This city in India is a metaphor of a barely functioning anarchy. The attack on the senses is unrelenting, with a mixture of fantastic, grotesque, wonderful and plain bad. However what makes it an anarchy is not these stimuli but just the mass of human beings. Human beings like ants, a swarm of flies, buzzing bees and so on. I think it must be this density of human concentration that also colors the Indian philosophy of being detached even in the middle of samsara, which anyway is maya. Perhaps that is how I should learn to absorb the anarchy, which in it’s reality itself to be unreal or maya.

The city I knew has vanished completely. Every empty spot of land has been covered with grotesque concrete. But now I am quite tired and don’t feel like writing, so I shall suspend this narrative here.

21:35 IST 2004:02:11

Today was the first day of doing nothing. The previous two days involved forays into the city to shop for various things. My sister said that I was on the verge of driving her crazy by repeatedly repeating ‘madness’ over and over again. But that is all I could come up with when I came face to face with the multitudes of people walking, riding bicycles, driving two wheelers, cars, buses, trucks etc on the various thoroughfares of the city. As I told my sister the traffic on any of those streets is a perfect demonstration for the Brownian motion.

I suppose I had become so much inurned to all this after living in the almost hermitic quite of Atlanta that my reaction is extreme. But even if I had never left this country and instead went into a deep sleep like Rip Van Wrinkle and woke up after the period of three odd years, I would find it hard to recognize this area where I grew up.

Not that is not right I would recognize is no doubt because the elemental components, say for example say in the morning time with milkmen yelling, roosters crowing, women adorning their house fronts with rangoli, various vegetable and fruit sellers with their carts hawking their wares, urchins begging, rag pickers whose livelihood is recycling, the familiar echo of Sanskrit hymns from the loudspeakers of various temples, school children in various plumages going to school, later as the night falls drums beating out an elemental two beat from the villages which are way off, perhaps to celebrate a wedding celebration or a festival of one of the pantheistic manifestation of god for the simple folk.

But what I would find hard to like, as I do now, is the amount of frenzied noise and frenetic activity that plagues this concrete jungle, this once an almost village of my youth. The other morning I went on to terrace, i.e., the rooftop of this house and saw a sky swamped with high-rise apartments, billboards and more buildings. Their density has gone up so much that the few glimpses of the rocky horizon have vanished.

For some reason whenever I sit before the computer here I feel quite tired after writing only a few hundred words. So I think I shall go and write in the notebook.