I have missed four days in total. My schedule had really been erratic and to be honest and making no excuses for my behavior, I consciously ignored blogging as an active priority. This was me ignoring the things I really should not be ignoring. Over the past year, the only thing I can say I have definitely learned is not to ignore the things that are yours to be. Deep, managed attention to all the things that belong to you, your sense of self, your possessions including your books, desk, clothes, your favorite wooden spoon you love eating in that ceramic bowl with, the people you truly love and want always to be there in your life, all these things, brings about a sense of satisfaction and self-regulation among them that you so require to live a harmonious and happy life. This blog has now become a vital part of it, attention to it crucial along with the number of others I have been actively ignoring.

Attention is vital in yet another place it is underestimated greatly I have learned, at-least by dilettantes which now well outnumber the wise. In technology. You see, developing anything that works in real life in the hands of hundreds of users paying for your product requires that the said product be robust and resilient to various failures to some degree. Dealing with the gigantic explosion in case-possibilities that take place while designing them to be so is something most humans are poorly designed to think in terms of at default. It takes sage-like wisdom and experience in that sub-domain’s management to be ready enough to foresee the many chances of failures. And even then you are only covering a part of them. Take this example, in the middle of rush-hour taking the walk home from office after work as you call your girlfriend and how due to the fact that you can hardly walk on this super-crowded footpath, she’s herself had a bad evening, the summer-night heat from the hundreds of vehicles and human bodies and whatnot combined with the fact that both your phones are malfunctioning and cutting off your signal and voice for no bloody reason almost causes a big fight between you two. That is how much design and the failure of technology matters. Entire histories can be made by the glitch in the signal during this negotiation in conversations and the subsequent failure of understanding each other. The metaphysics of communication.

Speaking of small things making entire histories, I have lately been thinking of how much the animals or even the trees of Bombay contribute to the history of this city and how much of the past can be attributed to the anonymized innumerable of them. Take the case of the squirrel. A creature with a parallel life from our own. Once while sitting in the gardens of Priyadarshani Park overlooking the sea I saw a number of them fighting for the crumbles of chips people kept scattering from time to time. Them along with the violent crows and ravens. How much of this fight, between two squirrels, motivated by greed and a habit of hoarding, contributes to the long-term history of this city? Do, when we say history, we only mean the history of men and women? Is it accurate to even include women as I did just now owing to the fact that much authoritative history ignores them as significant subjects of study? Are there priorities in which we must incrementally bring them back into dialogue? Women before mammals before birds before trees? What of the people who do not identify as male or female? Whose sexuality is not heterosexual? When and where do we add them? Or do we take all of them and bring them to an equal footing? How much of the narrative of histories is a selective filtering among men to thread a story for the people who look exactly like him? When will one hear a story of the history of the street dogs of Matunga? What of the dominant genders among them?

See you tomorrow,
Avi.