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.

==========

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

NREGA 'Social Audit' Padayatra - Photos

Going around the village in a procession, asking people to come for the meeting


Village meeting pics




Soumya doing her stuff



Meeting of all the NGOs with the government officials, after the Padayatra

NREGA 'Social Audit' Padayatra - 2

On 3rd September, Sunday early morning, Mary (who was going back to Timbaktu after a visit to Kerala) came by and picked me up on her way back to Timbaktu. We went by a Sumo, one of the 3 vehicles owned by Timbaktu. It was a quick trip as we had a driver (Timbaktu employee) who was fast. We headed straight down to Anantapur town where the co-ordination office of the social audit was supposed to be.

(A note about Anantapur town: this trip was the first time I was there. I visited it several times over the course of the trip. Essentially nothing to report, but partly because I didn't really get to do anything much there.)

We had a meeting at the office to discuss duties and other matters, and there was not much interest other than from Mary in having me do documentation or press release work there, so we relieved myself from that role. We headed back later and then went to the site of one of the padayatra teams for the evening full-village meeting. The way the padayatra was structured, during the day, the team members would interact with the government officials, go through the documents, and inspect the work done to see if it was all 'kosher'. In the evening there would be a meeting of the village 'gram sabha', the full population of the village to explain about NREGA, go over the results of the mornings' work and then to read out the muster roll. So I and Mary were joining for the evening meeting. The village was called Mushtikovila BTW, and has some other interest which I will touch on later.

There was a bunch of smaller stuff that happened, but not of much interest so I'll stick to the main points:

Earlier in the day, the padayatra group had spent time in the fields measuring and inspecting the work done and comparing it to what the records said. During the evening meeting they went over this and also read out the muster roll. What happens with the muster roll is :

For each piece of work done, each worker's name is read out, the number of days he worked is read out and the amount the records show him as having got is read out. This simple act contains a world of difference in it and can, if the atmosphere is right, be a completely electric moment. The reason is, this is absolutely the first time in independant India (and a couple of hundred years before that too) that the government official is being held accountable. Firstly, getting access to the muster roll and other records is in itself a HUGE thing. This is something that absolutely no common citizen can normally imagine happening -- getting access to the real records where the actual stuff goes on. ( Actually, this has changed with passing of the RTI Act which is why that act is so momentous too. The Social Audit is really very intimately linked with RTI at its essence, and so doing a social audit of NREGA, is to me a sort of ecstatic climax of good governance. :-)

Getting back to the point. So having got the documents, you are now standing in the middle of the entire village sabha and reading out 'x did this much work and the record says he got paid this much. did he ?'. And if he didn't, all eyes turn to the government official and he is on the hot spot. The first time I saw this process happening at Mushtikovila village, it was like the proverbial 'hair standing on end'. Even growing up in a relatively well-to-do family and having advantages that come with that, the simple act of having the documentation and being able to question a government official is something I've never seen. And personally (though I'm sure its true of many others) the empowerment of this process is hugely liberating and fulfilling. I wish something like this comes to urban local bodies too.

So this is approximately what happened for the 6 days of the padayatra across 600 villages of Anantapur. I'm sure the process did not go as it was supposed to, in each and every village for various reasons but its a big step forward for accountability and good governance.

Here are some notes:

-- There was a team of people from MKSS who were here to help out. Only one of them knew Telugu, so the help from the others was limited, they were there more as observers. However the one person who know Telugu (Sowmya Kidambi) was pretty fantastic. She knew a lot about the government workflow and internal rules, in fact she knew a lot more than the government officials, who were not properly trained, and she often gave them a earful. She was quite a fiery person (quite young too), and fearless. Quite remarkable. Without someone like that who is well-trained and has the gift, the process can flounder sometimes. The meeting dynamic can be quite delicate and despite the revolutionary nature of what was happening people sometimes get bored or disengaged. Other times the other thing happens, and the entire village gets into an explosion of anger or heated debate as some facts get uncovered and the process breaks down there too.
-- In NREGA, the payments ar made through post office money accounts. In one of the villages, it came out that the village postmaster had been deducting 10 Rs from some of the people under false pretexts. The postmaster was asked to come to the front and explain his action, and it was made very clear in front of everybody that he was basically eating money. That kind of situation is the tremendous power of the process -- uncovering of the 'money trail' and finding the culprits behind it and being able to get them up on stage immediately
-- all kinds of existing vested interests and existing village power structures and dynamics come into the picture and start complicating it. This is only to be expected. For example on one day in village Nagasamudram, we uncovered hanky-panky by one gentleman and he got a pretty solid public shaming from Soumya. The next day was village Obulampalli where his son-in-law was Panchayat Secretary. The process in Obulampalli went completely haywire and the meeting was stopped prematurely even before the key muster roll reading happened. I cannot be quite sure of what the reason was, but some of the villagers told us that the Panchayat Secretary called people individually into his house, served them lots of liquor and instructed them that as a matter of village honour, they should say that everything went fine, and that they should disrupt the meeting and not let it happen. THis is exactly what happened.
-- There was quite effective use of cultural techniques (songs, dance, musical instruments, puppetry) in conveying the ideas of NREGA. One thing that Timbaktu Collective and other rural NGOs do, is write topical songs on things that they are trying to convey. I did a post sometime back on the puppetry they used. I've always felt the extreme limitation of popular urban music (especially western pop) -- jeez they go on and on and on about love love love ad infinitum, is there nothing else to write about ? I think that there is some deep truth to be uncovered here -- why is it that pop musicians are simply unable to deal with the many problems of modern life and they are stuck dealing just with love-related themes. Anyway these village songs are very vital in the way they directly address the real issues. The MKSS people sang some of the hindi songs that they had and these were really very moving and powerful. One of the visitors was Shankar Singh who was an expert with a 'sock puppet' that he had brought with him and did his puppetry at the meetings to much enjoyment of everyone. Shankar Singh is one of the guys described in some detail in Bapu Kuti, so it was great for me to get to meet him.

Photos from the padayatra in the next post

Update on laptop

God, I hate Windows sometimes!

I already started getting occasional Windows/IE problems. Great ! Its amazing how flaky Windows can get.

One of the first things that you are supposed to do on getting a new comp. is create backup disks. Given that, perhaps the computer sellers could be thoughtful enough to sell you the required blank disks along with the comp! No such luck. I went through several hoops to acquire these which was irritating enough and when I did the back up, the software (****ing Compaq PC Recovery Disk Creator) told me that it couldn't complete the process because of an error (and quoted an error number. Dumb***** !). I'm so pissed off. Its the kind of problem that (I guess) is almost impossible to get decent support for and I'm dreading the thought of getting into an unending conversation with some uninterested drone over this.

Other issues: after I hibernate the system and start it up again, it takes me to the screen with a choice of available userlogins. This is *so* irritating, it didn't happen with my previous computer (probably because it was XP Pro).

And there is another infuriating problem where if I mouseover a link it sometimes clicks that link! This causes huge irritation, for example sending a mail before its completely written. I've had this problem when working briefly with other peoples' Compaq laptops too, so I'm sure either I'm doing something wrong, or its a kind of known thing and can be worked around. Somebody help me on this one please !!!
The mousepad is not good either and moving the mouse around is quite a pain. I'm not comfortable with these pads and on my IBM machine I used the rollerball thingy and not the pad, so I don't know if this pad is particularly worse than IBM's.

God ! I get high blood pressure from the absolute frustrating way the whole computer thing is organized. There are so many ways to run into problems and so few ways to get solutions. It reminds me of the movie Crash which I reviewed over there


PS: Other than the above its actually been quite decent :-)

Two trips

Two trips are in the offing.

The first is coming up next week, Priya and I are going to Kodaikanal for a few days. This is Dasara time and she has vacation at school. A friend at Juniper who subscribes to Club Mahindra graciously offered us use of a free (or rather almost free) offer he had. Hopefully this will be a do-nothing slow holiday where we will laze around and soak in the place, rather than rushing around which is what we usually do on vacation. We will stop off at Madurai for a day on the way back and see the Meenakshi temple there.

The other trip is to Ahmedabad. Aha .. this is something interesting, and I don't want to say too much about it till it gets more concrete.

Kitchen Chronicles contd.

Pix: A curious cat. But it didn't get killed (despite the old adage)







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Continuing an occasional series (here's one of the past posts) on matters food and kitchen...


So far I've managed to stay uninvolved with the kitchen, despite very pointed statements from Priya to the effect that seeing as I'm free and all and seeing as she's doing a course in addition to her regular teaching job ...

See, the thing is, I just don't like cooking.. see, what happens is I need my mind be focussed to be able to do cooking, and right now there's always a hundred things buzzing in my mind so what I'm planning to do is take a month really really off, and just focus on cooking and then I might be able to do something... see, she needs to be able to delegate properly, I don't mind doing some assigned tasks on a regular basis as opposed to being beaten up for generalized 'cooking' responsibilities ..

Is anyone convinced ?

Anyway right now, I fill water fairly regularly from our Aquaguard thingy, and there is talk (and some action) on cutting vegetables. That's pretty much it. And I take the waste out to the compost pot. And I occasionally make lemon juice for myself, which is the subject of this post. I was thinking: I should start drinking/eating glucose in a regular way. You know the sweet glucose powder packets you get in all medical stores right ? I mean, its supposed to give you energy, and who would complain about having more energy ? But drinking glucose water is boring and I wasn't able to get myself to do it. But I make and drink lemonade now and then, so I started using glucose instead of sugar in the lemonade. To my surprise it takes a *huge* amount of glucose to sweeten the lemonade, I wouldn't have thought so. All to the good, more glucose taken in the better. Well, my question is: is all this 'kosher' ? Does drinking glucose in a regular way do you any good ? Does drinking it in lemon water lose it any of its good properties. Let me know if you have some insights ?

On a related topic: honey. Lots of traditional Indian medical systems/knowlege/old wives tales extol the virtues of honey. Does anyone know something more about this and have a suggestion about honey. The taste makes me slightly sick so is there a palatable way of taking it ?

Cheers, and a good Sunday to you. Mine involves visiting a friend and probably getting having a nice lunch at his place.

Indian urban Legends - 2

This one is from Priya's coursemate when she did her B.Ed course in Hyderabad. We can call her Smita again :-).
So Smita once had to leave for Bombay for the funeral of her sister's husband's mother (or something like that). How did that lady die ? Apparently she had tried mixing Domex (a popular household cleaner) and bleaching powder in an attempt to get superior cleaning power when cleaning the bathroom. The two apparently reacted and the resultant fumes overpowered her and she died.

This one is a little dicey. I guess the basic story is true, but perhaps some of the details got distorted in the telling and retelling. I'm finding it hard to believe that mixing two domestic cleaning substances can kill you.

Indian Urban Legends - 1

Here's the start of what will hopefully be a continuing occasional series. What the series is about will become obvious so let me not try to explain.

So I've heard in the past of people being 'gassed' on Indian trains and robbed but was quite sceptical. Until it happened to someone we know. The person is (was) a colleague of Priya at the school that she teaches at, in Indiranagar. So this person (lets call her Smita), travelled to Delhi earlier this year to meet relatives. She took the Rajadhani Express. Things were normal and she was chatting with one of the co-travellers, another woman. That woman noticed that she had kept some jewellery in her handbag and suggested that she put it into her (ie. Smita's) suitcase for more safety. That Smita did as she thought it a sensible suggestion. But the next morning she awoke to find that her suitcase had vanished along with those of several co-travellers (and the aforementioned lady). People felt somewhat unwell which pointed to a gas having been used to keep them sleeping while the robbery was done. The passengers registered a complaint with the railway police and so on, but nothing came of it, the goods were not recovered.

Quite shocking to hear that this kind of stuff actually happens, and that too on the hi-profile Rajadhani Express. I always felt safe in trains earlier, didn't think that one had to guard against sophisticated theft like this.

Yahoo! Mail Beta

I started using the beta of the new version of Yahoo Mail and its an instant winner.
I haven't used all the features, but the improved speed and efficiency is obvious. It now has a Outlook/thick mail client style UI. Each frame refreshes independantly as required, so the whole page doesn't need to be redrawn every time -- a huge relief.

Check it out.

Images from cellphone camera

I downloaded the first set of images from my cameraphone to the computer. Using bluetooth wireless -- quite cool! Here are some:


The Lepakshi temple near Hindupur. Lepakshi gets its name from Laya Pakshi or 'Dead Bird' referring to Jatayu of the Ramayana. The local legend is that he fell dead in this area after his battle with Ravana.





This is supposed to be a footprint of Goddess Sita. It is claimed to have magical properties: there is always some moisture inside. If you wipe away the water, you can see it oozing back. Fed by some underground water formation ?
Later Priya, who cannot be accused of an overly rationalist attitude, asked me innocently -- how come the footprint is so big ?


Papier-mache craftwork by Timbaktu school children.



Vinayaka image (can't see much really) at the timbaktu school, for vinayaka chaturti celebrations.


Below: A funny tourist attraction on the way to Timbaktu: a giant sleeping Kumbakharna, with people running around trying to wake him up.

NREGA 'Social Audit' Padayatra - 1

Okay lots of detail and background needed here.

I already wrote a little about what NREGA is about.
It turns out that they are some good officials in government, who care that this project should be implemented well. In this case the relevant person is Mr. Raju who I already blogged briefly about. So he decided that it would be a good idea to do a 'social audit' to see how well the program is doing. A 'social audit' entails having a village meeting with all the villagers and going over the work done in the program and finding out by direct cross-verification with the villagers is stuff is happening as expected. The social audit would require a massive effort if its to be done in every village, so as a compromise its done in sort of a representative sample of villages. In Anantapur it was done by taking active help from NGOs as a third party otherwise the government is not very good at policing itself. And the social audit is structured as a padayatra where a group of people (NGO workers, other local organization workers, outside people) walk from village to village during the course of 6 days and each day do the audit at one village. In this way about 400 (0r 600, I got conflicting numbers) villages of Anantapur district were covered over the course of the week from 2nd to 9th September. The government officials were given strict instructions to cooperate fully and since their big boss Raju was behind this project, they had to take it seriously. The idea for this social audit came from Rajasthan where a similar thing was done in Dungarpur district by MKSS and other groups. Timbaktu collective covered 18 villages in 3 mandals as their coverage.
Pulling this social audit thing together was not an easy thing, as NGOs don't always work together well and have strong ideological stances etc. Finally people pulled together and made it happen but it could have been more effective (it *was* quite effective as it was) if the NGOs worked better together. I heard a lot about some of the friction arguments, although I didn't see it first hand. It was an excellent education in interpersonal interactions to see how even NGOs have trouble working together.

I started off expecting to do a lot of documentation work for the audit but as the situation evolved I did very little. People were learning how to do the audit properly on the job, and it ended up with me just accompanying Mary as she visited various places and talked to various people. I did some odd bits of work here and there that were quite useful but for the most part tagged along with Mary, absorbed a lot, and acted as her sounding board. It was quite fun !

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PS: I added a photo to a previous post about our anniversary

New Comp !

Finally its here !!!

My new Compaq V3035TU.

Notes:

-- Immediately after I bought it I saw an advertisement for IBMs new R60 which was the other computer that I was seriously considering, but finally decided against, because it was not yet on the market and it was slightly pricey. But the price in the ad was low enough that it was about the same that I'm spent on the Compaq. So some heartburn but I think there are enough pluses either way. The Compaq keyboard is 'feathertouchy' as the IBM, but it doesn't have the special IBM mouse and I'm finding that a pain. Otherwise the Compaq machine looks pretty sleek. Screen is smaller than IBM but I don't think that is going to be something very important for me. Both of them have the Duo Core processor that is the latest thing, but I'm not noticing my Compaq machine being particularly fast as a result of that (though the effect is mostly seen in high power neeeding applications and multithreading rather than the general OS functioning)
-- I bought it at a reseller called Computer Warehouse (computerwarehousepricelist.com) for 55000/-. They were overall pretty good with the service. I am going to purchase an add-on 3 year warranty for about 8000/- and probably Office Pro for 13,000/-. Yeesh. Right now I'll try downloading Open Office and playing with it for a little while.
-- I'm supposed to make backup discs immediately and I'm much more interested in blogging and messing up my computer importing images and stuff :-)
-- The laptop came with a nice bag and two power cords, one that works off a 'universal' plug point (I believe that's the plug point that they use in Europe), and another one that doesn't fit in my house powerpoints. So I had to get an adaptor today but its working fine after plugging that in. It weights 2.68 Kgs if I remember right, it feels quite light.
-- Huge backlog of blogging and replying to mail etc, that I didn't do because of non-optimality of browsing centers. I'm getting stressed out thinking of all the stuff I want to blog about :-)



PS: Bunch of updates at the other blog




Shiny black cover



Funky blue LEDs


Funny Compaq screen background

HUGE, dude (Celebrity spotting contd.)

Aruna Roy, Bablu, and Nikhil Dey



The person standing is (I think) D. Srinvas, a state minister, the snowy-hair person sitting on his left is Raghuvansh Prasad Singh. The rest of the people are assorted ministers and bureaucrats.



The person is the pink shirt is Mr. Raju and the person next to him is the Anantapur District Collector. Mary is at the edge of the photo.

Okay, so I saw sooo many interesting/important people this time in Timbaktu/Anantapur. It was a really intense trip with lots of input into my mind for digesting, and hopefully I can get it all down on paper and out of my mind.

I'll start by trying to list out some of the people I met (or just gaped at) during this trip):

Aruna Roy (and Nikhil Dey): For those who care about or keep in touch with development stuff, Aruna Roy is superbig. She would be on my 'A' list of 'celebs I would like to meet'. She has been actively invovled with two of the most far reaching legislations recently (NREGA-National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, and RTI - Right to Information). She and the group she works with (MKSS in Rajasthan) seem to be really productive in identifying and producing results on really key fundamental areas that can cause change. I first came across Aruna Roy in the book "Bapu Kuti" ( read my review :-) here , and an interview with the author here). To me it read as a fascinating story of how one person attempted to get deeper and deeper into the questions of development, empowerment etc. and found some solutions in things like Right to Information.
I spent a few lovely minutes along with Aruna Roy and several other people in a room generally chatting, though I was pretty mum throughout and just hanging on to her words. In that short interaction, she came across as a gentle, strong, intelligent, warm, caring, accessible person with a lovely smile.

Nikhil Dey is her comrade-in-arms. I didn't get to interact with him, just glimpsed him here and there. He left early.

Union Minister for Rural Development, Raghuvansh Prasad Singh: He addressed a couple of meetings at the end of the NREGA padayatra. He talked really loudly for a really long time like 45 mins. At the end of it, I don't know about him, but I was really drained. This was the first time I think I have actually heard a politician speak. I was really puzzled by the droning-on-and-on. Finally I came to the conclusion that at some level this kind of behavior by politicians is a demonstration of power. At the end of the talk I was so drained and I theorize at some level (perhaps not conscious) this is a demonstration of power ie. I can keep going until you accept defeat. (I'm not being very clear in explaining this). Anyway later in the conversation with Aruna Roy, it came out that this person is actually a good guy. He worked closely with the NGOs in pushing NREGA legislation through and she gave a nice quote from him, he was complaining about how difficult a time he was having: 'if I go to the PMs house to talk about NREGA, on one side I have to fight with Chidambaram, on another side I have to fight with Montek (Ahluwalia).' His speech was in Hindi so I didn't catch much, but there was some good stuff about how the govt. is willing to spend huge amounts for Delhi Metro, but not on the NREGA, and some good rabble rousing stuff, we'll never give up, we'll keep asking for more money, as much as we need to implement this program properly etc. Certainly a guy I will keep a lookout for in the news from now on.

Montek Ahluwalia (Vice Chairman, Planning Commission, and Jairam Ramesh, Minister for Commerce): No I didn't actually see them. They were supposed to come to Anantapur for this program but they finally skipped it. Disappointing. The interesting story though, is that these people are very against the NREGA as they feel that the money will get misused like all other govt. programs. So the point of inviting them for this meeting was to try to convince them that the program is good. In fact Aruna Roy was not planning to come, but decided to come hearing that they would be here, as she wanted to help convince them of the usefulness of the program.

Assorted AP state ministers: D.Srinivas, Raghuveera Reddy, and some others. I didn't see them much except quite obscured on a stage, and they didn't impress me at all. There was also a woman Union minister (Rukmini or something) and she too was not very visible and didn't speak so nothing to report.

Assorted senior bureaucrats: The most important of them was the AP Commissioner (or Principal Secretary) for Rural Development, one Mr. Raju. He was the key person in organizing this padayatra and came across as quite an intelligent committed person. The collector of Anantapur was there, but not that interesting. Also a couple of other senior women bureaucrats who were quite interesting but I don't want to go into too much detail as they are friends of Mary and I might be intruding on privacy and all.

Several other people from Aruna Roy's group, MKSS : They were here to help in doing the padayatra social audit. A very interesting, committed and fun group of people, I'll write more about them later in describing the padayatra.

A couple of memorable characters in the Anantapur NGO scene -- Narendar Singh Bedi of Young India Project and Malla Reddy of Rural Development Trust. I don't know if I can be quite forthcoming about my impressions of them in this blog. Will write a little more about them later.

And a few more interesting minor characters, and probably some more people who I've forgotten about at the moment, but will come to mind later.

All in all an extremely gratifying week from celeb spotting point of view. I think I will have gotten over some of my awe of development 'superstars' as well as senior govt. poohbahs and politicians, as a result of this interaction and that's a welcome thing.

Travails with the RTO

One of the tasks on my agenda is to get myself a drivers' license(!) and car registration. What happened was, in Jan 05, I lost my wallet and with it, my drivers' license and registration (both from AP). Negotiating with the RTO (Regional Transport Office) is formidable task for a honest person with an even slightly unusual situation, so I didn't make any progress for a long while. However now that I have more time on my hands -- time to tackle it. My situation is this messy, complex one involving the Hyderabad RTO and Bangalore RTO and some degree of past negligence on my part, simultaneously being without license and registration, trying to do things the straight way and so on. Its not clear where to start to resolve this Gordian knot. However I made a minor breakthrough with discovering an organization called the Automotive Association of South India. This is like the AAA in the US, and among other things, also helps you in negotiating the maze of the RTO. The RTO is very difficult to deal with on your own. The normal brokers who help you are pretty unsatisfactory. They tend to be unsavory looking characters, whose chief skill is bribing their way through the RTO. The AASI on the other hand is an organization with a long and illustrous history, a really nice old-fashioned wood and high-ceiling office off MG Road, and pleasant sensible people who know English. Perfect for me. So I've started with them. Getting the drivers' license should be reasonably easy as the RTO allows you to get one without a driving test if you have a foreign license, which I do. However they do force you to take a written test to get a Learners' License first. I could bypass the step for a 1500/- but I desisted and took the test. The test is a real mess. The test consists of 15 multiple choice questions that are to be answered in 15 minutes. 10 on 15 is a pass. There are several different versions of the question paper, so that people in the exam hall generally get all different question papers. There is no manual for preparation although the shops around the RTO will sell a couple of booklets that are somewhat helpful. If you study the booklets well, you can get around 5 of the 15 questions easily. The remaining questions are: a.) complicated by horrible english so you could muff even a simple question because of erroneous interpretation of the question b.) random stuff that you would never know c.) absolutely stupid questions that make you want to wring somebody's head. So far I've taken this test 4 times :-). In a earlier attempt last year to get a driving license, I took it twice before managing to pass it. The same happened this time too, first time around I got 7 on 15 and then second time 13 on 15. The questions are so frustrating that I didn't feel that I had done the second attempt any better than the first and yet I did a lot better. Anyway, all this nonsense has prompted an attempt to fight back. I've put as many questions as I can remember on my website: here. Its a little rough at this point, hope to clean it up. I did some websearches earlier but didn't find anything on the web about taking this test, so time to make a start. Hopefully this page will help other people, and even better, people will send in more questions so that (AGRE style) we would have this test completely cracked.
Ahem, there are also Google ads in a vain attempt to ...

Re. the permanent license, when I'm back from Timbaktu I have to go back to the RTO to get my photo taken and stuff, and that should be it ... with luck.