Instruction Manual

Safety, Warranty and Quick Start Guide

^{#aftertimes #happyaftertimes} 

^{#aftertimesaregoodtimes}

^{http://support.aftertimes.com}

^{http://forums.aftertimes.com}

Please read this guide carefully before using this lifestyle.

All information labelled with “*” in this guide is restriction free and must necessarily be added to, erased, modified by subsequent users based on caste, class and other sociocultural lived experiences. 

Thereafter this guide must be uploaded as an open-source document on the interwebs.

^{(After Times® will not claim royalties or copyright. Due credit to be given.)}

Important: Read before making changes to every day practices.

Change is first felt on the skin. Skin may have turned dry or excessively sticky, or some other side effect of *all this* [look around, refer to all this around which language continues to fail to articulate]. Make a note of the change felt on skin over time.

Look at the time. We do not “see” time.

But we see time. Everything is born only to die. Always spiralling downward into decay and endings. Including After Times®

The interim is where the fatness of hope and didacticism, songs in and about the dark times, all the sunlight lives.

In the interim the consumers of After Times® must also work, eat, cook, consume, fornicate, defecate, file taxes, so on, on and on in different order as per convenience and necessity*. 

Change begins with awareness and acknowledgment of the inadequacy of the existing state. 

As such, Commons are mostly commercial. We are nearly off the sharp end of the cliff. The reverse gears lack oil and no longer work. 

Start to make a list of coping mechanisms *

Try not to evangelise. Smugness is so 1950s. 

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Indicative shopping list to supplement After Times ®

• Net shopping bag made of organic and fair-trade cotton from fields in ____
• Unscented candle in a handmade, handblown frosted glass jar
• Something else that is sustainable and organic and from a fancy designer
• Another thing from somewhere across the world but is trending on Reels so must be purchased
• That thing one hates but still wants to remain relatable within the eco-club.
• Other components to run this expensive lifestyle successfully*

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BUT

_{(Modified under the clause allowing unltd changes to document by a hope-less cynic farmer)}

Note to readers of this section: the following tilts more towards making sense of the manifestations of loss in these After Times® There are always silver linings and positive news, etc. but the urgency of just where we are at must be indicated without adding sugar syrup to make the comprehension prettier.

After Times ® the product is an idea, a placebo even, to cope with climate grief. It is a comprehensive suite of programs under categories of Creative Commons License that can assist a person beginning to process the changes to the world and self. Mostly resisting the idea of a physical product, After Times ® is a flexible program that can be customised to fit specific needs. These include cases of climate migration and acute solastalgia. Climate refugees can avail special discounts or apply for grants under the Pay-it-Forward grant program generously funded by our towering patrons from the tech, oil and automobile industries.

This document was slipped into one of those inane chain emails. I am not sure whether it was done intentionally. What was a document like this doing in a poetry chain mail that has been doing the rounds since at least 2026? Besides the point, of course.

The rains were in high surplus this year. The floor of the earth bounces, like walking on sponge that has drunk too much water. Rot has set in, into the roots of the beans.

Climate grief, they say. Ha. It is an event well past these gentle phrases people offer. Pralaya, the end, feels more like it.

But one’s still got to eat – a stupid bodily need that pays no heed to any times.

GAMEPLAN

Personally, my idea is to slow down, to make ritual. Not votives to imagined entities, but something akin to the gradualism hypotheses. 

What has worked: 

• Commelina benghalensis or any other “weed” for a summer salad
• A tomato plant grown from seeds from a tomato that was going to be chopped for rasam. Or mint, that one is easy too. All one needs is a portion of the kingdom of soil.
• Visiting my best friend the fig tree every other day, once a week, at least. 
• Perhaps the reader could take a minute to look at the tree and its citizens outside her house/office/elsewhere.
• The resistance of growing my own food.
• Singing, walking, dissenting, resisting…others that do not feed into the whorl of neo-(current)ism.
• …
• …
• …

Note from After Times ®

The unnamed person who last edited this document deleted the remaining portions of the guide which included User Terms and Conditions of our unique program, Contact details, etc. But in the spirit of retaining our policy of open tech, we welcome such erasure. Therefore, this version of the manual will remain devoid of the rest of the details originally included in this guide to After Times ®

Users of After Times ® can access the full document at http://manual.aftertimes.com

About the Author

Deepa Bhasthi is a writer, translator and farmer-in-progress who lives and works in the hills of Kodagu, Karnataka. Her current research interests are in the areas of sociolinguistics, politics of food and the intersection of land and landscape.