’s politics, the real estate market, the traffic, the weather, the climate, so much more constitute how we experience life every day on waking up. Every one of them is something you have to deal with, and dealing with stuff costs energy and time. Your choices become about where you are going to spend your time and energy, and once you reach your 40s you realise there’s a lot that demands it and there’s also a lot less for you to spend. End result, you are tired – you wake up tired, you go through the day tired, you go to sleep tired. Every day.

One of the reviews of Beef had this line – “At a recent doctor’s visit, I was asked if I was anxious, and I responded, “Isn’t everybody?””
Exactly. Isn’t everybody? There’s just so much that could go wrong, and everything you have slogged up to till now will be gone in a whisker. We probably live in denial about it, but deep down, we know. A lay-off, a health issue or an accident, and everything you know gets upended, and you don’t have a safety net to hold you up. It’s gonna be a free fall.

I wonder how we got here. I remember reading this review by Will Byrnes about Barbara Kingsolver’s Unsheltered.

You do the right thing. You go to school, spend the years, invest the money, put off this or that temporary form of glee, take on the debt, pay it off. Get a job at the bottom of the ladder, work X number of years and move up. There are mis-steps, of course, accidents, bad decisions, re-directions, disappointments. Some big, some less so, everyone has these. You get married, have children, be a solid citizen, join the board of a local youth council, coach your kids’ ball teams. You do the right thing, and everything is supposed to work out ok. You’re not looking to be a millionaire. But you want to send your kids to good schools, see them go to college, have satisfying adult lives of their own. You do the right thing. You don’t cheat on your taxes, or your spouse. You plan for the future, and have a sane expectation that, someday, you can retire and still have a decent life. You do the right thing, follow the course that has been laid out for a very long time, expecting that the promised rewards will arrive. And sometimes they do. But while you were busy doing the right thing, those with the power and the money changed the rules of engagement. So, instead of an American Dream made real, it is as if you have stepped into an episode of The Twilight Zone.

The rules of engagement have changed. Every one is busy, no one has time because they are fighting the same battles. The safety net of affordable rents, healthcare, EMIs, schools, everything has evaporated, and with that the threads that weaved communities together are coming apart. It cannot be emphasised enough how much of a safety net our community – friends of family – was. You lost your home, you could go spend a few weeks at a friend’s place while you recovered your bearings. Dealing with an illness, your family and friends were there for you. You never faced your battles alone.

Now that sense is gone – because, well, every member of this community has to fight the same battles – they are busy watching their own backs (and sometimes because they are just selfish assholes.) All that we have left is fancy vacations to “rejuvenate” (while we stress about flights and hotels), and mindless consumerism to try to fill the void we feel that just keeps on growing larger.

Most times I keep hoping someone would check in on me, and no one does. In brief periods of stability I reach out, and the expectation tends to be the same – they are exhausted with the every day hustle, and were hoping someone would check in on them.

As the battles get harder with time, you are also truly alone while fighting them. And this is the biggest scam that has been played on us.

A Landscape of Spiders

It has been more than a year since I discovered Bangalore University’s bio-park. My haunt used to be Mallathahalli lake, accessed by a cattle path that took me into a section where the resident owlet and parakeets saw me regularly enough not to be alarmed. The path eventually got closed as walls came up all around the lake, along with JCBs and tipper trucks as the authorities decided that the lake had to be ‘developed’, forcing me and all the residents of the lake to move homes.

The Bangalore University bio-park is a wilderness spread over 1300 acres and lies adjacent to Mysore Road and the Bangalore-Mysore Railway line. The large area was daunting at first, especially for someone coming from a lake, where you walk a path and that is about it. And it took a while for the landscape to reveal itself to me.

Over time I figured out the areas where the birds are – a rainwater pond and a ground-water discharge pond. And more importantly, the areas where the spiders live. It was a small matter to be ignored that I regularly saw the rarer species of spiders and birds outside of areas where I had slotted them to be, but it gave me a sense of order to understand the landscape. It was like trying to learn an entirely new language – you start with a vocabulary of a few words hoping to expand it over time.

And over a year later, the vocabulary has been expanding, while much remains hidden. I walk slowly, slower with each passing day, wondering if every dangling twig could be a spider. Most of the times it is a twig, or as a friend joked “a spider-mimicking twig”; just once it was a Miagrammopes sp, a twig-mimicking spider of the family Uloboridae. They look like thin twigs and lie hidden in single strands of silk. You sometimes need to poke every twig you see to spot that one spider.

The Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything

This was supposed to be the year, the one where I discover the answer to life, at least. The Universe and everything else I consider clearly outside my ken. It was the year I was going to be ‘free’ having quit my job and hoping not to work a corporate job again. But it turned out to be a year where I floundered restlessly, had days where I had nothing to do followed by days having no time to pee; where I ran around restlessly for a full month as if my home was under siege. Days where I struggled to see the light at the end of the tunnel, but still days where I was thankful that I wasn’t answerable to anyone for my time.

This is a year that will take a while for me to process, longer than the jiffy it seems to have taken for the whole of it to pass. I wonder how much repercussions I’ll carry from this year into the future, and what kind they will be. It started with me being two months into not having a job and mostly enjoying the freedom before covid struck for the family. This was followed by a bout of anxiety and depression, a couple of months working with an abusive boss, but a lot of fun doing freelancing, eventually leading to the stability of a job that I am growing into and coming to like.

I try to think of individual events, but I have to work hard to find them, and when I do it is hard to believe many months have passed by; the year seems to have passed by in a haze. I remember those March days where I hit an absolute low, and wondered how to go on, eventually pulling myself back by trying to go back to what I know best – surviving. Those days led me to working in a bookstore for 2 months, and freelancing in parallel.

The ghost of the bookstore stint has to be dealt with before I move on. It was two months of work which I enjoyed. But things went bad for a couple of weeks after that before I quit under a spate of invective-laden emails. Maybe I should see the positives in having a boss go all out abusive in emails rather than quietly moving on, carrying a grudge for the rest of our careers. At least the bridge was completely burnt here.

Those two and a half months also made me realize how far I have come from my impatient twenties, where I was ready to pounce upon and judge people for not living up to my “lofty standards”. I couldn’t have flown higher those last few years of my twenties where I couldn’t put a foot wrong. How things changed once the decade turned.

This time I was frequently surprised with my ability to quietly put up with all kinds of nonsense, which also blind-sided me to the red flags that I should have seen coming ages back, and which I was regularly warned about by friends. The scary part is to think of what I might already be living with and blind to.

These couple of months also coincided with three months of freelance writing. Running around, meeting people, taking photographs, sometimes doing the meeting parts while buried deep inside layers of anxiety. When I look back and read the copies that I sent out, it amazes me how much I could get done while feeling like everything was collapsing around me. I don’t know if it is something to be proud of or be scared of, but it was weird to see how far I have come when it comes to the writing process, that I could compartmentalize my work from how I was feeling. It was particularly hilarious when I noticed that big media houses like Deccan Herald and The Hindu had ripped off a piece that I had written while being in a thick, anxious, foggy haze.

Since August there has been some stability. It is not just in having a regular income coming in, but also that my days are more structured. At some levels it is scary that I need to be doing some work to feel ok, but there is at least the consolation that this work is something I want to wake up to. Hopefully, better stability at home will ensure more independence on the needing to work front.

I remember the ride to Nuggehalli and Shravanabelagola at the end of June. The job with the bookstore was in the past, a potential job (the one I am currently working on) was lined up, and some writing happening regularly. The weather had been nice leading up to it. I hoped for at least half a day of good weather and set out. The weather, however, turned and the rains caught up on my way back and pounded on me most of the way. As the storm picked up, I stopped by a bus stop in Solur and sheltered there with other two-wheelers.

I had a brief epiphany where I saw myself at that moment. I was wet all over as I had foregone my jacket’s rain layer, and I was cold and hungry. But I felt strangely calm, my focus only on riding the storm out. I realized at that moment, that for most of the day I hadn’t thought about much on the whole ride – the anxiety had leveled off. In fact I had not ‘felt’ anything for the whole day, and that’s when I knew that the year had finally turned for me.

As the year draws to a close dark clouds seem to be gathering again on the horizon. I don’t start years well; it takes a while for me to come to terms with the resetting of months and usually by that time half the year is gone. At the end of every year I hope the next will be better, but the trend has sustained.

There really isn’t much more to expect than a bit of kindness from the next year. There will be a lot less floundering about, at least on the work front, and that’s a relief. In many ways, I am where I want to be on the professional front, and there is a job that I can make something out of. If only I could speak for my mind and its shenanigans. So much for answers, sometimes all you want is a year where your passage goes unnoticed.

New days

It has been more than 3 months since I got back to working again. What I feared would happen during my semi-retirement, happened – I ended up getting consumed by the situation at home. A bout of anxiety and dealing with it followed. It eventually led me to questionable choices, thankfully none that I could not extricate myself from.

The bout of freelance journalism that this led to (which I don’t count under questionable choices – I actually had fun there) eventually led me to the world of Open data and Opencity.in. I now spend my days finding data, working on it, and uploading the datasets to the site. And crowing about it on different social media sites – twitter and linkedin.

The fun part, however, is looking at this data and teasing out stories and what they tell about the state of our world. For eg. data from the National Crime Records Bureau showed that Bangalore logs a lot of pedestrian deaths – a lot more than the national average. And Chennai records a lot of accidents – the highest in the country, while registering barely a blip in the pedestrian deaths column. Strange? Well, read on for more insights there.

This period has also been one of learning – especially on the tech front. Maps are proving to to be the biggest learning curve, and being visual they tend to attract the most eyeballs too. Different formats like kml, shapefiles, and geojsons, and how to work with them keeps me occupied most times. I also wrote an explainer about a simple way to work with maps. For this I combined the female literacy rate at different districts of Karnataka from the National Family and Heath Survey of the Govt of India with the districts map of Karnataka as put out by the survey of India, and came up with a simple infographic. You can read more about that here.

I realised it has been a year since I quit my job, hoping to never get back to the industry. In part, that still holds true. This is still a one year contract and I am not looking to get back to the software industry anymore. But I know that there is also the factor of luck. As the saying in India goes – you are just one medical emergency away from poverty. The draw of medical insurance for elderly parents is always there in the back of my mind, and I have been careful about not burning any bridges, no matter how much the temptation to do just that. But for now, I am taking it one week at a time on the work front, and see what bridges it leads me to at what points, and how and whether I can cross them. On the home front though, life has become about figuring a few hours at a time, and for some of the hardest hours, one hour at a time, trying to making it to the other side.

I don’t know if I’ll ever be in a state where I will be able to write about the whole process and life of giving care without just alluding to that life like I have done so far. But what is crushing is how alone you feel at the worst hours. As much as I want to blame people for not standing by me, I know that this is the case for everyone – they have their own battles to fight. And where the domestic front is quiet, the work front tends to bring its own troubles. As someone wise said on twitter – there are only two choices in life, between boredom and suffering. How I wish this were a choice.