And in other updates

Today I met Sanjay Kadaveru, a senior from IITM Jamuna. He has been invovled with a lot of interesting groups -- TIE (a entrepreneur network), the Pan IIT group (rediff has a lot of articles on the meet). More recently he has gotten involved with a group that's trying to use Indian diaspora (mainly N.American) to strengthen engineering education in India. The last is of some interest to me as there may be a possibility to do a consulting gig of the sort that I'm doing now at Arghyam.

The next month and further out is a little busier than usual on the social front. For new years' there's a party that is held at the apartment complex (Most big apartment complexes do this). I *never* really have fun at New Years but well, ets give it one more shot. There's a dinner with my IITM branchies to meet up with a visiting branchie from the US. There's a marriage of Shankar's (another branchie) brother in late Jan. In Feb we have my cousin's family in town. My parents plan to visit in April/May.

I have a very strange cough currently. I don't feel very sick or unenergitic, but when I have a coughing fit, it feels like I'm coughing my heart out and I have a scary feeling like I can't breathe. I got some medication from a doc but it doesn't seem to be helping.

I get some funny comments on the blog occasionally. Check out this one, third one in the list, on the post "Coaching Rohit". Sometime back I got a pretty nasty but funny one which I deleted. It was on the other blog on this post, which I guess was a kinda vulnerable post. You'll have to read the post to understand the comment which was "Sure. Here's one. Shut yer yap". (Well, screw you, you anonymous pommie lout, go out a beat up a rival football fan now ! )

The fun never stops at Arghyam ..

We fixed a date for the launch of the portal at the PMs residence in Delhi for 12th January. TERI (mentioned in a previous post) will be launching an energy portal at the same time. I helped a little bit in drafting notes for the PM's speech and a mail to Sam Pitroda to check out the website :-))))). I won't be going to Delhi for the launch :-(. It was a very intense last week but now things have lightened up and the portal seems to be in shape. You can have a preview of it at www.indiawaterportal.org. Note that everything is not yet done (Latin text signifies placeholders!) but would be happy to get feedback and bug notes.

Last weekend we met with two people from the Gates Foundation who were visiting. We had a good discussion and I learnt something about how the Gates Foundation functions. Very interesting. Myself and Priya also went to a party at my manager Sunita's place. Met a bunch of older friends, nice catching up. Today we had someone senior from Nestle come in to work to talk about their corporate social responsibility program but I skipped that.

The 2nd Annual Arghyam conference (invitation only!) is scheduled for late Feb. The focus will slowly shift away from the portal as it stabilizes, and things will get focussed on the conference. I don't know how much I will get invovled with the conference.

I'm enjoying this gig. Its the most fun I've had and the most productive I've felt for such a short span of time. It's kindof a dream job for someone with my inclinations and aptitudes. My rolodex has expanded *a lot*, besides Arghyam people, I've met bunch of people visiting Arghyam, and people at eGovernments.org and apparatusmedialab.com, Arghyam's technology partners.

Coaching Rohit

Pix: With Siddhu, my sister Rajini and her husband Naresh
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I have only one comment on my major 'vision' post !
I'm quite surprised. Even the regular commenters gave it a miss. If you think the vision is flawed, say so. I can take it !

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As I mentioned, the major reason for going to Vizag was to spend some time with my nephew helping him with his preparation for the engineering entrances. We mainly concentrated on Organic Chemistry and Permutations and Combinations and Probability, as he had missed these chapters at school due to illness. Most of the time we spent on Organic but nevertheless progress was quite slow, we only covered Alkanes, Alkenes and Alkynes. It was quite fun for me to get re-aquainted with a lot of the old stuff. Does anyone remember the Corey House alkane synthesis, Markovnikov (and anti-markovnikov) addition across a double bond and triple bond, IUPAC nomenclature ( 2,3 dimethyl buteane), benzene resonance structures.... It reminded me that (atleast part) of fashioning a new career for myself could involve working with high school and engineering stuff, as I enjoy the material. One of the things that I have on my agenda which I haven't done is meeting Sridhar Subramaniam from our Coromandel colony in Vizag who runs a engineering coaching center in Bangalore and is setting up a school too.
Getting back to topic, some of the material was quite difficult for me, the level of the coaching seems to have gone up and people do a lot of reaction mechanisms and stuff. Also Chemistry is a lot of mugging up and my nephew kept asking me 'why is this so?' and I felt bad to say: 'forget about that, just mug it'.
I could see that part of Rohit's problem was being able to plan and manage time, and being able to estimate realistically so that you don't get disappointed when you can't carry out what you estimated. I would've been as bad as he at that age and its only much later that I learnt a little (and a lot more to learn). I think there's a lot of inefficient studying happening among the high-school students and they would gain a lot from training in time manangement and planning.
Its not all fun being a coacher I found. You have to try to understand and adjust to your coachees level and aptitude/temperment. Occasionally you may get frustrated and show it which might actually get you results or might just discourage the person.

Siddhu, my other nephew (here and here) was also there, so I hung out with him a little. He enjoys shopping and is good at at, so I went shopping with him and bought me a cargo pants and a Lotto brand flip-flop.

Sajini -- to answer your comment, yes Rohit is quite thin due to two bouts of illnesses. But generally seems quite healthy and not sickly. He's grown tall, taller than Siddhu now.

I had my trusty New Balances stolen when I left them outside my parents' apartment ! These of Honolulu Marathon fame. Oh well, one mustn't get sentimental and attached. Someone is is hopefully gaining some value from them.

I had an interesting talk session with Mr. Vishweswara Rao who was a colleague of my dad at Coromandel. He now runs a small chemical plant. He's a very smart and energitic person. They had a lot of trouble selling what they made (diammomium phosphate, a fertilizer) because the market had fallen out of the business. They were in pretty bad shape but the man was able to change tracks midway to start making something else (calcium phospate derivate if I remember right) which is used in the material that is fed to domestic animals for which there is a much better market. He also branched out into engineering consultancy and has some patents to his name and is setting up a plant for somebody in Egypt (!). He felt that biodiesel was a risky area, and that another related area (generating power by burning or processing biomass) was much more interesting and that several commercially viable technologies were coming online. He also has a (rare) ability to view things at a high conceptual level and was commenting on the folly of a civilization that uses a 100 tonne car to transport a 100 Kg man, the energy cycle (does the total energy that go into making a solar cell exceed the energy output of the cell over its working life ?), stuff like that. He has travelled a bit and recommended the Dead Sea as a particularly striking place. I came away from the discussion with my head buzzing :-). Next time I go to Vizag I plan to visit their plant.

The other highlight of the trip was spending two days at Cheepurapalli near Vizianagaram, about 3 hours by bus from Vizag, with a social worker, P.D. Kameswara Rao. Hope to cover that in another post

Major Celebrity Sighting

Amartya Sen, R.K. Pachauri and Nandan Nilenkani at one go.

I had mentioned that I had got an opportunity to go to a talk by Amartya Sen through Arghyam. This was at a conference being organized by TERI in Bangalore. I went for it today. I didn't find Sen's talk too stimulating, but I kinda expected that from reading his books which are pretty dense, and which I find I am unable to absorb very well. However his warmth and sense of humour showed and I was quite happy to have the opportunity to hear him talk.
R.K.Pachauri is the head of The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), which is a very hi-profile org in the NGO sector. The chap is also very hi-profile, and was named to an India Today list of most powerful people in India. However I got a sense from someone whose judgement I respect, that TERI has become 'too successful' kind of thing -- it now hobnobs a lot with the government, does all this policy and conference stuff and perhaps is not as passionate or honest as it might have been.
Nandan Nilekani (the CEO of Infosys) was at the talk with his wife Rohini. He looks exactly as he does in his photos. He didn't talk, was in the audience.
At a panel discussion that I squeezed into prior to Sen's talk, there was 'Kentaro Toyama', 'Group leader for Technologies for Emerging Markets, Microsoft India'. Quite intriguing to see a Japanese in a MSFT India role and at a development conference. I missed the earlier part of the discussion, but he talked briefly towards the end. Kinda exactly the personality I would expect from a Microsoftie, with both good and bad points. Lot of energy and drive and freshness and well turned out. However not much substance. Not that I think MSFTies have no substance, but I would expect that at a development conference they would not have anything of value to say, and that's what I found :-)
I went to the conference with some scepticism, as I've developed a degree of cynicism about business-as-usual development work. By which I mean the NGO scene is so huge in India and the funding is so vast that it has become a sector by itself, not requiring any special commitment, but more like a career option. And there is an immorality in all the 5-star conferences and flying around by development workers. Anyway, the conference didn't make a strong impression either way. The people there (from the very superficial observation) did not strike me as particularly interesting or serious people, but I didn't see anything particularly bad either.

Didn't take a camera so didn't get pics, but anyway was quite difficult to get good pics.

At work ..

Yesterday we had Rajesh Shah of Oakland CA of Blue Planet Run and Peer Water Exchange come in to the office. Today Eklavya Prasad came in to talk about Megh Pyn Abhiyan, a low profile but very brave project implementing rain water harvesting in some of the poorest and dangerous areas of Bihar. This coming weekend Rohini is going to get us tickets to go to a talk by Amartya Sen. As you can see this job is fantastic exposure. Now if I can actually get some work done, and we can get this portal launched ...

Happy Birthday

Happy Birthday to you
Happy Birthday to you
Happy Birthday dear Sajini and Nandita
Happy Birthday to youuuu....

A vision for myself

Much to my surprise :-), my thoughts about long-term work are converging. The below is what might work for me. Since I have the tendency to change my mind 5 times a day, this may not go anywhere, but I think it will.

I would like to work as an outside consultant or on contractual basis for short term assignments. This fits my 'short attention span' kind of personality. I also am energized by working on clear and meaningful deliverables in short timespans (though I also get stressed out due to the same). Consulting kind of work seems to fit my personality in other ways. I have usually felt underqualified, overqualified and frustrated (all at the same time) at most of the jobs I have done :-). I think this kind of work will keep me happy rather than a corporate job. I will get to meet lot of different people and different work environments, which stimulates me.

I have several things that I can do in this kind of a consulting role. One is 'project management'. The job I am doing at Arghyam is a perfect example of that. They have a very clear deliverable (putting up the water portal), very clear deadline and timeframe (the PM is scheduled to be launching it in January). They have done a lot of work already but they needed a central person to pull it together and keep the project on track and keep people on the same page. This kind of thing seems to fire me up and get me going. I also helped Timbaktu to put together their Annual Report (read it!) and enjoyed that. I would love to be able to do this for more organizations. There is an organization called the Project Management Institute and I can join them and get some qualifications to make myself sound more impressive.
One thing that I found on the sabbatical is that 'ordinary people' (ie. non IT, non big city people) are tremendously appreciative if someone of that background tries to contribute something to them. It feels very good. I would love to work some of the time in those kind of environments instead of always following the money to the big cities and IT companies.
Another is the kind of thing I did at Bijapur. I would love to travel to different colleges and interact with the students and raise their awareness and capabilities. On the Vizag trip I interacted very briefly with a Physics teacher at Timpany school. She was really happy that I took the time to talk to her, and I have been interested in curriculum development and teacher development kind of things. So if I can do some stuff like that too, it would be great.

Like Arghyam and Timbaktu I can continue to work with social work organizations. This is criticall important to the vision. I can multiplex working for corporates and working for non-profits in a ratio that works for me and keep me really happy and fulfilled. Of course working for non-profits would be much less renumerative, and I might do things for free too.

Doing consulting means that after x months I can take a break, theoritically for as long as I want. This is *great* and something that I critically seem to need.

I would love to continue writing when I get the time, either through blogging or some other avenue. If I can get paid for it too, it would be really fulfilling and fit in perfectly with the overall picture. In the ideal dream picture I would have multiple income streams coming from doing multiple things that I like and at any given time I could be concentrating on any one of them.
I also want to spend a decent amount of time on personal development kind of things. I did a Landmark refresher course recently by the way but it didn't do much for me unfortunately. I want to take a Vipassana course and do more such things.
To complete the picture: I have to see how this fits with family life (in principal looks okay). Also would like to give more attention to keeping physically healthy.

Drawbacks:
There would have to be a degree of marketing involved which I am not so hot at. However I think I can manage as I have a decent network and as the job market is hot and I would need just a few projects a year to keep me occupied. Also in many roles, companies would love to have a consultant come in if they don't think there is a long term role, and since I want to do things short-term too, it would be an excellent match. I think I won't make a lot of money given my laid back style, but something I have learnt during the sabbatical is how much I am willing to sacrifice on the money side to keep the current lifestyle going :-)

I think while doing odd projects for social work groups is very nice, it might get frustrating after a while. One cannot see real impact of ones work in this way. So I might have to get more serious about social work at some next stage (or give it up altogether, rather than do it in a half-half way).

I am very kicked by how much the tech industry is achieving in India. Every day there are new reports of new chips or softwares coming out of India. I do wish I could be a part of a core team that can deliver on a complex, useful product. The above vision can't make this happen.

This vision does not fulfil occasional strong longings to do entrepreneurial stuff like biodiesel. That is something I should live with. I'm basically not very entrepreneurial and going that way would in any case come with a good possibility of failure. I also don't have any money to invest myself so that makes things harder.

I also desperately want to travel, and that may not work that great in this scheme of things. I think it will give me the chance to travel to places (esp. smaller places in India), but not much scope to travel abroad. However if I make some money, I can travel on my own, since my time is in my control. (I have a vague plan to do a long trip to the US and park in all the friends' places in turn :-) ).

So ???!!!!
Whatcha think. Give me your feedback.

I'm back

.. from Vizag and to start with, two off-topic posts over there


Cheers

Pix: Cutting a cake on my sister's wedding anniversary which happened while I was in Vizag

Bijapur talk contd.

Okay here's the detailed dope on the Bijapur talk.
I uploaded a whole lot of photos into a Yahoo album , which comes across nicely as a slideshow. I haven't been able to upload the videos due to a technical problem.

The college is called Dr. PG Halakatti College of Engineering and is run by the BLDE Trust which runs a whole lot of educational institutions in Bijapur. There are a small group of young enthusiastic lecturers there who do a lot of extra stuff and they basically set up my talk. These guys really impressed me. They are quite happy to be in Bijapur instead of migrating to Bangalore. At the same time they are energetic and enthusiastic and want to do something good for the local students. They have been running a placement service for the students in the college and in that connection they called me. They put me up in a nice hotel there (I didn't expect such a nice place). On the first day I met the principal and then sat with them and discussed the talk and logistics. The talk was restricted to CS, IT and EC students but still that would have been abot 150-200 students so we decided to do the course over 2 days, repeating the same thing for a fresh bunch of students on the second day. There was a common session on the first day for all the students to get things started.
The talk was about various things related to getting a job: background about software companies, the written test, group discussion, interview, resume, on-campus and off-campus recruiting. I had spent some time on various websites so I got to know a little about about some of the details of the interviewing process. One thing I was happy about was how effectively these students are using the web to help them prepare for jobs -- pretty much all the question papers of all the companies can be found online. Its a great way to share information so that everybody benefits and improves and the overall level goes higher.
At the training session, another person, Mukund, also gave a talk. He talked about a technical topic (networking). He was one of my reports at Juniper, and he was the person who put me in touch with the people at Bijapur.
On the first day the sessions did not go that well. The students were pretty quiet and did not particapate much. I came up with some stuff on the fly to get them to particapate more and it helped a little. Nevertheless the session was quite successful and the feedback (we passed out a feedback questionnaire) was quite good. The next day I emphasised more on involving the people and the response was much better. At the end of the day we did a mock group discussion with some of the students particapating and the rest looking on. It went very well and I think people really benefited from seeing hands-on how the dynamics in a group discussion work.

Some notes on the photographs: there are two photographs with a group of us standing on the road -- this is the group of lecturers who organized the whole thing.
There are some photographs of me and Mukund interacting with the students during a tea break. Priya was not very appreciative of some of these photos :-)
I feel quite mortified seeing some of the photographs of me talking -- my posture is terrible. I have a particularly bad posture when I hold the mic out to someone to talk -- I put my hand on my hip and thrust my tummy out in a very ungainly way. Defiintely a learning opportunity for me. The beard looks very bad in some views.

I think the students rarely get exposure to someone from industry and someone with some level of polish and communication so overall I think it was a pretty good experience from them, both from some hard facts as well as the general exposure.

I came back from the talk on something of a high, but haven't pursued this direction much because of getting involved with Arghyam. However I feel quite attracted to the idea of being like an independant consultant. I feel I don't have the drive and people-ness to be the leader of an organization, and at the same time I have enough thinking skills (ahem, Arvind) and general smarts and ambition to do something good. So an independant consultant seems like a good midway option.

There was one more interesting aspect to the experience -- the situation of having to be in control or to keep the attention of a roomful of people. I'm sure you would agree that this could be quite an unnerving experience. Luckily these students were amenable people (if not downright silent) so I didn't have that much stress. One of the things that helped me was having done the Landmark courses. Not from learning from the courses per se, but from watching how the course leader managed the whole experience. I was completely dazzled by the way the did it and unconsciously learnt a lot and adopted it as my gold standard. I felt a couple of times during the Bijapur course when I was hitting the high spots that I was like a Landmark Forum leader myself and dazzling the kids. Not that difficult actually since as I said these were people without a lot of outside exposure, but nevertheless a very good feeling and yes, good for the ego.

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I'm off to Vizag tomorrow (today actually, its late Sunday night here), will probably get a couple of posts in from there. Till then.

Vishwanath's position

We had a very animated discussion today at the talk with Vijayalakshmi of Development Alternatives. Vishwanath, one of the people at Arghyam posited the following (I am condensing a lot of animated discussion and argument):

The background 'juggernaut' phenomenon that is playing out in India is urbanization and rural migration. This has historically happened in all countries, and we too can expect a 80-20 mix soon, from the current 35-65. So all development and government action must be taken in the context of this phenomenon. It could be as extreme as cutting out a lot of the aid and investment that goes to villages and instead spending that on facilitating the smooth absorption of the migrant workers in the city and the planning and implementation of cities to be sustainable equitable places to live and work.

This is a hugely subversive statement (for people like me, and many many others) who have taken as obvious that "India lives in her villages" - kind of thing, and that huge amount of money and effort can and should go into the development of villages. But the basic argument above seems quite sound on the face of it.

Something to try to absorb and verify.

Vishwanath is a very nice guy. His background is rainwater harvesting, here are some of his stuff:

http://www.rainwaterclub.org
http://rainwaterharvesting.wordpress.com

Finally ..

Here are some 'teasers' of my talk.

Here is a short video
The video was taken with a phone camera and the resolution is really low, so needs to be seen at very small size. The audio on it is mostly impossible to make out. The video clip uses some funny 3gp file format, but it runs with QuickTime for me (would be good to know if someone tries it and has a problem).

More to come hopefully, unless I hear screams of protest from people after watching the video :-)

Timbaktu Organic is seeking investment

Timbaktu Organic is one of the projects of Timbaktu and notable because it is aimed at financial sustainability instead of working on philanthrophy. Ashis, who I talked about earlier, and Dinesh, the snake man, (among many other things), both work on Timbaktu Organic.
Timbaktu Organic wants to raise some of the money it needs in the form of loans from investors who believe in this kind of work. The loans will pay 5% interest. They did an earlier round of loan financing when they started working, and raised about 6 Lakhs then. Since then a lot of work has gone in and several successes demonstrated. They now are trying to raise 24Lakhs more through the loan route. The formal proposal with all the info is at the website www.timbaktu.org, see under the "Whats New" section. I hope someone is interested. I am planning to put in a little.

PS: Ahem, if you wanted to do something about my Mutyalappa post and just didn't get around to doing it, I'm still waiting ...

First few days at work

First few days at work at Arghyam have been good.
On the portal launch we made a bunch of progress and have a kind of working plan for the next month. However this has only made clear that we are woefully short of time :-). As I was prepared for, I stepped into a tough situation, but one of the reasons I signed up for the job was for the simulation of the adrenaline rush of a software company, so bring it on !
Things are already heating up a lot and I've not been able to tie about other loose ends (like blogging about my talk at Bijapur!) like I'd hoped.

There is almost 1 talk/meeting a day at Arghyam with an outside person, so it promises to be very stimulating. Already I ran into someone I knew a long while back. His name is Anand Krishnaswamy and I knew him through my cousin Naini, from Chennai. He is now with L-RAMP an entrepreneurship mentoring program based in Chennai. He visited Arghyam to explore partnership possibilities. We had lunch together after his visit to catch up. Yesterday we had an interesting person called Anand Jalakam who has a long background of field work in the area of water, including 14 something years implementing rural drinking water solutions as an employee of the goverment of Andhra Pradesh. That discussion was somewhat contentious with several disagreements, and I came away confused, which is not bad -- I have some more way to go to get a handle on the issues.
Today someone from a well-known NGO called Development Alternatives is going to be coming.

Updates from here and there

--Another milestone, though somewhat dubious -- according to Google, I have crossed 10,000 'page impressions' on the blogs (combined) yesterday. I'm not sure how they define a 'page impression', and the ClustrMap at the bottom of this page shows a much lower number. Nevertheless, it is some metric and it passed a milestone !

--I leave on Monday for a 10 day trip to Vizag. The primary purpose is to coach my nephew for taking the engineering entrances. Really. Although its been many years back since I studied the stuff, I do remember some of it and I have a sense of how to approach things. So I feel that I should try to contribute something. When his elder brother was taking the exams I was at my old job and didn't have the time to do anything much and felt bad about it. So feels very good to do this now. I coached him earlier when I was in Vizag in July and he says he benefited from it. The other thing I plan to do while at Vizag is meet a social worker called P D Kameswara Rao near Vizianagaram. Balaji, who has been keeping an benevolent avuncular eye on me during my sabbatical in case I do something stupid, has always been keen that I meet this person.
And might try to meet one or more Timpany friends there. And trying to squeeze some other stuff too. Lets see.
Oh, and it would be great if I could give my placement talk to some colleges while at Vizag. If someone knows somebody at an engineering or other college in Vizag, who can set this up for me -- I owe you a big treat.

The Gol Gumbaz and Ibrahim Roza, Bijapur

I did a little sightseeing in Bijapur, specifically the Gol Gumbaz and the Ibrahim Roza.

Bijapur is quite a nice little town, with a whole bunch of ruined or semi-ruined monuments scattered throughout the city. The past is definitely woven into the city, and its somewhat unique that way. The two most notable monuments are the ones mentioned above. The Gol Gumbaz is stated by Lonely Planet to be a 'massive ill-proportioned' building, but I didn't see anything ill-proportioned about it. BTW, the ICSE history book (Kundera!) had a photo and mention of it, and I remember it from there. Good old ICSE history, I actually learnt a fair amount from it, and it created in me a hankering to see all the ancient monuments that are mentioned there, which I've only been able to satisfy of late. Anyway. The notable thing about the Gumbaz is that the dome is the second largest in the world after St. Peter's Cathedral at the Vatican. Ho-hum. But its still a really nice building.
Muslim architecture in India seems to get enthu about acoustics. The Golconda fort outside Hyderabad has this amazing stuff, where somebody at the bottom of the hill can clap and someone standing only at a specific spot near the peak of the hill, can hear the clap. Somehow they engineered the acoustics to do that. I would guess it would work as a useful security measure in an emergency. The Gol Gumbaz has another acoustic trick. There is a gallery running around the dome where you can enter. Any sound in this area echoes around 10 times, very clearly. Also if you sit at diametrically opposite ends of the gallery, you can hear very low noises (like the clattering of a keychain) from one side to the other. This particular trick I've seen elsewhere, notably at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. But that doesn't take away from the overall effect of the "Whispering Gallery" which is quite an awe-inspiring place, though can get bloody noisy with screaming kids. We went in the morning so had the place to ourselves for a while.

I did a Yahoo photo album out of the Gol Gumbaz photos. They were taken by a budding photo enthusiast, Bapu, a very sweet chap and a lecturer at the college where I gave my talk. The photos are pretty good especially for someone who is just starting off. Better than most of mine :-(

The Ibrahim Roza below is another graceful monument, but not particularly much to say about it, and I didn't take many photos

Its official

After a very quick round of conversations, I agreed to join Arghyam, for a temporary period (through Jan) at the end of which we would discuss if it mutually works to make it more long-term.

It was a very sudden thing, and I'm glad I made up my mind quickly as I'm usually very slow about these kinds of things. Arghyam is a organization that does a few things in the broad area of 'water', its mission being 'safe sustainable water for all':
-- It funds innovative projects that are in line with the mission
-- It organizes conferences and other fora for discussioins to propagate the mission
-- It lobbies with government
-- It is setting up a 'water portal' as a clearninghouse of information about water in India.

I'm personally being hired (its a paid job) as a product manager for the last item. They have the v1.0 launch of the water portal coming up and they are stressed for people to help do the launch. Don't tell anybody but the PM might be officially launching the portal.


Why did I take this up ?
-- the job description sounded really juicy, including stuff like 'liasoning with international agencies in the area of water'. The offical job description is 'senior product manager' which is a nice title, and should I want to go back to tech world, it will actually be very good experience to have. I expect that I will get to meet and interact with a whole bunch of more people and that may open new doors and new directions. Water is a very key area in India and the rest of the world. There are various dire predictions by very mainstream organizations, how the world is getting shorter and shorter of water and there will be more and more disputes and even wars over water going forward.
-- I was getting a little concerned as I knew the deadline for getting a 'real job' or atleast to start making livelihood money was March 07. This gives me a little headstart on that, while doing stuff that is entirely in line with the objective of the sabbatical. So if this gig turns out to be short term, I will have bought myself some more time after that if needed.
-- Arghyam is a high profile NGO because is funded by an endowment by Rohini Nilenkani, wife of Nandan Nilenkani (google him if you don't know). BTW - the endowment is of the size of 100 crores so that gives you an idea of the kind of money Rohini and Nandan have. I met Rohini briefly on Saturday. Nice person, but would not be appropriate to dissect her more ! Because of its high profile it gets attention from lots of places for eg. Sam Pitroda of the National Knowledge Commission is very keen on the water portal, Saifuddin Soz, Union Minister visited Arghyam a while back, Jeff Sachs gave a public talk under their auspices, and Bunker Roy was also there.

Sajini -- surprise for you, Arghyam's CEO is Alli. She had posted on the Coromandel mailing list with the job description and that's what got me to start talking to her. For the others, the CEO is an old friend from the Vizag Coromandel days, with whom I've worked in a company in the US, WebMD.

Hampi dreams (and nightmares)

Things are in a sudden state of flux. I am considering a job offer with a tech-centric NGO here in Bangalore, which I would want to take up as a short-term thing, though paid and full-time. At the same time I have just come off this gig in Bijapur, which went very well and am wondering how to take that forward. The biodiesel thing is hanging in the background, I had earlier given an in-principle 'yes' to the people who had invited me to join. There are a couple of projects at Timbaktu that I took on that need to be worked on. And I am off in a week to Vizag to tutor my nephew. And lots of other smaller things to take care of. When I had come back from the trip I had written up a long list of to-dos and suddenly its all pushed to a side by this new opportunity, for which I need to decide quite quickly. Definitely a feeling of being swamped.

Lots of photos and videos from Bijapur and Hampi but uploading them is a real chore as they take such a long time and too often Blogspot or Flickr fails halfway through and I have to start yet again. Perhaps I will start with just some writeup and get to the photos later.

Hampi first. Hampi is a very unique place and hard to convey. Its amazing but is difficult to absorb and got to be frustrating. The very brief story is that it was a a huge urban area (a metropolis of its time) with perhaps a half million people living in it. It was the capital of the Vijaynagar empire of which Krishnadevaraya was the most successful king and Hakka and Bukku (whom you might remember from history textbooks) were the founders. After a decisive battle which it lost, the city was savaged by the winners to such an extent that it never recovered after that, and today is just ruins. But the ruins are so striking (so .... ruinous, one might say) that I was constantly left trying to imagine what the city might have been like in its heyday.
Well, there is a huge amount more that I learnt regarding the full story of Hampi, but I am not feeling enthused about making a history lesson of the blog. The facts are remarkable though, and for now I'll leave you with just an exhortation to learn more about it, I'm sure a google will yield more than enough information.
All the guidebooks say that you have to stay for atleast 2 days at Hampi to really soak in the atmosphere. I reached on Monday afternoon, and intensively toured the place for a day and a half and at that point got some kind of overdose, and left although I had planned to stay an extra half day. There is sooo much of stuff at Hampi and the sculpture is so elaborate, and the ruins are so striking that beyond a point it gets too much to absorb. Perhaps the right way to do it is at a very relaxed pace seeing a little each day. I squeezed in a lot during my a day and a half there, and there were atleast 2 or 3 more striking things that I particularly wanted to see but didn't get to do, not to mention like 30 other things that were mentioned in the guidemaps as worth seeing.


I was reflecting on the Hampi experience today, and got the feeling (which I have got before but not quite so strongly or definitively) that I should stop visiting Indian temples. The level of effort and ability that has gone into the architecture and sculpture is so absurdly high that it simply cannot be absorbed. Any one temple out of hundreds of th best ones would boggle your mind. So keeping on seeing these temples just isn't working beyond a point, the mind stops reacting. At the same time, all this stuff is out there, so what's an appropriate way to react or deal with it ? I think the right thing is to get engaged with this stuff in a more serious way than just gaping at it. For eg. I was just thinking that it would be *fantastic* to be part of an archeological expedition working on some ruins. Just a (far fetched) way of getting involved with the stuff more concretely. Or (again farfetched) since sculpture and carving is such a intimate part of the Indian ethos and dates back to so long, learning this art as a hobby would be a way to be in sync with Indian heritage.

Whatever -- my next holiday is going to be to go hiking somewhere in nature, far away from temples !



I uploaded about 12 of the photos to Flickr. Here is the link, the photos are all tagged with 'Hampi'

http://www.flickr.com/photos/despoki/tags/hampi/

They are well worth a full-size look. Also at the link above you should get a link to all photos on Flickr tagged with 'Hampi', so if you are interested you can click on that and get everybody's Hampi pics, not just mine. There's also a post at the Written Word.

More to come

AID petition

I'm back, but before I head off trying to exhaustively empty my mind of the just-concluded trip, here's a petition forwarded by Ashis Panda who I wrote about earlier. His wife Madhulika is currently working with the Bheels talked about in the petition. The pdf page with the background on the petition is quite a sad read.
AID is the Association For India's Development

A fellowship for Mr. Mutyalappa ? (long post!)

Quite a while back I had talked about one of the more capable people who worked at Timbaktu. The post is here and I'm pasting a snippet here:

The guy I mentioned above is quite a remarkable chap and 'discovering' him was something of a high point of the trip. He stands out quite quickly in a crowd due to his abilities and drive. Earlier he was involved with several things including the People's War Group and politics (he was close to Paritala Ravi for those familiar with Andhra politics), but finally found a niche for himself at Timbaktu.

I have been wanting to do an update on him and make the proposal that I am making below, and finally getting around to doing it.

So Mutyalappa (the guy I talked about above) is quite a remarkable chap as I said above. He's a natural leader with a very strong personality (and something of a drinker too and hotheaded, someone who can't suffer fools gladly). He is a completely local person with very little outside exposure, nevertheless he's very smart. You get the sense that he is going to go places. Even before I was asked to work with him formally on a couple of the projects, he instinctively gravitated towards me and spent some time getting to know me etc, though not in a 'suck=up' way. I think it was like an instinctive curiousity about how the outside world is, what do people do how do they progress etc. He wheedled an answer from me about how much I had been making at my previous job, stuff that I don't like to talk about at Timbaktu. People like him are rarely in social work as they gravitate towards other more, shall we say .. coercive .. methods of getting things done and making money. However, in his case, somehow, perhaps due to early influences from good people, he comes across as genuinely keen to solve some social problems even if there is no personal benefit involved. His approach probably would be rather less consensus-driven than I would prefer, but that's all right.

He did a whole bunch of roles at Timbaktu and did well at all of them and at the time I started going there, I was wondering if the organization would manage to keep him interested and focussed. As if on cue, he impulsively decided to run for 'sarpanch'-ship of his village. This is quite remarkable from a couple of reasons: 1 - he comes from a caste (boyya -- goatherds I believe) that has traditionally been backwards and under the thumb of one or the other of the more powerful castes. 2 - sarpanch elections have become pretty corrupt, politicised and money-laden in Anantapur. Usually only the powerful with lots of money stand and throw a lot of money around (liquor, lots of goat and chicken) and buy their way to the post, and then try to misappropriate money alloted for work in the village. Basically a microcosm of the national political scene though more distressing that even at the most micro level the rot has gone deep. So it was quite astonishing that he decided to stand for election, kind of the way it would be for someone we know to stand for election as an MLA or MP. People at Timbaktu were quite surprised that he did it. There was some background there, people asked his brother to stand for election, but he had more than 2 kids and the rules in AP prohibit people with more than 2 kids from standing for sarpanch (! that sounds unconstitutional to me), so he decided to go ahead and do it. Having decided, he is not one for half measures so he went ahead and spent a fair amount of money on said booze and non-veg (another interesting expenditure is to pay for the travel costs of people who have migrated from the village to Bangalore or wherever, to come to the village on election day and vote!). But I believe he managed to keep his campaign basically clean in that he didn't get indebted to anyone or seek help from people who would later come back and ask him to do favours for me. He won the election.

So now he is in a position to do something really good for his village. And its very very rare to have an opportunity like this where a smart, educated strong competent person with integrity intact and a background in social work is elected. Its possible he could do a fantastic job and then go on to become a leader at a higher level (the sarpanch term is for 3 or perhaps more years, which is enough time to do something substantial). However he is now quite deeply in debt and the position comes with a paltry honorarium of 2500/- or so a month. So to me this is like a very 'unfolding in real time' situation. This guy could go either way I feel, with his huge debt on one side and his drive to do something good on the other.

So we come to the final point: I think an intervention to help him out at this point might be crucial. If he gets some help to tide him through financially, that may be what keeps him on the 'right' side of the fence. I seriously wanted to send this mail a long time back, but it got lost in bunch of things, including my own diffidence to try this kind of intervention. But recently in talking to Mary, she said that she was trying to organize a fellowship for him, for pretty much the same reasons, though she did not put it in quite the stark either-or way that I did above. So with that confluence of ideas I thought I should really write up this post.

So my proposal is: are there people reading this who would be interested in contributing money towards a fellowship for him for a year. There are lots of details (like we would expect some specific output for the fellowship) but they can be worked out. The size of the amount -- my guess is 3000 to 5000 per month is a decent amount. If a few people put together fairly small amounts (esp. if the small amounts are in dollars!) it should be possible to cobble this together.

If you are interested please mail me directly or add a comment on the website whichever you feel appropriate.

Going to Bijapur

I'm off today (Thu) evening to Bijapur to do my stuff there. Both excited and scared. Its a really nice opportunity and I enjoy interacting with young fresher types. But its something that I've never done before and I'm having a hard time coming to grips with what exactly would be useful to talk to them about. Some organizing glitches that are not helping either.
There are a couple of historical monuments at Bijapur that I hope to take in while I'm there. I'm planning to stop for atleast a day at .. Hampi. This I am really looking forward to. Hampi is a world heritage site that I've been wanting to see for a long long time now.

Okay, so have to see how it all goes :-(

Pan-IIT 2006

Shall I go ?!
The IIT Alumni Global Conference is an annual (I think) schmoozefest of IIT alumni. This year its to be in Mumbai from 23rd to 25th December. The focus is (supposedly) on development issues. There is a valedictory by Manmohan Singh. What a great feather-in-the-cap for celebrity spotting !

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PS: Added the missing photo to a previous post

Nemeli trip

Priya and her parents



We drove down to Priya's home village and spent a couple of days there and drove back. Drive time was about 6.5 hours, first to Chittoor by national highway and then by a secondary road to Tiruttani. Tiring driving -- I don't enjoy driving as much as I used to, age showing.

The drive from Chittoor to Tiruttani was gorgeous, but didn't take photos. India in the monsoons is such a pleasure, particularly rural India. Especially in the drier areas the contrast with other times of the year is remarkable.

On the way from Chittoor to Tiruttani we were waylaid by a police group checking documents. I had forgotten to bring my insurance papers and so gave them 100 Rs instead to let me off. For a guy who hates bribes, I end up doing it remarkably often ...

Priya's family house in the village is a lovely place. Its quite rundown due to lack of maintanance but still has a lot of charm. It was built a long time ago in a traditional style which I like. The house is also quite large. It has a series of doors (6!) that are all in a perfect straight line : the main door to the house, then the entrance to the main living room, then the entrance to the kitchen, then the cemented backyard, then the walled-in garden, and finally the open garden. The full plot area of the house is therefore huge.

We brought Priya's parents back with us and they are here right now. Her dad leaves in a day or two and her mom will be here for some more time. Both have recovered quite well from their chikungunya.



In their backyard

Bijapur trip

A very interesting trip is coming up. I came to know of a small enterprising group of people who after doing various stuff ended up running a placement cell kind-of place for their alma mater, an engineering college in Bijapur. They invited me down to come and talk to the students about corporate world, interviewing, getting a job, stuff like that. Generally students from small-town engineering colleges don't get enough exposure to the life in companies in tech centers like Bangalore, so I think these kind of talks could potentially benefit them a lot. Also the area of training exiting students so that they can be absorbed into industry is something that I've been interested in for a while now. During all the recruitment at Juniper it was clear that the level of most freshers leaves a lot to be desired and there seemed to be a real business (and social) opportunity there. McKinsey did a study where they say that some large percent (75 if I remember right) of all engineering grads coming out of India are 'unemployable' (I don't know what exactly they were using as their benchmark for employability).
So these people have agreed to pay my expenses (a 12 hour bus ride!) and give me a small honorarium which makes the whole thing work very well for me. And if this thing works out well and there is scope to expand and do the same or similar thing on a larger scale it would be very cool.

I am very interested in comments of people in a position to know what I am talking about, regarding what I could usefully talk to them about.

Ashis Panda -- a nice guy

Ashis is one of the nice people I have met at Timbaktu. He is young, has been working for only a couple of years after BE and MBA. He studied at BITS Pilani where he took part in NSS work and got interested in development work there. So he went to IRMA (Institute of Rural Management, Anand) for an MBA and currently works on a project called Timbaktu Organic. They try to organize farmers to farm organically and then market the produce.

Ashis recently wrote a good article for the BITA alumni paper about his (and his wife's) journey. Its an excellent read. I got his okay to link to it on this blog.

Here is the article


Here is an article about Ramon Aybar who is mentioned in the above

Lets hear it for my sis!!

Sajini


I want to acknowledge my sister's (Sajini) unstinting enthusiasm for my writing and blogging efforts. Since the time she discovered my previous blog (at despoki.net), she has always been thoroughly appreciative of my writing and consistently encouraged me to write more. She reads the blogs fanatically and she was pretty much the only one (as far as I can see) who took some interest in my revenue generation efforts. And she just sent me a check so that I could meet the target I had set for myself for earning some money through the blog. That way I can stop worrying about blog traffic or ad-clicks. So thanks for all the interest and support, sis !

While I'm doing thanks, let me also acknowledge the other regular blog readers and commenters who have made the blog more interesting and given me a reason to continue blogging. Thanks Arvind, Sidharth and Sukesh (aka Anonymous). Your interest makes the blog go ! And if there's someone else who reads the blog on a regular basis (atleast once a week), I'd love to know who you are.

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Another blog milestone: I'm 4 short of 200 posts (including both the blogs). So its close to an average of 1 post a day since April since I started the sabbatical, although I actually started blogging earlier.

Head on over there !

I've been seeing that traffic on the other blog is only a tenth of the traffic on this one (such as it is). Why ?!!!! Head on over there, lots of cool stuff there !

Skype (a little more)

Today I talked to one person in Australia and then one person in the US using Skype. Worked fine though the person in Australia had some trouble hearing me, so I guess I need to get a mike after all.
Skype rocks !

Skype

Its quite embarrasing for a putative techie like me to be caught discovering Skype in October 2006 but here goes.

After some earlier half-hearted attempts dating back to 2002, I downloaded Skype again recently and it works like a dream. The biodiesel group that I am talking to uses it so they asked me to get on it too, so I did. Its simple and elegant, and so far (I've only had one conversation yet !) I've been able to get away without using a mike or headphones and still get good clarity. Skype positions itself as a way of making phone calls using your computer, though they're basically a more targeted Yahoo Msgr with Voice which I talked about earlier. Still its pretty cool. I came back from our Nemeli trip (yeah, we're back, I'll blog about the trip later) and came online to check mail and bingo! somebody notices that I'm online and Skypes me and we have a conversation. Powerful (and empowering).

That's all for now (ie very early Thu morning) folks.

To Nemeli!

Okay, sudden trip.
Both of Priya's parents have got Chikungunya, the current scourge of rural south India. So we thought we would make a quick trip down to their village (Nemeli, border of TN and Andhra) and bring Priya's mom atleast back here with us, so she can get some rest and care.

More when we come back. You can google Chikungunya for more information, I also talked about it in a previous post about Thippatheega kashayam. I am a stupid fellow, I should have gotten some of that medicine with me on one of my many trips to Timbaktu

RSS, Syndication, ATOM and all that

I finally spent some time, and got the basics of this working. FYI in case you are interested.

Lots of sites nowadays allow you to do 'RSS' or 'Atom' syndication. What this means is that you can have a program on your computer that will keep checking when new content comes onto those sites and let you know. Using the program on your computer you can therefore from one central place, check a lot of different websites for their latest content. (If you're such a web junkie as to need such a tool, probably your first priority should be to wean yourself off the net in the first place, but we digress).

So here's a simple and relatively lightweight 'reader' (that's the program that sits on your comp. and monitors websites):
Feedreader , http://www.feedreader.com/

And you can syndicate my blog by entering the following URL into feedreader:
http://despoki.blogspot.com/atom.xml

I left out a lot of details, but feel free to mail if you want to seriously do this.

Happy Deepavali

Taking stock

A 'taking stock' post has been long overdue.

I've been going through a small down period.

Regarding what I've been doing at Timbaktu, there are things that I am happy about and other things less so. I have enjoyed doing stuff there a lot, I have learnt a lot, and I have met and interacted and become friends with some really cool people. What I've done for them has not been that great but its certainly helped them and they have been very appreciative. Its fulfilled the long hankering I've had to work with an NGO. However I've not engaged deeply enough with them, since I don't stay there or work full-time. I've told them that I would like to finish the 'engagement' in December. Right now there is a big messy project that I've taken to update their website and another pending small project to do a small Access database for them that has been causing me inordinate problems (if somebody knows Access well, and wants to help out with this one -- very welcome).
There were times when doing NGO work seriously full-time seemed like a very attractive option. But that option has really not come together to be a serious possibility at this point.

The chief purpose of the trip to Hyderabad was to talk to somebody about a work opportunity that came up unexpectedly in... biodiesel. There's lots and lots of stuff that I could talk about biodiesel, its something that I've been following for a while now. However I'll leave it for now with just a website that gives an excellent introduction to the topic: www.treeoilsindia.com. The opportunity has lots of positive and negative things about it and its weighing on my mind quite heavily.

Besides that, there is a small opportunity (more about it later) to give some training sessions for graduating students at an engineering college (what the real world is like kind of thing), which is something that is close to my heart. If I was really keen I could perhaps expand that into a job, or find something else along those lines.

Other than that -- lots of things have been going through my mind but without much direction and resolution. 6-odd months off from work is a long time and twinges of guilt for not doing a 'real' job are becoming more frequent. Also some kind of dissastifaction with the kind of opportunities that are coming up as they are not the 'perfect' opportunity. That I think is something that can be dealt with -- if I do commit to something and go with it, managing the shortcomings is more doable, then when one is in an uncommitted state. Especially when I'm in Bangalore, I tend to slip into a 'lassitude' state.

There are some long pending things that I'm glad to be resolving. The driver's license was a big deal, and right now, I'm in the process getting some stuff done regarding the flat that we bought (a 'khata transfer') that also has been long pending. When I went to Hyd, I did some stuff regarding the lost registration for my car, but that is proving to be a harder nut to crack.

The blog(s) has also reached a level of staticity. Partly because of the above broodings, I haven't been blogging that much. Blog traffic has also levelled off, and ad clicks is down to zero :-). So some ambivalence on that front too.

So that's where things are at. Comments are very welcome.

Timbaktu Annual Report

The Timbaktu Annual Report for 05-06 which I spent a lot of time on, is available at their website now (www.timbaktu.org). Look under the What's New section. The photos are not of good clarity, we hope to fix that. Its worth a read, though its long and wordy. Comments welcome.

And a few more

I wish ...



Sculptures on the campus of the JNTU School of Fine Art where my nephew studies. I was wondering among the sculptures and brushed against one, and the head fell off and broke :-). The guard was not too happy, but twasn't my fault, the head had already come off and someone had just placed it back on.





Slightly random photo of handwork being done on garments. Off Commercial Street in Bangalore

More Timbaktu Photos

This is a really striking sight in the area. Since the time I have been going there, I have never seen any standing or flowing water. Seeing this much amount of water at one go was somewhat disorienting :-). The interesting thing is that this water was there only because of a 'check dam' (see below), that was constructed by Timbaktu only this year. This is a very striking demonstration of the value of small local water harvesting and storage structures.




Groundnut field



A 'ear' (?) of millet




Millet field

Timbaktu was gorgeously green this time. There have been good rains recently and the fields near the office had grown tremendously since the last time I was there. Here's a lovely movie (8MB) of swaying fields. (Seems to work better by right-click and saving to disk).

Quick post -- Meenakshi temple

Two not-so-great photos of Meenakshi temple, that don't do it justice

Budgeting

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An interesting part of my sabbatical has been doing the budgeting for it. Till now, I have never done any kind of serious budgeting, I never kept track of how much I spent each month or had any targets for saving x amount of money. Taking a break from a job meant being much more clear about the financial position and how much was being spent each month etc. It has been very useful experience to try to do this kind of planning and that's one of the positive outcomes of the sabba. I have been quite ...perhaps 'reckless' in the planning actually -- I set things up so that if the sabbatical continued through Dec 2007, I would have completely exhausted all my savings. I intended to wind up before that though, but set end 2007 as a 'drop dead' date.

Here are some of the calculations I did: 25,000/- per month for the monthly payment on my houseloan, 4000/- p.m. for the basic household expenses (kitchen and other stuff, stuff that mostly falls in Priya's plate). 16,000/- for all other expenses. Besides that there were a number of 'capital expenses' items that I estimated would be required. And an emergency fund and some buffer. Among the capital expenses was a decent amount (2 Lakh) set aside for travel.

So here's what happened in the past few months of implementing. The first thing that caused a problem was the travel budget. I was very keen on doing the Europe trip, but in some subconscious denial of the expense that it would actually involve, I didn't do an realistic calculation. All counted, the Europe trip took close to 3L so that sent that portion of the budget for a toss. The other part was that I had underestimated quite badly in putting just 16,000/- for other monthly stuff. Partly because I/we continued to do a fair bit of travelling which we are very keen on doing and I didn't want to compromise on that. Also we had got used to a particular lifestyle earlier and didn't want to start getting miserly. So I recently redid the budget and upped the monthly expenses by a third. During the course of the past few months it has also become clear that it makes sense to keep the sabba. to around a year. So the earlier budget underestimate doesn't hurt too badly.

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I'm leaving tomorrow to Timbaktu and will go to Hyderabad from there. Be back in about a week.

Kodai photos

http://www.flickr.com/photos/despoki/sets/72157594308573174/

Kodai photos - 2

The Kurinji flower is a Western Ghat speciality. The shrub blooms only once in 12 years and that too all the shrubs in an area bloom at the same time (synchronised). It bloomed this year, but we missed the peak.



Fresh carrots are a popular snack there



View of the resort


Hotel room -- wooden floors, a rarity in India




In front of a church. Story here - Priya had earlier been quite censorious of the other girl's short skirt. Later we asked someone to take a photo of us. Much to Priya's annonyance the guy included the other couple in the photo too, for no reason at all. I was much amused at the comeuppance.

Kodaikanal

Dew-laden flower -- closeup

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At Kodai, the weather was chilly, but I found it bracing. This is offseason but there were a moderate number of people around. I think off-season touristing of places like Kerala and hill-stations like Kodai is a great idea, if you have the patience to bear with the weather.

As I mentioned earlier, we were taking advantage of a friend who's a member of Club Mahindra which is a timeshare holiday thing. CM doesn't have a resort in Kodai, so through a second-level exchange the Kodai availability came through RCI (the international timeshare company) and then Sterling Resorts another Indian timeshare company, which actually owns the place. This trip was enough to convince me of the usefulness of timeshare holidays. The resort was good, the management was good, there were no hidden charges and everything went fine. Signing up for a timeshare right now is too expensive for me in my current state but I have really bought into the idea and would love to go on more such holidays.

There is not much to do in Kodai if you are an active sightseer ie. want to see lots of famous places or ooh-aah sights. But if you enjoy just chilling in the middle of nature and mountains, or trekking, its a great place with many nice locations. There is a lack of sync between me and Priya along these lines that reduces the potential of a vacation although we still do have fun. And of late I have been sticking to group trips where someone carts you around and you dutifully stare at the sights. I really need to get out of this mode and do something more 'real'. This trip we did do two nice things -- we went all around Kodai lake (6 km) on a tandem bicycle. Priya doesn't know how to cycle but she put enthu pedalling. The bike was old and clunky and it was quite hard work but we had a good time. The other thing we (I) did was get a traditional Kerala (Dhanwantari) massage at the resort, followed by a steam bath. It was quite interesting and I'd do it again, but there were no obvious benefits.

Apparently there are 'magic mushrooms' growing naturally in Kodai that will give you a high. We saw them and we brought one home with us, but since I'm not 100% sure that they are the the right ones, don't want to test it out.

We briefly touched Madurai. Due to logistical issues we didn't spend much time at the temple which was again a bummer. I guess I still haven't learnt how to do this properly.

We got lots of good photographs, perhaps I will upload more of them later. I took my camera manual along with me and started reading it and am discovering that there is more to photograhpy than point and shoot :-).

Blogger is not uploading photos properly right now, so more photos later.

Puzzle!

I just posted a very nice word puzzle at the other blog. Check it out.


Yes, we're back from Kodai. Feeling very sluggish and not doing much curently.

More later.

Nokia cameraphone review

At Kustavan's request, here are some notes on my new cameraphone.

I didn't do a lot of research or comparison shopping on this one. The only thing I was really looking for was a decent camera on the phone. I wanted to get a fashionable Motorola phone but my wife overruled me in favor of Nokia. We went to the Nokia Concept shop on Church Street (dunno if that was a good idea, maybe they have higher prices. There was another Nokia dealer just across the street, but I didn't compare prices). They had a lot of phones there so there was a decent range of phones to pick from. I straightaway liked this phone 6125 and another slightly higher-end model. Both were fliptop (or do they call them clamshell) phones. The differences were minor -- the other phone had a knob you could press to open up the phone, this one you have to physically prise the two blades apart, and there were a couple of other enhancements on the other one that I felt I could live without. 6125 costed me 10800 (or was it 11800? don't remember) and the other was 13800/- types.

6125 is pretty good. The look is sleek -- silver and black. The camera is good, I forget the image quality number but you've seen the images on this blog. The camera has a reasonable zoom range. There are the usual neat things like associating an image with a contact so the image shows up when the contact calls. Other features:
-- You can easily stick in an external memory card to increase the memory.
-- Its got radio but that requires an external extra antenna, so that's pretty much uninteresting for me.
-- Basic voice recognition so you can say the name of a contact and it will try to identify the contact. Doesn't work that well.
-- Thoughtful feature: press a key and switch between 'general' and 'silent' profiles.
-- Lots of messaging enhancements that I haven't gone into yet as I don't use it much
-- I wrote about the bluetooth already, but that's pretty much standard nowadays
. It also has USB and infrared connectivity to computers which I haven't checked.
-- GPRS, which I don't know anything about
-- You can record short video or audio clips. You can download video and audio on to the phone and play. It has an equalizer for the audio!
-- Calendar, to-do list, stopwatch
-- WAP web browser
-- What it don't got is a torchlight like 1100 -- which to me is a high-watermark of cellphones

Enough already ! Technology gone mad !

PS: Thanks, Priya for gifting me this one :-)

Yahoo Messenger with Voice

I've never had luck with multimedia on my computers. Either the sound card has a problem or the driver has a problem, or the mike doesn't work okay or the external earphones I buy aren't compatible .. and so on. So I stopped trying to use computers to do any VoIP or other media stuff in any serious way (lots of people have recommended Skype). However with my new computer I'm having a completely different experience. I downloaded Yahoo Msgr and was chatting with a friend, when he asked me if I had voice. Before I could explain my voice jinx to him he had started a Msgr call to me, and it beeped on my computer. I clicked the icon and bingo! we had a voice conversation going. No external mic, no headphones, no testing the system, no nothing. That seamless. The person was in Hyd, and the clarity was quite decent. I dunno how it would be on an overseas connection.

We shall hope for more such going forward.

Babysnake

Through a unusual set of events Dinesh of Timbaktu came to be in possesion of a bunch of snake eggs and on my last trip one of them hatched. Dinesh who is an experienced photographer took some excellent pics of the half-hatched snake. Given the tiny size of the actual egg, perhaps a centimeter or two in length, the photos have amazing clarity (if you expand to see the full size photo). He took them with my camera and I had no idea that you could get such closeups with it. I got to read the user manual !
He also used the opportunity to show off a (moulting) non-poisonous snake that he happened to have around. We took a very nice short movie, but its too large to publish (14.4MB).

Hearing test

Consequent to the tinnitus business, I was advised to get a hearing test done as the doctor (and I) felt that I had a long-standing minor hearing problem. We finally got around to doing it today. We did the test at an "Institute of Speech and Hearing" in Lingarajapuram. It was quite amusing, with all kinds of pings and beeps. Here's some fragments of understanding:

-- they do an middle ear, inner ear (and perhaps outer ear too) test
-- the normal hearing range is apparently 0 - 15dB, but those are just words and I don't know what they really mean. Also there is a range of frequencies of sound, so the above dB number will have a graph of values for each person over the frequency range.
-- they did one test where they increase the air pressure inside your ear and look at some response data. Then there's a test where they put earphones on you and subject you to beeps of decreasing volume at various pitch, to see when it becomes inaudible for you. And a similiar one where they use English words and ask you to repeat the word. An interesting variation of the above test is done with the earphones not sitting on your ear, but on the bone in front of and behind your ear (see first photo). Surprisingly, you can hear quite well in that configuration too.

The results were fine on all the tests, well within the normal limits. On the dB scale above, I had 10dB in one ear and 13.3 dB in the other at 1000Hz, which is the middle of the normal hearing range, and some drop off at higher and lower pitches.

I look distressingly bald. Perhaps I'll go to Batra's Homoeo clinic and try to do something about it.

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We're off tomorrow (Saturday) to Kodaikanal, and back on Thursday 28th. We plan to stop for a day at Madurai on the way back, to see the Meenakshi temple.

Updates from here and there

* We bought a beanbag for our house recently.

* I did the first full-fledged harvest from the composting pots. Photos below. It feels *really* good to see the fruit of the process of the last few months. That's a fair amount of compost, and I don't know what to do with it. Does anybody in Bangalore have plants/a garden, and would like some of my compost ?







* A head-hunter put me in touch with a networking company called Nevis in Pune. I talked briefly with a senior person from there, but since I wasn't willing to join immediately and wasn't keen on a QA manager role, it stalled. However it was quite tempting. I do miss the fast-pace and adrenalin rush of the tech industry, as also the boundless opportunity and good money. The possibility of going back to the tech industry after the sabbatical is strong.

* Here's a nice link: the top 10 college pranks of all time