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Masala Inc 15

Overview of my manifesto to build a good web and a peek into my new work, Heartland

🌱 2022-07-25


Digital Manifesto #

  • Make things with personality
  • Use tools that will work even a decade later
  • Open better than closed. Closed better than it never existing. [1]
  • Build your own garden, an open and welcoming place, and break the hegemony of walled gardens.
  • Own your data. [2]
  • Document your mind.
  • Don’t load unnecessary junk. A side effect to not loading unnecessary junk, a fast website.
  • Access is a civil right. Inaccessibility is poor craftsmanship [3]

For years I have been planning a trip into the heartlands of Andhra Pradesh — East Godavari. Generations of my family made a life for themselves on the shores of Godavari. A lot of them made their way back to it cold embrace on their death.

Godavari has never been just a river to me. When I was a kid, the train would tremble with excitement when it made its way across the river. One could hear the river whisper secrets. Secrets of the kind that families leave unspoken when they meet each other in weddings and funerals.

Art has always been a way for me to peek at the inner workings of the world. Of figuring out the unsaid. I wanted to see what lurked under that landscape. The stories lost with generations of my family. Struggles, subjugation and survival.

Ask any artist and they would be first to tell you. Never share your work prematurely. This work could evolve and grow into something else. By putting it out there, I could be limiting it's scope. But, this space is my garden. We can all watch this idea evolve together.

(this is a pretty generous dump of pictures. i haven't killed my darlings yet)

heartlands

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  1. https://adactio.com/articles/1522/ ↩︎

  2. the indieweb played a big part early on in putting to words what I thought was missing in cookie cutter, dog-eat-dog internet of today. ↩︎

  3. https://twitter.com/marcysutton/status/1545440558004375552 ↩︎


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