At Gubbi

The weekend before we went to Coorg, I went to a rural area near Gubbi, Karnataka to meet Chitra Krishnan, a batch mate at IIT who is doing organic agriculture there with a couple of friends. Chitra is a cool person, a PhD from IIT Delhi who worked on irrigation systems (traditional tanks I think) for her thesis. I went with Balaji a common friend and batchmate. It was quite a humbling experience. They want to do farming as simply and authentically as possible so they do pretty much all the work manually. The land is quite infertile, and they are slowly regenerating it using natural fertilizers. We spent some time harvesting toor dal and pumping water. It was disturbing seeing how austerely they have chosen to live.

I've been doing short trips on consecutive weekends. Before Gubbi I was in Chennai to look at some land to purchase (!!!!!!), and during the week a day trip to Mysore for the wedding of a colleague.

PS: A hi to Siddharth who posted a comment recently. How's doing. I'm still up for a group lunch. Was at Juniper to catch up recently but couldn't find you.