Category: Why don’t we care?

Compassion pah … humbug

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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.

Post Brexit

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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.

This article illuminates

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.

I feel young again. Ha ha

Can we find her?

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Isn’t she pretty?

Stolen

… 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.

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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.

Meet Trixie

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

We’ve listed details here

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.

Vancouver and the island are great

Shopping with a purpose

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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.’

Another case for the missing dharma detective.

Bloody typical

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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.

Oxygen supplies low

Photos and summary of the oxygen problems

There were unfulfilled plans to build more units for creating more oxygen.

It’s been unpredictable

Rural areas hit

So what’s the Government got to do with it?

another good summary

or a crime against humanity

I would be so stressed out if my poor Manjula was here and having to deal with this, now that’s a weird sense of relief. What a topsy turvy world.

What a mess

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That’s been with us for a thousand years.

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.

Manjula’s kind

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more on kindness

I hope I’m getting there.

KINDNESS 
by Naomi Shihab Nye

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.

This is another direct lift, aka homage to the great gathering work of Maria Popova and her brain pickings, clearly hers are not slim pickings!

Children riding two wheelers

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a new problem in Mysore are children riding scooters (two wheelers means motorised) with the obvious dangerous consequences.

A policeman stops three children age twelve on a scooter. Two of them run away (not a lot of respect for the Police) as he’s asking for personal details from the one who’s riding.

The Policeman telephones the father and demands a bribe or he’ll report it aunders an offence. A bribe of 5000Rs is paid. That’s the equivalent of half of someone’s monthly pay.

Bribery and corruption is inherent. Does it have the desired effect of stopping dangerous under-age driving? who knows?

Sad and Sorry

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Driving on a double road this morning a ten month old bullock stepped into the path of my Ambassador

A group quickly developed, as is usual in India.

Satish came to handle the situation. Compensating the owner with 4000 Rs (£40) in theory for the poor bullock’s leg to be fixed up and he to be taken to the old cow’s home.

But I wonder if the owner will just pocket the money and sell the poor bullock to become meat even thought just recently that became illegal.

I’m really sad and sorry.