Slivers of paper, pencil sharpenings, crisp packets,
Neighbours blame the inconsiderate young people but let’s look a little closer….
Yes it’s adults with babies dumping their diapers (nappies)
A bag full goes in our bin to be collected by the city corporation (MCC).
Why can’t the people give their rubbish to the MCC who collect most mornings?
The fading Firangi (foreign pensioner) chooses to clear it up. My neighbours blame the students and it’s partially true but on closer inspection — it’s the babies shit now smeared all around by the dogs — who’ve adopted the park that’s made it worse.
So all ages are responsible together with their team mates, the dogs…. It’s not just due to the corporation not clearing up. People need to learn to put things in a bin and not expect other to clear up after them.
We had similar problems in the U.K. in the past.
The keep Britain tidy logo
So there was a countrywide campaign, decades ago to stop people littering.
I’ve tried to help people become active participants in the decisions affecting them throughout my life.
I’ve worked to develop and improve their organisations as facilitator and manager since the early 80s.
Initially this was in NGOs and government but later in my career i was guide: consultant and trainer working with MNCs (multi-national companies) and by developing partnerships.
Occasionally, here I’ll post opinion pieces and insights from my experiences. These are for anyone but particularly young people and especially members of our reflective space group here in Mysore.
With dancing elephants we introduced an award scheme. Years later we found an incredible coincidence.
Sometimes things were meant to be.
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Manjula’s Library
There’s a great range of books including those on learning, management, history, philosophy and education in Manjula’s library at our house aka Mysore Bed and Breakfast. My favourites are the children’s picture books which are of course for all ages!
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My MPhil was a research degree in Critical Management undertaken at Lancaster University in the 1990s
In my studies and practice, I focused on human behaviour in different contexts. When I reached my 60s, I realised I’ll never understand human behaviour 🤪
I’ve helped develop hundreds of projects over the years. As a facilitator no one probably associates them with me.
I just had to post again. Earlier I reflected my concern about the lack of care and compassion (see last posting) when I stumbled across this photo and dickens quote
Here’s someone’s extreme lack of care and compassion preferring that we don’t support people in poverty, who are clearly undeserving feckless oiks.
Un-bloody-believable.
Except this attitude is all too familiar, but I expect that these people (I’ve made it anonymous as we don’t want to create an internet teacup storm) aren’t demonstrating the slightest bit of self awareness by posting such crap on an insignificant page of old London photographs.
Maybe they haven’t got the slightest idea that our system is slanted in favour of the rich and powerful and blaming the powerless feeds into a narrative that maintains this unsavoury order.
Obviously I am naive about how people just accept the demonisation of poor people. I feel a Brexit moan coming on. Get real old people.
I write this having just returned (I live in India, remember?) from a one room dwelling that would have been no better and probably far worse than where those in the photograph lived.
The people are not to blame for the cycle of deprivation or their lot in life.
In my distorted view. It’s our duty in life to work out how best we can be kind and that includes showing care and compassion with a more equitable share of the resources we have at our disposal.
Assuming the immigration bureaucrats (long story) let me remain in my adopted country, we’ll continue to help where we can, through Manjula’s Mysore.
Kalyuva Mane is a school we support to help children who’ve experienced difficulties in their young lives.
I would joke that there was life after Brexit in the U.K. as an island old people’s home.
I take it back — there’s not enough people to staff it or tomatoes to feed the residents. .
But it’s worse: the inhumanity: commodification of people care, indifference of the owners, ignorance and inaction of the families, callousness of a privatised only-care-for-the-rich system, means you’re dumped into concentrated carelessness.
We shouldn’t be surprised but why should we or how can we care?
Just make sure you,’re not feeble and alive to have to enjoy the mouldy fruits of the system
I sometimes scoff about extended supportive family networks. I shouldn’t but I do question whether they shouldn’t also be on life support. The fact is it’s the compassion and care amplified through people connections to each other we sorely need injecting to revitalise our communities
Me as a 66 year old am about to go care for an eight year old that helps blow life into this bundle of walking cobwebs.
… in Mount Pleasant Vancouver. Please pass this information on to help locate her. there’s a reward of cash or a free cycle tour and accommodation in Mysore, flight not included. 🤭
I’d planned to bring her back to London and then onto India after she was given to me by my son while holidaying in Canada in July 2022.
Originally a single gear from over ten years ago a three speed hub Shimano gears and coaster brake were added. The gear control on the handle bar shows 1-2-3 and is scratched. After a trip to Vancouver island we cycled the goose cycle trail.
There’s more of our history here.
Stands out from a crowd
She’s distinctive with her yellow frame, white wheels and pretend leather saddle. She has a single front rim brake.
I’ve now flown back but can arrange to pick her up or have her transported when we find her.
My son Oliver Farrell is the proprietor of ‘Feel Good Everyday’ near the railway (train) station in Vancouver and can be contacted there or online. Please email me at sfindia@gmail.com
Manufactured by Regal Bicycles in Toronto, she was known as ‘Count’ over ten years ago as a single gear fixie but now she has the addition of three speed gears and coaster brake and so we named her Trixie
I lead city Mcycle tours and host Mysore Bed and Breakfast in South India.
My experience was otherwise very positive in Canada.
Don’t consider Tanuja and I to be sensible shoppers.
If our trip to the nursery is anything to go by, we’re the sort to go to the supermarket for staples and come back with puddings, the exotic rather than the plain, the icing while neglecting the cake.
We’ve got a great selection of flowers but our eyes were distracted by the shapely coloured and aromatic roses.
The problem is, as we knew, but didn’t care, they’re not a lot of use for the new Manjula’s garden in the park.
Why? you might ask.
Because people pick the flowers in the morning for their puja rituals.
So I thought I’d create a mini rose garden inside our gate.
I wish I’d done it for Manjula a few years ago as she would have loved it.
I started writing this post in a light-hearted jokiness way, only to realise this…..
I placed some of the roses out the front door but inside our gate. Within less than one day someone had stolen the roses.
Clearly these people haven’t any thought that the flowers are there for the enjoyment of all, rather than the selfish ritualistic needs of a few.
We’ve yet to plant out our flowers in Manjula’s garden and I seriously wonder if any of the flowers will survive, if I don’t employ a 24/7 guard.
It’s even worse with the roses in the next park. They are carefully nurtured by the gardeners but people go in and steal the whole plant.
We need some English old fashioned park signs ‘don’t pick the flowers.’
The virus situation goes from bad to — we’ve got rid of it, to —- disaster.
Leaving things until the eleventh hour, no … it’s more like one moment before midnight is not a sensible policy but it’s standard practice. No lessons learned from the first wave, infrastructure collapsing, shortage of beds, no oxygen in many hospitals, exhausted staff, people confused.
Indian politicians fail their communities. They have other, presumably more important things to worry about.
Now we have a lockdown in all but name and it’s piling confusion onto inconsistency onto chaos.
Is the instruction to close most businesses for all of everyday in which case it would be a lockdown or just when there’s a curfew?
The govt diktat is totally confusing. If it’s just overnight and weekends. What’s the point it’ll have minimal effect on the virus. If it’s everyday it’s a lock down a term they don’t politically wish to use.
The police statement adds to the confusion with the statement “it will be normal from tomorrow” so there will or will not be a lockdown/curfew from tomorrow. Of course it probably means that closure of businesses will seem like normal tomorrow.
Clear as mud.
It’s the day before the non-lockdown, I’m just back from cycling, with nobody wearing masks in the villages, most wearing them back in Siddarthanagar. I passed a wedding. In a field presumably outdoors (but in tents) in response to the situation but the limit to the gathering is supposed to be 50! There’s almost that number already preparing for the event and the guests are yet to arrive.
Recently Sowbhaghya asked why a shop keeper wasn’t wearing a mask as he should be, he declared there was no coronavirus here.
The combination of poor confusing communication from authority, default to deference and the anything goes attitude of the Wild West, is part of why we’re here.
Here’s useful guardian articles summarising how we might have got into this stupid situation.
Already people are beginning to help. There’s an appeal here or Manjula and I will be making a direct donation. Contact me if you wish to join in, tours@mycycle.co
I’m from the U.K./Britain/England/the North/Yorkshire… We often joke about the north/south divide, I mention how the British pronounce words oddly, sometimes (?) to hide their French origin, I’ll explain how my accent and the words I use enables others to place me geographically and allocate the class I was born into and then of course there’s Brexit.
The U.K. becomes more the disunited kingdom by the day, has a rich pedigree and mongrel history. There’s the rub, the divisions we recognise are far more ingrained than we realise and have been established over a thousand years.
The divisions we see, the power games and the ascendancy of certain groups, represented by ‘The Tories’ now seems to be breaking it apart.
I recommend this book . It reveals, in surprising ways, how the established patterns of behaviour are difficult to break, we continue to adapt our national house, following the foundations and seem unable to create any real and lasting change.
Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness. How you ride and ride thinking the bus will never stop, the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness, you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore, only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread, only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say It is I you have been looking for, and then goes with you everywhere like a shadow or a friend.
Me and MYCycle 