Why this exists

I have been keeping notes on civic problems for about three years. Water, garbage collection, one very long saga about a ward committee that met twice. The notes are good. Nobody has read them, including me, because a note you never revisit is just a more organised way of forgetting.

So: this.

The rule I am setting for myself

Everything here carries one of two labels, and I am going to be annoying about it.

Gutte Speaks is opinion. It is me arguing something, usually from incomplete information, often wrong in at least one place. Gutte Reports is sourced — every claim carries a tier, from T1 (a gazette notification, a court ruling, actual government data) down to T5 (I saw it, or someone told me).

The reason to keep those apart is not politeness. It is that the moment you let opinion borrow the credibility of sourced reporting, you have nothing left to offer anyone. Plenty of civic accounts have made that trade. It works for about eighteen months.

What I am not doing

I am not aggregating headlines and calling it journalism. I am not going to pretend I have no opinions about the state of Bangalore’s stormwater drains, because I absolutely do — see The pothole is not the problem — and pretending otherwise would just be a less honest kind of bias.

I am also not building a platform yet. There is a whole design for one: people take positions on civic content, cities get compared against each other, contributors earn their way into curation. It is a good design. It also assumes an audience that does not exist, so it waits.

The thing I want to get better at

Organising problems. Not solving them — organising them, which is the part everybody skips. Most civic complaints are three problems wearing a trenchcoat, and you cannot fix any of them until someone separates them out. I want to get good at that in public, where being wrong is cheaper than it is in private.

I have a half-written piece on Gutte on ward committees that has been sitting at 600 words since March. Maybe publishing this forces it out.

Sab chalta hai. Par likhna zaroori hai.