Giving Love A Chance

There were 3 JCBs working on a single section of road in Indiranagar today. The section which contains metro entrance A. I exited the metro today via the same entrance. But I did not go to the road where the JCBs were. I hadn’t had lunch. So I went on the main road under the metro station, to the closest Darshini called Panjuruli.

I asked them what rice items they had. They told fried rice, jeera rice, puliogre, and some other items. I heard “fried rice” and couldn’t imagine eating a vegetarian fried rice. After knocking over and repositioning the uddin vada plate on display, I left Panjuruli. As I stepped out, I walked unconsciously towards 404 Nectar, the salads and pasta place that Swathi and I frequent. But by then the idea of eating some chicken had taken hold of my brain. I decided to move to Arbn Food shawarma place and headed back to the road with JCBs.

My first step onto the road, some liquid fell on my left hand. It didn’t smell or look like crow shit. Maybe just some water from the metro station. And then there were many drops falling all around. It rained yesterday too. Must be a drizzle. I decided to brave it and reach Arbn Food before it started becoming heavier.

It did become quite windy very quickly. Arbn Food had its lights off. I was afraid that they were affected by the LPG crisis. But they were open. As I ordered a ₹140 jumbo shawarma roll, the rain had become quite thick. Arbn Food has a few seats on the roadside for people to sit and eat. I was standing under the retractable awning that extended just a couple of feet off the building. There’s no space inside. But the person making shawarma asked me to come inside and sit as it was raining. I said chalega and stood outside looking at the rain.

The rain had become quite heavy when the shawarma reached my hands. Two people who were waiting for grilled chicken on the seats outside ran to a nearby shop as the large umbrella couldn’t stop the rain drops that were carried horizontally by the wind. Intermittently, the wind brought some rain drops to me and my shawarma too. But I was eating it so quickly that there was no time for the drops to settle in on my shawarma. As I finished spreading mayonnaise all over my fingers and making the butter paper and tissue paper become one, the shawarma came to an end. I washed my hands with the water falling from the awning. Then I walked into the rain to throw the paper waste into the dustbin.

Apsara ice-creams was right around the corner. I walked on the footsteps of shops and reached there. As I turned the corner I could hear loud sounds on tin sheets. I thought some building under construction was falling down. But on the synthetic green carpet in front of Apsara, I saw that there was ice falling. Not snow. Ice. There were many pieces of ice falling. They were round and smaller than the CR2032 coin battery that we bought today morning from MK Retail, for our weighing machine, along with a tawa that supported induction stove, grated coconut, bread, eggs, kadala, avalakki, and goodday milk.

I went inside and there were three friends having ice cream. I ordered a small cup of strawberry cheesecake. And I finished it while watching the three friends get up and order another round of ice creams. They got jackfruit and chickoo. I thought about getting a second cup. Maybe tender coconut? No. I could instead have juice from Kundapura juice center.

I paid ₹90 and sat on one of the chairs outside waiting for the rain to stop. I sent a video of the ice — which was still falling — to Shan Geoites. That’s the Telegram group with Savi, Akash, Swathi, and I. The group is named after the YouTuber who taught us how to make kadala curry.

Once the rain stopped enough, I reached Kundapura, carefully protecting my foot from stepping in the rivers on both sides of the road. The person there cheerily greeted me. I returned the greeting and started looking at the menu plastered from top to bottom of the two pillars of the shop. I decided to have an apple milk shake. The people staffing Kundapura were scrambling around and I gave my order to another person now.

As I turned around I could see the scrambling was related to draining the water on the roadside. One of the staff had gone with a long pipe to the road trying to re-open the entrance to the stormwater drain. Another person came with a cement shaping trowel and started giving instructions to the person with the pipe. After lot of shoveling with the pipe, they succeeded in getting some movement. By then I had finished my apple milk shake, paid ₹65 and started moving towards home.

As I reached the bakery adjacent to Kundapura, the one where we always have egg puffs, some commotion developed there too. A lizard jumped from the shop front onto two people who stood eating something. They jumped and the lizard ran to the nearest pole. Turns out the pole was another person’s pants. I had seen the lizard moving towards this person who was calmly eating what I imagine was a samosa. I took a couple of quick steps to reach the other side of this person and pointed my finger straight at the lizard which had now reached their knee.

They asked me, “What’s it?”

I said, “There!”

“What?”

“Lizard!”

And they jumped too. And the lizard got off. And I walked away. A local dog with a pitbull’s face that was split evenly into grey (green?) and white looked at me from in front of the insurance company’s door.

After managing to not step into any puddles till then I planted my left foot firmly into the puddle that presented to myself as a firm piece of land at the corner between Old Madras Road and Double Road. Maybe I wouldn’t have made that mistake if I wasn’t looking at all the people waiting for catching long distance buses at the petrol pump there and then looking at my watch to confirm if it was indeed Wednesday or it had become a Friday already.

Emboldened by that misstep I decided to walk on the pavement to the side of Old Madras Road towards my home. Halfway into that, I had the opportunity to play Takeshi’s Castle as the pavement was filled with water and the road was filled with water and the only dry space was the edge of the pavement where the bricks were laid vertically. I tested my balance twice on this segment and when I saw that the buses were throwing water to the side on the road ahead, I decided to cross half the road and walk on the median. The median was wider but it ended into tall dividers soon. At that point I could cross the rest of the half of the road, reach the dry-er pavement on the other side, and finally reach the path to home where I would be writing this post.

---

Yesterday I saw a few eye-opening posts on Instagram.

In one Ahmad Abdallah was saying how we need to ask people for help to be able to build community. How we need to inconvenience each other so that we could become connected to each other like in a village.

In the second one Christabel Mintah-Galloway says how not everyone might be in a position to build a deep relationship and how that is okay. And how we shouldn’t confuse shared politics with genuine relationships.

In the third one Niké Aurea says how we shouldn’t expect people to guess what we need and get hurt when we don’t get it, about how we need to communicate and create clarity.

In the fourth one Avi Gill says how making it obvious to people how much you love them is amazing.

In the past week I was feeling very sad about my friendships. I felt like I had made friends who had little reason to like me as a friend. I felt like I had friends who didn’t give much space for me — to express myself, to talk about things I cared about, or to give me what I needed to feel loved.

But it was also true that I had never communicated to these friends with clarity what I wanted. I had been enjoying getting hurt.

It was overwhelming.

But it was also an opportunity for me to grow.

---

The reason I hadn’t had lunch today is that I had gone to Freedom Park for the protest against The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Bill, 2026. Swathi and I had left together from home. We took the metro from Indiranagar and I got down at Central College metro station while Swathi continued to Jayanagar. She was giving a talk about research and activism at the Institute of Public Health, Bengaluru.

I was supposed to eat something near the protest site. But by the time I reached it was 2:50. And a lot of people had come. And the protest started without much delay.

I met and greeted 18 friends there including Shubhangani and Zayan.

Vaishali put me in the speakers list for the protest. I prepared something while listening to others speak. It was something like this (jotted down from memory, could be totally exaggerated):

As a doctor, it is ironic that I’m standing in this venue to speak. The medical and healthcare system has been the most violent to many of the people assembled here. On behalf of the healthcare system, I apologize to everyone here who has faced violence or are scared to approach healthcare.
Even among that violent medical field, there are rays of progressive elements who have come together to develop a correct understanding of gender identity, sexual orientation, and all of that. The WPATH guidelines state that “An individual’s gender identity is an internal identification and experience”. So even science has learned and corrected itself. But none of that has reached our political class.

Now they’re talking about medical board. But let me ask, is there any test to determine a person’s gender identity? There’s none. Doctors have to eventually ask the person about their gender identity. There’s absolutely no role for doctors in this bill.

I do not understand why doctors are not standing up against this bill. Why are the medical associations not releasing statements?

All of the progressive public health groups in Karnataka and India are opposed to this bill. Saravatrika Arogya Andolana, Jan Swasthya Abhiyan, everyone is opposed to it.

This bill is unscientific. It makes no sense. It is anti-public health. It is anti-social justice. And that is what makes it a manuvadi bill.

Oppose this bill.

In school I had no problem giving speeches. But of late, I shake when speaking. The politically correct streak of activism has made me less confident about speaking, especially about social justice. Who am I to speak? Do I have lived experience? Shouldn’t I be passing the mic? Also what words do I use? Can I say “jai bhim”? Too many questions come when I take the mic.

But I tell myself “it is not about me”. If I can speak from a medical perspective or a public health perspective, that has some effect. Indeed, today, after I spoke, it became like “lawyers have spoken, doctors have spoken, everyone is against the bill”. So I felt I did the right thing by just straight up saying “ok” and speaking when called up.

The moment Zayan saw me afterwards, he said I spoke well. That’s when I stopped shaking. Later Apeksha too told me that I spoke well.

Although the permission was till 5, the protest went on till 6. And that’s when I took the metro to Indiranagar.

---

Around noon today, I broke the rule I set up for my own safety and entered a debate in a WhatsApp group. It was again modern medicine vs traditional medicine. Since I spent weeks discussing this in mfc e-group, I feel responsible to share a summary of my findings whenever this topic comes up anywhere. It’s another of the self-inflicted torture I take on.

As if by karma, when I got out of the underground metro station at Central College and reached network coverage, my WhatsApp crashed with all the messages. The database got corrupted. I could restore history from a backup from February 26. It cleanly erased all messages between then and today. Amazing.

I wanted to put a status telling people about this. I thought of writing “I can’t hold you accountable for things you’ve messaged me because I lost my whatsapp history”.

But then I put “Lost my whatsapp chat history. So feel free to resend all the “I love you” messages.”

---

Love requires space. Love requires space for mistakes. Love requires space for alternative truths. Love requires space for growth. Love requires space for negative emotions. Love requires space for difficult conversations. Love requires space for inconveniences.

Almost four years after I started exploring the framework of love, I’m finally beginning to understand the basics of love.