despoki

Kilikili !

2011-11-27T21:21:00.004+05:30

I had a very nice 'Eureka' moment recently. On Rainbow FM (the AIR FM channel?) there was a programme "Folks with Different Strokes" (?). It featured a lady whose child had a mental disability and how she and her husband coped with it and went on to found an NGO "KiliKili", to create playspaces for children with disabilities. The lady was simply fantastic. One could see that she had beautifully come to terms with the difficulty of having and raising a differently-abled child, and there was great spirit and strength and no bitterness whatsoever visible. The host was fantastic too, asking good questions, interjecting when needed, generally sensitive and soft-spoken. From the way the interview went, she seemed to have done a horrific amount of preparation. How wasteful and old-fashioned! To actually do research before going on air. Kudos to this hostess, whose name wasn't mentioned on air. The interviewee was Kavitha Krishnamoorthy and the organisation she co-founded can be found at www.kilikili.org .

The icing on the cake for me was a small personal connection through Chitra Vishwanath of Biome Solutions (www.biome-solutions.com), the redoubtable environmental architect who was mentioned on air as having worked with this group to design playgrounds that are usable by all kinds of children.

So - this was one of the best programmes I've heard on air (both TV and radio) in India. Truly an example of what TV and radio could be at its best. Not that these media should only show inspirational true stories, but the current fare on offer without depth or substance is pathetic. The programme compared well with the best I've heard on radio in the US.

"Folks with different strokes" airs every alternate Saturday between 6 and 8 pm.

On the cost of clothes

2011-10-16T14:04:00.004+05:30

Sometime back I started thinking about this idea below of evaluating how one spends money on clothes. I mentioned it in one of the earlier posts on the blog, but then I continued to think about it and found it more and more interesting, so here's the idea now fleshed out more. The intention to keep detailing it out until I can get something to publish in a peer-reviewed journal :-) ( the Journal of Consumer Economics ?)

You could evaluate your clothes by dividing the cost of an item by the number of times you wore it. You'd look for a low number to come out of the ratio as that would indicate that it didn't cost you much and you used it a lot, therefore good value. We could call this number the cost per use (CPU). It seems an interesting way to evaluate the worth or the value you get out of it.

I've continued to think about this and find it very interesting. Firstly, you can think about how much money you're wearing everyday. This is the total cost per use of all the things you're wearing (lets restrict it to just clothes, including undergarments and footwear but not jewellery and accessories). I was surprised by the number that I estimated, in my case: greater than 50/-. I wouldn't have thought I was spending that much on clothes every day ! Take a 1500/- Rs pair of jeans which I bought recently ; I'd have to wear it a 100 times for the cost per use to come down to 15/- . I think I'll probably not use it so many times, perhaps 75 times is more like it. So cost per use is Rs 20/-. For other trousers I expect I'll use them even less than 75 times so if they cost the same, the CPU is even higher. A similar calculation for shirts, which could cost 500/- to 700/- for the kind of shirts I wear to work but which I would wear less number of times than trousers before discarding or giving away, perhaps 30-50 times (so CPU average around 15/-). Then calculate the cost for undergarments , shoes/socks, belt . And an unexpected extra, the cost of washing and ironing. Ironing now costs 4/- a garment for me, so that's close to 10/- for ironing itself ! So as I said, adding it all up, a total of Rs 50/- per day.

Its an interesting calculation to do.

The one thing that cost surpringly less for me was footwear. The current pair I use is from Bata, a fairly nice piece that is very reasonably priced at around 450/-. And since I use it everyday pretty much, I've probably used it more than 100 times already, so the cost per wear is down to 4.50 /- already . Very low compared to shirts and pants ! And its in pretty good shape still and could easily go for another 6 months, so the cost per wear is coming down even further. It seems I could cut down the amount I pay on clothes and splurge a little more on footwear, to reach a more optimal point.

For fancy clothes that you wear for special occasions, the cost / use would be much higher than for daily wear clothes. This is because these would be pretty expensive clothes, that we would wear it very few times, so double the effect. For eg. all the suits I've bought, I've used only a couple of times, and then they've gotten too tight for me :-( .

You can start doing this for the other things you buy and use. For example my cellphone cost is horrendous ; each time I've bought a high end phone (both Nokias), I've enjoyed using them a lot but they've lasted relatively short. The first one for eg. cost about 13000 and lasted for about 18 months, so that's close to 750/- per month ! No more expensive phones for me!

2011-05-08T09:40:00.001+05:30

2011-04-27T12:16:00.002+05:30

New Vibhat video. Watch him test his vocal chords. There was a phase when he loved to shout just for fun. Quite endearing

2011-02-13T00:37:00.002+05:30

At long last a video of Vibhat , this one of him exercising his vocabulary:

"It Happened In India" by Kishore Biyani

2011-02-04T22:23:00.007+05:30

Image from Rupa Publications website, Go there

In Kishore Biyani's book "It Happened In India", there is one story where Biyani and an associate are not able to find the onramp to the Mumbai Pune expressway. Frustrated, Biyani complains to his associate, who is an NID (National Institute of Design, the premier design school in the country) graduate designer that after 30 years of NID, the school and its graduates still haven't made any impact in the country. The associate defends NID rather weakly citing the designing of the SBI logo Indian Airlines logo and some such examples. Bhiyani segues the story towards his own ideas about the importance of design in the retailing work that he does, on India-centric design and some other things. (That associate by the way is persuaded to merge his design firm with another complementary one, to create Idiom design, Bangalore, a firm Biyani feels has the potential to become one of the best design shops in the world).

My own take on the story is that it is very revealing of one thing: the fact that the NID people are happy to contribute by designing logos when the whole country is one vast landscape that could do with design inputs at every level (designing of policies, railway stations and buses, traffic systems, cities, you name it). A similiar criticism applies to the IITs, I think. In some form this criticism has been around for a long time, perhaps from the time I graduated, but I'd like to add my take to it, from personal experience. Of late, I'm continually struck, how everywhere you look in India there is something that a good engineer could improve. From my own work in water, water quality, rainwater harvesting systems, hydrogeology and groundwater, appropriate wastewater treatment systems are examples. Other examples: traffic engineering, rural development, agricultural engineering, IT-enabling government and development. We have built infinite number of buildings especially in the last twenty years, but have any signficant construction innovations happened ? Why is it that the entire country has the same cookie-cutter style apartment buildings ? Is there any significant improvement in building technology that we have come up with by observing Indian conditions and innovating for them ? Travelling in rural areas, I see how bad the roads are ; the reason being there is not enough money to build and repave. Why have we not found a more appropriate version of the conventional way of building a road, that may not be as comfortable but will atleast connect all the villages in a minimally motorable fashion? Somehow the IITs and other engineering colleges have managed to divorce themselves from all that and find some strange projects to do and sustain themselves. Its a great pity because, from personal experience, the stimulation of working on things that are directly relevant to people lives is huge, and the work is incredibly rewarding.

Kishore Biyani's experience of creating and managing Pantaloons, Big Bazaar and more, which is recounted in the book is also relevant to the above. While I have personally been quite revolted by Big Bazaar (I'll have to go back and try again), the book makes me see it in a different light. What Kishore Biyani says he's trying to do (and I believe him) is bring the 'retail experience' to an order of magnitude more people than previously could access it. And you gotta agree with anybody trying to bring any sort of benefits (even a dubious one like consumerism) to a much larger audience. In India so many things are restricted at the 1% or 10% level of the population, and we have gotten used to it and gotten complacent. Anything that breaks that barrier and equalizes stuff with the rest of the country has to be, in the big picture, a good thing. The Nano is another example.

"And his life should become extinct"

2011-01-11T09:17:00.003+05:30

Am reading the very disturbing "Listening to Grasshoppers" by Arundhati Roy. Wanted to do some kind of review of it, but gave up and am settling for extensively quoting from perhaps the most devastating piece , "And His Life Should Become Extinct". It is about the terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament in 2001 and the subsequent trial of one of the accused Mohammed Afzal, who is currently in jail having been awarded a death sentence that has not yet been carried out.

The original can (and should be) read here:
http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?232979
http://www.countercurrents.org/hr-roy311006.htm

The Outlook article has some comments that refute some bits of Roy's research and are useful to read.

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On December 13, 2001, the Indian Parliament was in its winter session. (The NDA government was under attack for yet another corruption scandal.) At 11.30 in the morning, five armed men in a white Ambassador car fitted out with an Improvised Explosive Device drove through the gates of Parliament House. When they were challenged, they jumped out of the car and opened fire. In the gun battle that followed, all the attackers were killed. Eight security personnel and a gardener were killed too. The dead terrorists, the police said, had enough explosives to blow up the Parliament building, and enough ammunition to take on a whole battalion of soldiers A day later, on December 15, it announced that it had "cracked the case": the attack, the police said, was a joint operation carried out by two Pakistan-based terrorist groups, Lashkar-e-Toiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed. Twelve people were named as being part of the conspiracy. Ghazi Baba of the Jaish (Usual Suspect I), Maulana Masood Azhar also of the Jaish (Usual Suspect II); Tariq Ahmed (a "Pakistani"); five deceased "Pakistani terrorists" (we still don't know who they are). And three Kashmiri men, S.A.R. Geelani, Shaukat Hussain Guru, and Mohammed Afzal; and Shaukat's wife Afsan Guru. These were the only four to be arrested. In the tense days that followed, Parliament was adjourned. On December 21, India recalled its high commissioner from Pakistan, suspended air, rail and bus communications and banned over-flights. It put into motion a massive mobilisation of its war machinery, and moved more than half-a-million troops to the Pakistan border. Foreign embassies evacuated their staff and citizens, and tourists travelling to India were issued cautionary travel advisories. The world watched with bated breath as the subcontinent was taken to the brink of nuclear war. (All this cost India an estimated Rs 10,000 crore of public money. A few hundred soldiers died just in the panicky process of mobilisation.) Sadly, in the midst of the frenzy, Afzal seems to have forfeited the right to be an individual, a real person any more. He's become a vehicle for everybody's fantasies—nationalists, separatists, and anti-capital punishment activists. He has become India's great villain and Kashmir's great hero—proving only that whatever our pundits, policymakers and peace gurus say, all these years later, the war in Kashmir has by no means ended. Afsan, who was pregnant when she was arrested, had her baby in prison. Her experience broke her. She now suffers from a serious psychiatric condition. It can and will be argued that the cases of both S.A.R. Geelani and Iftikhar Gilani serve only to demonstrate the objectivity of the Indian judicial system and its capacity for self-correction, they do not discredit it. That's only partly true. Both Iftikhar Gilani and S.A.R. Geelani are fortunate to be Delhi-based Kashmiris with a community of articulate, middle-class peers; journalists and university teachers, who knew them well and rallied around them in their time of need. S.A.R. Geelani's lawyer Nandita Haksar put together an All India Defence Committee for S.A.R. Geelani (of which I was a member). There was a coordinated campaign by activists, lawyers and journalists to rally behind Geelani. Well-known lawyers Ram Jethmalani, K.G. Kannabiran, Vrinda Grover represented him. They showed up the case for what it was—a pack of absurd assumptions, suppositions, and outright lies, bolstered by fabricated evidence. So of course judicial objectivity exists. But it's a shy beast that lives somewhere deep in the labyrinth of our legal system. It shows itself rarely. It takes whole teams of top lawyers to coax it out of its lair and make it come out and play. It's what in newspaper-speak would be called a Herculean task. Mohammed Afzal did not have Hercules on his side. For five months, from the time he was arrested to the day the police charge-sheet was filed, Mohammed Afzal, lodged in a high-security prison, had no legal defence, no legal advice. No top lawyers, no defence committee (in India or Kashmir), and no campaign. Of all the four accused, he was the most vulnerable. His case was far more complicated than Geelani's. For Afzal, everything that could go wrong went wrong. He was incarcerated in a high-security prison, with no access to the outside world, and no money to hire a lawyer professionally. Three weeks into the trial the lawyer appointed by the court asked to be discharged from the case because she had now been professionally hired to be on the team of lawyers for S.A.R. Geelani's defence. The court appointed her junior, a lawyer with very little experience, to represent Afzal. He did not once visit his client in jail to take instructions. He did not summon a single witness for Afzal's defence and barely cross-questioned any of the prosecution witnesses. Five days after he was appointed, on July 8, Afzal asked the court for another lawyer and gave the court a list of lawyers whom he hoped the court might hire for him. Each of them refused. (Given the frenzy of propaganda in the media, it was hardly surprising. At a later stage of the trial, when senior advocate Ram Jethmalani agreed to represent Geelani, Shiv Sena mobs ransacked his Bombay office.) The judge expressed his inability to do anything about this, and gave Afzal the right to cross-examine witnesses. It's astonishing for the judge to expect a layperson to be able cross-examine witnesses in a criminal trial. It's a virtually impossible task for someone who does not have a sophisticated understanding of criminal law, including new laws that had just been passed, like POTA, and the amendments to the Evidence Act and the Telegraph Act. Even experienced lawyers were having to work overtime to bring themselves up to date. Eventually, both the high court and the Supreme Court set aside Afzal's confession citing 'lapses and violations of procedural safeguards'. But Afzal's confession somehow survives, the phantom keystone in the prosecution's case. And before it was technically and legally set aside, the confessional document had already served a major extra-legal purpose: On December 21, 2001, when the Government of India launched its war effort against Pakistan it said it had 'incontrovertible evidence' of Pakistan's involvement. Afzal's confession was the only 'proof' of Pakistan's involvement that the government had! Afzal's confession. And the sticker-manifesto.Think about it. On the basis of this illegal confession extracted under torture, hundreds of thousands of soldiers were moved to the Pakistan border at huge cost to the public exchequer, and the subcontinent devolved into a game of nuclear brinkmanship in which the whole world was held hostage. Later, when Afzal's confession was set aside by the higher courts, all talk of Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba ceased. The only other link to Pakistan was the identity of the five dead fidayeen. Mohammed Afzal, still in police custody, identified them as Mohammed, Rana, Raja, Hamza and Haider. The home minister said they "looked like Pakistanis", the police said they were Pakistanis, the trial court judge said they were Pakistanis. And there the matter rests. Had we been told that their names were Happy, Bouncy, Lucky, Jolly and Kidingamani from Scandinavia, we would have had to accept that too. We still don't know who they really are, or where they're from. Is anyone curious? Doesn't look like it. The high court said the "identity of the five deceased thus stands established. Even otherwise it makes no difference. What is relevant is the association of the accused with the said five persons and not their names." It became clear that the accumulation of lies, fabrications, forged documents and serious lapses in procedure began from the very first day of the investigation. While the high court and Supreme Court judgements have pointed these things out, they have just wagged an admonitory finger at the police, or occasionally called it a 'disturbing feature', which is a disturbing feature in itself. At no point in the trial has the police been seriously reprimanded, leave alone penalised. In fact, almost every step of the way, the Special Cell displayed an egregious disregard for procedural norms. The shoddy callousness with which the investigations were carried out demonstrate a worrying belief that they wouldn't be 'found out,' and if they were, it wouldn't matter very much. Their confidence does not seem to have been misplaced. A series of prosecution witnesses, most of them shopkeepers, identified Afzal as the man to whom they had sold various things: ammonium nitrate, aluminum powder, sulphur, a Sujata mixer-grinder, packets of dry fruit and so on. Normal procedure would require these shopkeepers to pick Afzal out from a number of people in a test identification parade. This didn't happen. Instead Afzal was identified by them when he 'led' the police to these shops while he was in police custody and introduced to the witnesses as an Accused in the Parliament Attack. (Are we allowed to speculate about whether he led the police or the police led him to the shops? After all he was still in their custody, still vulnerable to torture. If his confession under these circumstances is legally suspect, then why not all of this?) The judges have pondered the violation of these procedural norms but have not taken them very seriously. They said that they did not see why ordinary members of the public would have reason to falsely implicate an innocent person. None of the inconsistencies that I have written about so far are the result of spectacular detective work on my part. A lot of them are documented in an excellent book called December 13th: Terror Over Democracy by Nirmalangshu Mukherji; in two reports (Trial of Errors and Balancing Act) published by the Peoples' Union for Democratic Rights, Delhi; and most important of all, in the three thick volumes of judgements of the trial court, the high court and the Supreme Court. All these are public documents, lying on my desk. Why is it that when there is this whole murky universe begging to be revealed, our TV channels are busy staging hollow debates between uninformed people and grasping politicians? Why is it that apart from a few sporadic independent commentators, our newspapers carry front-page stories about who the hangman is going to be, and macabre details about the length (60 metres) and weight (3.75 kg) of the rope that will be used to hang Mohammed Afzal (Indian Express, October 16, 2006).Shall we pause for a moment to say a few hosannas for the Free Press?

The learnability of states

2010-12-30T04:58:00.002+05:30

Perhaps there is a useful concept around the 'learnability' of states. This refers per my thesis, to the ability of countries to 1.) come to terms with ground realities and not live in a state of wishful thinking 2.) recognize the legitimate (and perhaps not so legitimate) and persistent aspirations of groups of people and do something even if reluctantly, about it 3.) to correct the mainstream view of history regarding an event or events when the party line is wrong or distorted 3.) and to do this in a reasonable timeframe

The Irish 'troubles' are a classic example of lack of learning of a state. It took a huge amount of time (after the initial formation of the independent country of Ireland in the southern part ; a surprisingly forward-thinking decision for colonialist Great Britain) for the UK to come to terms with the conflict in northern Ireland and agree to the final solution that worked there. Simliarly, the Israeli state is learning at a glacial pace in the Palestinian conflict.

In India, the thinking on Kashmir. 60 years after independence, the discussion on Kashmir has pretty much not budged an inch - anything other than Kashmir as a integral part of India is not up for discussion. This is astounding given the dubious nature of the accession of Kashmir to India in the first place, and the incredible amount of conflict, displacement and death over the years. One would expect minimally some form of autonomy to be actively on the discussion agenda, but nope.
And going by this article, perhaps the conventional understanding on China and border issues with them, also needs a significant shift: http://www.indianexpress.com/news/night-of-november-19/729644/0

The relatively sudden shift of China towards capitalism and financial liberalization in India in the nineties are examples of good learning in states perhaps.

Kissinger jokes

2010-12-30T04:34:00.004+05:30

Kissinger's work has many examples of what decent people would find enormous inversions of justice - like for example that he was given the Nobel prize for bringing an end to the Vietnam war, when he was in actuality responsible for things the massive bombing of Cambodia as part of that war. It was famously and appropriately labeled 'the death of satire' when it happened.

Chomsky is not usually given to humor, and one of the few and classic examples in his writing is in relation to Kissinger, whose guts he really hates. Recounting another of the large-scale inversions of justice that Kissinger was responsible for, Chomsky with savage bitterness, comments: "While K is always good for a little comic relief..."

And finally one from that fantastic commentator on world affairs, Gary Trudeau of Doonsbury. In a series of strips, Kissinger is visiting faculty at a local Washington univ and taking a seminar course while doing his stuff as Secy. of State. While he tries to use the seminar to talk about realpolitik and world domination and such cool stuff, there are one or two idealists in the class who keep bringing up useless questions about truth justice and the suffering of the common man. Finally Kissinger in frustration bursts out "Human rights! Human rights! I'm sick and tired of human rights!"

Touche. Sometimes I feel a similiar sentiment : "Climate change! Climate change! I'm sick and tired of climate change!"

For perhaps a more rounded and fair portrayal of Kissinger, see the Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Kissinger

2010-10-20T14:28:00.003+05:30

I did another review recently, this time for Pratham Books, a really good children's book publisher in India. They sent out books to people to review, and I got one.
Visit their very nice blog at blog.prathambooks.org and their impressive social media outreach at social.prathambooks.org. And while you're at it, their website: www.prathambooks.org :-)
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"Grandfather Goes on Strike" is a good book that takes on an environmental issue and makes it accessible to young readers. Sathya's grandfather decides to climb a tree and stay there in order to prevent it from being cut down to construct houses. Sathya is staying alone with his grandfather so on his young shoulders falls the predicament of handling this situation. A stream of visitors, policemen, environmentalists, artists and councillors have to be managed, along with grandfather's well-being, but finally all ends well for both grandfather and the tree.

A very nice feature of this book is the understated humor.

Grandfather grinned: "I cannot hear anything you say, because of the breeze". There was no breeze. There was not even a breath of air.

I hope the child readers get the deadpan humor of jokes such as these.

The book does a good job of being realistic and true-to-life without being boring. The policemens' personalities are done well in text and illustration. The artists are intriguing, they seem to tread a fine line between being superficial do-gooders and being more substantive changemakers. I am not sure what the author had in mind! A few elements are glossed over: How does grandfather manage sleep, poop and pee up in the tree? If the land belongs to someone else, what about his right to use the land as he feels fit?

The book is a welcome addition to Read India's line. Congrats to the author, illustrator and Read India. But one also feels a small disappointment, that still more could have been done to make the book engaging and fun.
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and some specific niggles:
1.) The text transition from page 2 to page 3 is not so good
2.) "There was a flash news in a box" - grammatically incorrect ?
3.) "Just then Ramya and Priya, my cousins brought us a flask of steaming, hot coffee". If there were cousins around, where were their parents, and why did the cousins not help out more ?
4.) "Meanwhile breakfast arrived". From where ?!
5.) In one illustration, the councillors are shown wearing suits and carrying briefcases, which is unlikely in India.

Vibhat September 2010

2010-09-25T15:46:00.000+05:30

Since my last upload Vibhat has developed enormously as this video shows. He's walking very comfortably, enormously curious about all objects, physically stronger with better motor skills and is developing a personality

On education

2010-08-28T02:23:00.007+05:30

What is the purpose of education? There are many answers, and three common ones are below:

-'to succeed in the fast-paced, competitive modern world' (an answer that I find particularly moronic)
-'to equip the child with the knowledge and skills to find work to support themselves'
-'to discover one's talents'

Are you satisfied by any of the above answers ? I'm not, in fact I'm tremendous dissatisfied with the education system (of personal interest now that I am a father). Human minds are complex. We experience emotions - joy, anger, jealousy, contempt,love. We complain about other peoples' actions and justify ours. But do we have to take all these as given, these things are how we are, or is it possible to 'step outside' of oneself, and be able to observe how our minds work, why we react the way we react, what are the hidden motivations or insecurities. As the child is growing up and its character being formed - is it possible to have serious conversations about the rather imperfect nature of the world we live in, with how we rationalize the way we (in India atleast) make our peace with the enormous poverty and suffering outside our doorsteps in order to carry on our lives. Is it possible to teach children to be decent, happy individuals ?

Can we teach children to be alive to the mystery of life ? Here we are, blobs of protoplasm with odd projections that enable us to locomote manipulate, on a large orb circling a ball of fire, in the middle of a vastness we cannot comprehend. We are one in billions today and have been preceded by billions and will be followed by billions. So how do we come to terms with all this ? Normally all this is pushed to the back of the mind so we can get on with the day to day business of life, survival, freedom from pain and discomfort, pleasure, achievement and all that ? Can we teach our children to do a better of job of this than us? And what of the infinite complexity and variety of life on earth. Can we teach our children to be open to that?

Schools have to teach maths, physics and geography and so on. But if we as parents and teachers don't weave in the above we have lost the spirit of education. And this is the state of affairs across the board. I am sure the most expensive and fancy schools don't do that much better of a job than the middle-class schools in this, because the management and the parents are as much invested in the status quo of the world today, in fact even more, so that they are uninterested in questioning it.

Post Script:
We were casually talking about something related to schools at work once, and during that I spontaneously burst out: "I have zero faith in the educational system!". I was myself suprised by my vehemence as it was not premeditated, and to some extent I didn't even know that I felt this way. Some subsequent reflection resulted in the picture I lay out above. I find it ironic that having done excellently by conventional standards in most of my education, I now am completely disdaining it. But all the reflection, discovery and learning that happened for me, mostly slowly and haltingly, completely parallel to or outside the educational system, is central to what I am today. I see that as a tremendous failure of the education system.

I don't think many people feel so negatively about schools as I do. This leads to a nicely ironic dilemma for me: at least others are comfortable with the current system, and they are true to themselves if they don't fight against it. If I don't, I am being a complete fake. And the job I am talking about above is so gigantic and so seems so much beyond my capabilities.

The above thoughts are tremendously influenced by J. Krishnamurti's writings. But I have internalized them so completely and find them so obvious now, that I am not parroting what someone else is saying.

"It is our earth, not yours or mine or his. We are meant to live on it, helping each other, not destroying each other. This is not some romantic nonsense, but the actual fact"

Orhan Pamuk's 'Istanbul'

2010-08-21T19:26:00.003+05:30

DONT READ IF YOU HAVENT READ AND PLAN TO READ ORHAN PAMUK's CLASSIC 'ISTANBUL'

The superb dramatic ending of Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul. To get the full effect, you have to read the book. Nevertheless, the context is that the young Pamuk is a very talented painter but gives it up temporarily after a painful breakup with his lover and muse. Meanwhile he drops out of architecture school and is having huge frequent fights with his mother who is adamant that there is no future or career for a painter in Turkey and that he must finish his architecture degree. Often he would leave the house in a rage after one of these fights and wander the streets all night:

"On my way up to Taksim, I'd stop for a moment to look at the lights of Galata in the half dark view, and then I'd head for Beyoglu to spend a few minutes browsing through the bookstalls at the beginning of Istiklal Avenue, and after that I'd stop for a beer and vodka in one of those beer halls where the television drowned out the noisy crowd, and smoke a cigarette, as everyone else was doing (I'd look around me to see if there happened to be any famous poets, writers or artists sitting nearby) and when I felt I was attracting too much attention from all those mustachioed men - because I was looking around me, and alone and had a child's face - I would go out again to mingle with the night. After walking down the avenue for a little I'd head into the back streets of Beyoglu and when I had reached Cukurcuma, Galata, Cihangir, I would pause to gaze at the holos of the streetlamps and the light from a nearby television screen flickering on the wet pavements, and it would be while peering into a junk shop, a refrigrator that an ordinary grocer used as a window display, a pharmacy still displaying a mannequin I remember from my childhood, that I would realize how very happy I was. The sublime, dizzying, pure anger I felt at this moment, after listening to my mother, would leave me after an hour of wandering around Beyoglu - or Uskudar, or the back streets of Fatih - wherever I went, as I got colder and colder, I'd be warmend by the furious flame of my brilliant future. By then my head would be light from the beer and the long exertion, and the mournful streets would seem to flicker as in an old film, a moment I would want to freeze and hide away - the way I used to hide a precious seed or a favourite marble in my mouth for hours on end - and at the same moment, I'd want to leave the empty streets and return home to sit down at my desk with pencil and paper to write or draw."

And then one day, the insight that resolves everything ...

"The streets of Beyoglu, their dark corners, my desire to run away, my guilt - they were all blinking on and off like neon lights in my head. I knew now that tonight my mother and I wouldn't have our fight, that in a few minutes I would open the door and escape into the city's consoling streets; and having walked away half the night, I'd return home and sit down at my table and capture their chemistry on paper.
"I don't want to be an artist", I said. "I'm going to be a writer".

Sensible things to do on (next) Independance day

2010-08-18T08:59:00.003+05:30

1.) Join the Clean Bengaluru campaign and clean up some area of Bangalore (www.cbengaluru.com)

2.) Revisit and reflect on the freedom struggle by watching a movie or reading a book. "Gandhi" by Attenborough is of course the default option, but there are some other less known options like movies on Bhagat Singh.

3.) Acknowledge people who serve you. At our apartment complex they gave some recognition (including monetary) to some employees who had helped put out a fire. A really nice thing to do.

4.)Spend time at an old age home, orphanage kind of place, like Sourav Gupta. Or take the opportunity to donate some money to them.

5.) DON'T take part in meaningless displays of patriotism like flag-hoisting or singing the national anthem.

Notes on "Inception"

2010-08-04T08:45:00.004+05:30

I saw it twice running on the same day to catch everything I had missed and get the movie out of my system :-)
'Matrix' did it already so in that way this one didn't blow the mind the way Matrix did. But still probably the best movie of the year? And certainly better than Avatar (thank god they didn't do this in distracting 3d).
The visuals and settings were gorgeous and pitch-perfect (except for the goofup with the carpet :-). And same with the acting.
Lot of gratuitous shoot-em-up.
The main motivator of one company battling other felt flat, did not have an importance or urgency to it.
And isn't it gratifying and amazing that a big-budget Hollywood film would do something like this without putting the romantic angle to Codd/Ariadne ?

==
PS: It isn't a co-incidence that the two blog posts I squeezed in, in a long time, happened when Priya and the kid were away. A one-year old is a real time consumer even for a hands off dad.

Notes from Raghuram Rajan's talk

2010-08-01T23:35:00.003+05:30

The UChicago BSchool professor who was Chief Economist at the IMF for a few years, and gained prominence recently for having 'predicted' the financial meltdown talked at Bangalore today, mostly about the root causes of the meltdown and also about India. The main talk did not resonate much with me but a few points that did:

* India will be the 2nd or 3rd largest economy in the world in a couple of years he said (I think he must have meant 4th, or else he was referring to many more years than just a couple). Do we have the thinking going on that would be needed for a country with that clout ? Like geopolitical thinking ; what should be our policy towards different countries/blocs, towards Africa ? A country like the US has a whole bunch of people discussing and debating these kind of things, and finally it crystallises into policy. Absolutely I agree -- there is a complete lack of depth in thinking about all the many areas of a complex industrialized (post industrialized) society. (Now this is where I step in ...)
* He felt that land/real estate has become a stumbling block for India's growth. Like if you have land or control of land then you can make money and if you don't, you don't. There is lot of lack of trasparency and distortion in land ; political people influence things unfairly, who you know matters. He also cited POSCO which has been trying for a long time to get land for its plant in Orissa. While I don't agree with the POSCO example (there is a lot of popular resistance to this from the local people), I agree completely to the broader point. When I see all the building construction in the cities of India, it gives me a very uneasy feeling. I've tried to analyse this and usually conclude that putting up such large buildings feels such a complex business and requires so much financing, that it makes me feel very small in comparison. But now I think the kind of thing Rajan was talking about also feeds into it ; the whole business of real estate is so opaque and criminalized and common people feel completely helpless in front of the forces involved. This shouldn't be.

* He pointed to UID and cash transfers (apparently being proposed) as critical pieces to stem the massive leakage and put more power in peoples' hands.

*Government's role need not be as a service provider per se. in areas like education and healthcare, the critical thing is that govt. plays a transparent regulatory role, so that whoever is delivering the service is constrainted to deliver a certain quality.

'Mobilized'

2010-07-16T09:30:00.003+05:30

A friend put me in touch with a startup mobstac.com that is beta testing its product to optimise websites and blogs for mobile. So now this site , despoki.blogspot.com can be viewed cleanly on a mobile. You should be able to navigate to despoki.blogspot.com on a mobile and get the mobile version, else go to despoki.mobstac.com . If you aren't able to get it through despoki.blogspot.com, please let me know.

Walking

2010-07-11T15:04:00.002+05:30

The long awaited event. He started walking (more like staggering) about a month back, and slowly got better and better at it. Now he walks more than he crawls.

More recent photos of Vibhat

2010-07-04T21:01:00.000+05:30

Photos from Vibhat's first birthday

2010-07-04T21:00:00.000+05:30

Rework The World

2010-06-28T02:11:00.005+05:30

I went to the Rework the World conference, www.reworktheworld.org in early June, representing Arghyam. The conference was in Leksand, a lakeside resort a few hours north of Stockholm. The conference was a very good experience. The next and last edition of the conference , which is one of a series is going to be held in Alexandria , Egypt in 2012 and I heartily recommend that to any young person, though needless to say, it would be quite expensive.

As luck would have it, my passport was quite close to expiring and I needed to get it renewed. I had a difficult time getting the renewal done ; worth its own blog post!

I flew out of Delhi and back to Delhi which make the overall trip more strenuous.

The event was on youth and social entrepreneurship. It was co-organised by two interesting groups the Yes Foundation (one of whose key people is an Indian American, Poonam Ahluwalia), and the Tallberg Foundation, a wellknown think-tank in Sweden. The trip expenses were sponsored by the organisers which was really nice of them, though I think they were hoping I would play a more active role than I did.

From Stockholm Airport, I drove down to the conference location by car with Thomas Bjelkeman-Petersson of Akvo.org, who's visited us in India a few times. It was a great drive through open sparsely populated countryside. A very welcome break from the crush and the dirt of Bangalore and India which gets to me.

There was a huge amount of infectious energy in the gathering ; so many people, especially youth (1500+), all trying to make the world a better place, all over the world.

Lots of particulars that bear a passing comment but maybe in a later post.

Some videos below:
1.) The Max hamburger chain in Sweden now tracks the carbon footprint of each kind of burger and lets you know !

2.) There was a lot of great music at the event:

2010-05-28T22:49:00.003+05:30

Yours sincerely represents Arghyam to receive an award from the Karnataka Governor

New videos

2010-05-08T08:21:00.003+05:30

From our trip to our village in Chittoor district for Vibhat's tonsuring district:

Mutyalappa : In memoriam

2010-04-18T14:59:00.005+05:30

Mutyalappa is my friend and Sarpanch of Mushtikovela village whom Asha for Education (www.ashanet.org) supports on a fellowship for which I am co-steward. On 4th April night/ early hours of 5th, Mutyalappa passed away after a road accident in which he suffered severe head injuries.

He was brought to Bangalore from Anantapur as the medical facilities there were not good. I met them here. He was on a ventilator so he had a pulse but the doctors at multiple hospitals said that he was beyond resuscitation due to damage to the brain. We then took him off the ventilator and his body was taken back for post-mortem and funeral.

His pillion rider on the mobike also suffered injuries but is recovering.

If you can contribute some money for to help his family piece their life together ; as well as cover the medical expenses for him and his co-rider, it would be very useful.

Below is something I wrote for the Asha website:

It is with shock and sadness that ASHA notes the death of N. Mutyalappa, ASHA fellow. He passed away on the night of 4th April/early hours of 5th. He was 33 years old. He had a road accident and suffered severe head injuries while driving his motorcycle on the Bangalore/Hyderabad National Highway near his residence in Chennekothapalle village of Anantapur district.

Mutyalappa was nominated as a ASHA fellow in mid-2007 to support his work as a Sarpanch of Mushtikovela panchayat in Anantapur district of Andhra Pradesh. The details of his work can be seen on the Asha page tracking the fellowship here: https://www.ashanet.org/projects/project-view.php?p=854 His extensive previous work with the NGO Timbaktu Collective laid a solid grounding for him to undertake village development work as Sarpanch. He made Mushtikovela panchayat an outstanding example of NREGA implementation, with more than 1 crore rupees in cumulative disbursements to labourers. His most recent project which was just reaching completion at the time of his demise was the optimal utilization of Mushtikovela's tank through a process of consensus and dialoguing, so that a crop of paddy could be taken even in a drought year, creating significant income for the village.

Mutyalappa was a highly dynamic individual who understood the system and decided to work within it, by entering the political arena at the village level. Despite tremendous pressure and continuing difficulties he worked for proper implemention of government schemes for the benefit of the village. In interactions with him, his tremendous capacity to mobilize people, put pressure on the goverment to make the will of the people prevail came through clearly. He had an amazing talent in negotiating the delicate terrain of caste, political, personal and other divides in a village to get people together to achieve something of value. It is tragic that a person like him met an untimely demise while he had much more to contribute. The circumstances of his death were also unfortunate as he was shuttled between hospitals and places in a desperate attempt to find appropriate emergency treatment.

He is survived by his wife, a young son and an elder brother. ASHA volunteers would like to convey their profound condolences to his relatives in this time of grief.

===

Some videos and posts about his work:

A previous post on this blog about his work:

Video on tank irrigation

Video on NREGA work

Older film

Bio, project visit reports as part of Asha's fellowship

====

The Times of India

2010-04-11T22:47:00.004+05:30

I recently began subscribing to the Times of India. The reason was a bit stupid and the kind of ass-backwards decision-making that I sometimes indulge in -- I find the Hindu so compelling to read that in the morning, I get absorbed in it, so that it both makes me late and distracts my mind. A bad way to start a work day. So finally I decided not to subscribe anymore. But my wife still wanted to subscribe to a newspaper so that she could keep in touch with what was going on outside Vibhat-world ; so we subscribed to the Times of India instead. It seems to be working out; I am definitely not absorbed in the newspaper in the mornings nowadays.

Subscribing gives me an opportunity to take a closer look than when I would just pick up occasionally at the office or elsewhere. My observations backs up that of many others, that The Times is a breathtaking newspaper and I feel compelled to add my notes to the reams that have already been written about it. This is hopefully just a beginning.

The first thing to say I think, is that a simple switch of context makes all the difference when thinking about the Times. Its as follows:

The Times of India is a business: then it becomes a predictable, sensibly run, run-of-the-mill, moderately interesting entity which is not very special compared to all the other zillions of businesses in India.
The Times of India is a newspaper: It becomes a jaw-droppingly amazing, completely crazy, death-of-satire, evil-empire, laughing stock, end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it, death-knell-of-Indian-civilization entity.

Again:
business -- nothing special
newspaper -- what the **&&^&#(@*@*!&&!!* is going on?!
Moving on:

the paper design seems really bad. Actually I have not been really looking at the paper with a critical eye, I've been just reading it, so to say, since we started subscribing, so this post will be more off-the-cuff comments. Having said that, the paper is just a mess. The pages are a loud clash of colours from all the ads and the colors used in the articlespace too. I haven't yet figured out the logic of the newspaper in terms of what kind of articles go where or on what page, because the cues towards this are not there or not strong enough. The mixing up of editorial and advert makes the jaw drop lower each day.

Today's front page had a truly stupid artistic illustration of a big-boobed woman being flagged at airport security, because of some news that the new airport security detectors are set off by silicone implants. I mean... really, this is too idiotic.

More often than not, upto 30% of the front page is taken up up by a single ad which completely distracts the attention. Today its about 25% distributed between several ads. A couple of days back there was some absurd article of less than 12 column-lines on one of the pages, and all the rest were ads. Today the first "City" page has about 5% of articles and 95% of ads.

On the plus side: generally they seem to have a lot of coverage of water issues, and not competely superficial which I can vouch for, since I keep an eye out for this. So they do have some news going. For a couple of days now they've had a lot of coverage of the naxal issue, ("Deep Focus"), though I haven't had the enthu to read in detail.

Today's "Global" page, had an "Around the World" section (probably a standard feature. It had a.) a picture of an unknown (but stunning) South Korean actress, b) "Teri Hatcher looking for love" c.) "Postmen boycott UK house because of cat".

Swaminathan Aiyar, one of their usual columnists had a stupid article on irrigation, something about using piped or drip irrigation instead of canals. Not a single figure about how economically viable this might be.

They've expanded their "Speaking Tree" column into a full Sunday supplement and are running a slick, nicely designed, but, to me, predictable ad about it in the main paper for a while ("Visit yourself, once a week", "If you listen, you hear", "Somewhere between our head and heart (Ed- our neck?) lies a land we rarely go to")

Enough of Times bashing for now.

Bringing up baby

2010-04-08T19:13:00.005+05:30

I haven't been writing about the baby on the blog, taking the shortcut of posting videos instead. Writing takes some 'quiet' time which is hard to come by nowadays.

Lets give it a shot here.

Vibhat is now 8.5 months old. And according to the latest doctor report that's the typical weight of a 13 month old. So that's taken care of immediately, we continue to be far ahead of the curve on weight ! Don't dare make fun of him! He's very nicely proportioned and just darlingly chubby nothing more. Maybe he's taller too and that's how he manages it.

Due to work commitments on my side, we postponed the first hair-cutting that is traditionally done as an event, so that his hair is now far too long and unruly. I'm sure he finds it irritating, poor bebe. The ceremony is on 2nd May at our village in Chittoor district and you all are cordially invited to join!

Priya is completely sucked into the baby's world as the major portion of the work falls on her. Her mother left yesterday so right now she doesn't have any real help as I don't count. We are planning to get a maid or use a pre-school soon. He is also very strongly attached to her which makes life difficult as most of the time he wants her attention. We hope he will come off this in stages.

The first gleanings of a personality that I can make out for Vibhat, is 'strong' ! He is not a mild or meek baby. He jets around the house with great enthusiasm now that he is crawling. He gets angry, as opposed to just being upset, and can scream *pretty* loudly if he feels like it. He doesn't cry a lot though, which is really nice for us. He is physically strong and likes to bang on tables, beat/scratch whoever is carrying him and so on. We have to figure out a way of communicating to him what's acceptable and what's not.

As with all babies I think, the experience and emotions of being a new parent can be quite strong. I resent (when I get the time to think about it!) the constant emotional seesaw from the joy of the baby to the demands it puts on you.

Well, there you have it for a quick summup. Hope I get to write more.

PS: The amazing photo is from Siddhu who managed to catch me looking presentable and smiling a natural smile, and also get a fantastic smile out of Vibhat. Click to enlarge

And one more..

2010-03-28T04:24:00.001+05:30

Vibhat Krishna update

2010-03-27T20:30:00.001+05:30

The Economist on climate change science

2010-03-25T15:55:00.006+05:30

Summary/excerpts of a recent Economist article on Climate change science, mostly for my own reference:

Full article here:
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15719298

======
In any complex scientific picture of the world there will be gaps, misperceptions and mistakes. Whether your impression is dominated by the whole or the holes will depend on your attitude to the project at hand. You might say that some see a jigsaw where others see a house of cards. Jigsaw types have in mind an overall picture and are open to bits being taken out, moved around or abandoned should they not fit. Those who see houses of cards think that if any piece is removed, the whole lot falls down. When it comes to climate, academic scientists are jigsaw types, dissenters from their view house-of-cards-ists.

The defenders of the consensus tend to stress the general consilience of their efforts—the way that data, theory and modelling back each other up. Doubters see this as a thoroughgoing version of “confirmation bias”, the tendency people have to select the evidence that agrees with their original outlook.

No one doubts that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, good at absorbing infra-red radiation. It is also well established that human activity is putting more of it into the atmosphere than natural processes can currently remove. Measurements made since the 1950s show the level of carbon dioxide rising year on year, from 316 parts per million (ppm) in 1959 to 387ppm in 2009. Less direct records show that the rise began about 1750, and that the level was stable at around 280ppm for about 10,000 years before that. This fits with human history: in the middle of the 18th century people started to burn fossil fuels in order to power industrial machinery. Analysis of carbon isotopes, among other things, shows that the carbon dioxide from industry accounts for most of the build-up in the atmosphere.

Disagreement is not with the level of C02 or that it comes from human activity. It is with the warming associated with a particular level of CO2. Problems:

Background natural climate cycles.
Climate is a complex non-linear system
Oceans can absorb heat and add inertia to the climate system, so atmosphere warms more slowly than expected.

On the data front: There are three records of land-surface temperature put together from thermometer readings in common use by climatologists, one of which is compiled at the Climatic Research Unit of e-mail infamy. They all show warming, and, within academia, their reliability is widely accepted. Various industrious bloggers are not so convinced.

Pure theory says that doubling Co2 will result in 1 degree C of warming, which is not so problematic. "climate sensitivity". However there are feedback effects that can increase this. The most important involve water vapour and clouds. Warming air will absorb water vapour (powerful greenhouse gas) which is a positive feedback loop for warming. There is scientific uncertainity about how much the water vapour adds, one estimate is 1.7 degrees C, up from the 1 degree C above.

Another point of contention: greenhouse warming should cause warming down below and cooling in the stratosphere. Earlier observations did not corraborate this, but now evidence is building up in favour.

Clouds have both a cooling effect (reflecting sunlight from the upper atmosphere), as well as a greenhouse effect. Sorting these two out to get the net is complicated.

Another source of evidence is the climate of the past, like ice ages and the associated CO2 and other factors that contributed to it. The temperature records of the past millenium is one particular hotspot of debate. Tree rings is one source of data. A 1998 Nature article found a 'hockey stick' shape for temperatures of the last century, mostly flat but with the blip towards the end of the 20th century. This paper is widely contested by sceptics. One contestation is that this curve does not account for the 'medieval warm period' ; when, it is believed, temperatures were as warm or warmer than now.

The most accurate recent climate data cannot be used easily for checking the quality of models because of complexities like aerosols in the atmosphere whose effects are not known well enough so their effect is parameterized in the model instead of being strictly modelled. This also leads to accusations that they are parameterised in such a way as to make the models show higher levels of warming.

Siddhu's latest video

2010-03-24T02:55:00.002+05:30

2010-03-13T23:40:00.001+05:30

2010-02-20T12:16:00.003+05:30

From a recent trip to Timbaktu, more on Mutyalappa's work as Sarpanch of Mushtikovela village, supported by NPO Asha for Education, www.ashanet.org

Kerala percussion

2010-02-20T10:53:00.004+05:30

Vibhat was in India and invited us to join him while he was in Kerala. I went with Siddhu, since Priya and kid are at her parents place. Vibhat's mom organised a cool music concert at the house. The video of of this. As a matter of fact this is pretty rare footage. This particular instrument is not common and is rarely played in public. The musicians here are students from Kala Mandalam -- a university for traditional arts in Kerala. We visited the place later, pretty impressive.
Let me know what you think of the music:

The vegetable pushcart man as hero

2010-02-19T01:33:00.004+05:30

As you drive on the streets of Bangalore you often come across vegetable pushcarts. These are flat 4 wheeled contraptions, loaded with vegetables and being trundled around the city. Sometimes its just piled high with tomatoes and potatoes, sometimes its a wide range of vegetables. Consider the life of the vegetable pushcart man:

-- the daily pollution and dust
-- being completely at the mercy of the weather ; from hot sun to sudden showers. Imagine trundling your way home maybe 5 kilometers away in one of Bangalore's thunderstorms in roads running full of water with your business day washed out.
-- reducing business as the big shops like Reliance undercut everyone else
-- negotiating Bangalore's traffic and intersections where to the man in the CAR the pedestrians and pushcarts are irritants to be honked angrily out of the way as they interrupt the smooth flow of traffic.

Despite all these obstacles, the pushcart man endures. Why does he do it? Does he go home to a loving family that makes it all worth it for him? Does he feel he has no choice? Or does drink do the trick? Where does he draw the strength from, to continue his useful but uneviable role? Does he fall prey at some point to the many options for a spiral into self-destruction that a city offers? Does he feel a proud sense of dignity in doing a honest day's work?

Vegetable pushcart man: I don't (yet) have the humanity to stop my vehicle and have a real conversation with you, so I just have to imagine all the above. But I salute you.

Notes on "3 Idiots"

2010-02-09T00:50:00.004+05:30

I saw it today, long after everyone else. (Impusively went to it Everest near our apartment ; was passing by at 9:20 pm and saw that they had a show at 9:30pm! I and Siddhu have been planning to go together sometime and he was genuinely shocked that I ditched him. I'll have to make it up).

Too long and loosely edited. Maybe I've just seen too many good movies but I get impatient easily at the movies.

Definitely didn't live up to the hype and good reviews. But was quite nice.

Stuck too much to stereotypes with Chatur Ramalingam and Suhas. Would have been interesting to make Chatur in particular much more serious and accomplished (that's what successful Indians in the US tend to be like) rather than an easy-to-dislike clown.

Nicely made its points about the education system including using old legends (urban or otherwise) like the NASA pen. We should have had this movie made 20 years ago, and maybe it would have saved me :-(. Delivery scene was far too contrived.

Scene where Farhan convinces his father was genuinely moving.

Gorgeous Ladakh scene at end. We don't need no Switzerland!

Would have made the movie lot more cool if they'd situated it in IIT like in the book. Campus they used looked very nice.

Kareena was weak in places and looked overawed at the star cast she was competing with.

Handling of Raju's parents was pretty good.

Song sequences were mostly a pain.

How do Aamir and Madhavan manage to look reasonably realistic as 20somethings ?!

After all the controversy with Chetan Bhagat ; I felt that while the movie was irrevocably situated in the ideas of the book, there was a huge amount of original stuff overall. Which doesn't say much I guess !

And they had some truly atrocious product placements. Shame on you Vidhu Vinod Chopra

Quote from "Catcher in the Rye"

2010-01-29T09:21:00.002+05:30

J.D. Salinger also passed away yesterday. Here are two quotes from Catcher in the Rye:

"She was a pain in the ass but she was very good-looking" (from my memory)

"Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean - except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be."

More nice quotes: http://www.quotegarden.com/bk-cr.html

Howard Zinn passed away on 27th Jan

2010-01-29T08:57:00.006+05:30

Image from Wikipedia

I read a couple of his books including "A Peoples History of the United States". The books were a great way of relooking at history, from the point of view of what was going on with common people rather than with the power holders, hence "Peoples History". They were pretty cool reads and recounted lots of unknown stories of resistance and courage of the common people. He was a pretty cool personally, he followed through on the theoritical understanding of racism as a bad thing, by actually walking the walk at a very early stage when it was difficult to do so and when there were no examples or role models for what could be done. He was a teacher at a school and hung out with the black kids and encouraged them to resist and fight discrimination, stuff like that, and lost job in the process.

I had the opportunity of listening to him talk in Berkeley once. Extremely warm and gentle person, he came across as.

Noam Chomsky spoke warmly about him to the press after his death: "He's made an amazing contribution to American intellectual and moral culture. He's changed the conscience of America in a highly constructive way. I really can't think of anyone I can compare him to in this respect".

Read the Hindu's piece here: http://beta.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/article96513.ece
On Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Zinn

His books are well worth a read (and for me a re-read). Unfortuntely I don't have my copy with me.

There's lots of his stuff on YouTube, here's a random one :

Bye "Howie" and thanks.

This year's Padma awards

2010-01-26T12:55:00.004+05:30

Today's announcement of the Padma awards gives some scope for criticism:

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, A.R. Rehman, Resul Pookutty: We must be the only country that gives national awards to our people after they get international awards. I guess we give awards to people for having gotten international recognition, not for their work. A thoroughgoing shame. It would be interesting to dig deeper and see how often we are able notice and recognise peoples achievements before they reach international renown. I don't think we do a good job.

Prathap C. Reddy (Apollo Hospitals), C.P.Krishnan Nair (Leela Hotel Group chairman), DLF Chairman Kushal Pal Singh : I find it disturbing to see awards going to successful businesspersons whose where the work done or the business concerned doesn't have any otherwise important or socially relevant features. In the case of Apollo Hospitals and other corporate hospitals there is a definite ambiguity about them - there is a common perception of money-driven practice of medicine. Why award Leela Hotels for running a business of luxury hotels which 99% of the country will never stay at? And how many think DLF got to where it is without underhand dealings ? On the contrary, I find the award to Venu Srinivasan of TVS and current head of CII appropriate. M.S.Banga of Unilever is a bit on the borderline.

Looking through the entire list of awardess, overall, for a poor country like our, perhaps the awards should be more focussed on people who are contributing a bit more directly to national development.

Comments ?

Annaprasanna

2010-01-24T23:07:00.004+05:30

Using Twitter

2010-01-17T02:48:00.006+05:30

I'm learning and enjoying Twitter ; here are my notes on how I'm currently managing the overload that is always waiting around the corner when you use Twitter:

1.) I'm using TweetDeck which is pretty nice, haven't tried any of the other Twitter tools so far other than Twitpic. I post on two Twitter accounts @ahminotep and @indiawater and TweetDeck allows me to manage both of those, though currently I'm constantly 'crossposting' due to negligence

2.) I've gotten over the initial phobia of following too many people ; now I feel comfortable following interesting accounts I come across. The way to manage this is to try lots of accounts and unfollow or use lists to manage an overflow of information.

3.) I'm finding that its actually not difficult (and its fun) to scan quite rapidly through the 'pending' tweets. The trick that made this work for me is to keep clicking on links that are interesting but *not* follow them right away. Earlier I used to look at each link as I viewed the tweet and found it too disorienting and needing too much context switching. Instead now I go through all the tweets, click-click-click, till I'm up to date and then go and look at all the links that I've opened up (or even just keep them up and look at them later when I want a break). The only difficulty with this is that when one of the links is interesting and you want to retweet, you have no easy way of finding the original tweet.

4.) Its become a little game now to try to see how many mentions and direct messages I can get to happen

5.) Here's my take on some prominent Tweeters and why I follow or don't follow them. Its also interesting to follow well-known people and get some idea of the kind of people they are, but you often find out later that they (or atleast their tweet persona) are not so interesting:

-Kevin Smith, the director @thatkevinsmith : Great guy, really genuine and authentic, raunchy, but huge amount of tweeting, so I had to unfollow and move him to a list instead.

-N.Ram, @nramind : Wider range of interests than I expected him to have (don't ask me why), retweets stuff from prominent foreign newspapers, but I generally don't find his stuff interesting enough to clickthrough. Still following

-Pritish Nandy @pritishnandy: Bursty tweets, often annoying because its like a blog post divided into tweets, lots of analysis of news headlines, intelligent but I don't agree with a lot of his opinions and am not clued into the mumbai stuff he tweets about

-Gautam John @gkjohn, a goldmine of interesting links

-Anand Mahindra, @anandmahindra, just unfollowed :-) , insipid (sorry!)

-Jack Welch @jackwelch, doesn't tweet very often, goes on about sports teams, and I'm beginning to find his opinions pretty annoying, a big difference from the persona that came through in his books which I was a big fan of

-Sivakumar Surampudi, @s_sivakumar, CEO of eChoupal (I think), quite an interesting tweeter especially for a head honcho type, seems to get Twitter

- Genelia D'Souza: @geneliad, seems to tweet quite a lot, does the next generation style grammer that puts me off, I think I'm going to have to unfollow soon

- Brahma Chellaney @chellaney , security analyst and writer for the Hindu, fairly bland

- Chetan Bhagat @chetan_bhagat : Very much like with the books, just a nice down-to-earth kind of guy to follow

- Manjit @chefmanjit : Not exactly famous, but is the chef at one of Bangalore's good restaurants, Herbs and Spice. Just checking him out.

- Shah Rukh Khan, @iamsrk: I just started following him. It looks like its the real guy, not a fake.

- Gates Foundation, @gatesfoundation : Utilitarian news and publicity stuff, worth followingt

I've purposely desisted from following Barkha Dutt, Rajdeep Sardesai and their ilk (though keep bumping into them in retweets), and same with Shashi Tharoor.

====

Update (18/4/2010)

- Vinod Khosla the venture capitalist: @vkhosla : Just started following him

Here are a couple of interesting Twitter related episodes:

- Did live tweeting from our Coromandel colony get-together ; find this much faster in reporting events than trying to do a blog post and uploading photos

- Even without an internet connection , my phone hooks up to a wireless internet access point. This is really convenient and cheap to tweet photos from the phone without having an internet connection on the phone (expensive).

- We have multiple instances at work now of Twitter enabling us to make connections with people we didn't know which has lead to productive results. In one case we met up with an org and tweeted about it and got back negative feedback about the org from someone with relevant links -- very useful.

- N.Ram responded to a crack I made once about Hindu content. Cheap thrills :-)

-- Makemytrip.com corrected the spelling of Visakhapatnam on their site after I tweeted about it.

I'm stuck right now in trying to increase my followers on Twitter .

2010-01-01T01:16:00.002+05:30

And he crawls!

2009-12-26T09:40:00.005+05:30

It is amazing to see a newly mobile baby. Look at the energy he puts into it.

In the bathtub:

And one more:

Anantagiri Waterfall

2009-12-25T10:20:00.004+05:30

Anantagiri waterfall is a pretty good local tourism thingie. It doesn't seem to be pushed very actively by the tourism folks-that-be and guidebooks, but is a hidden gem. The waterfall itself is quite high and good viewing, one of the higher I've seen. The route to get there is quite an interesting mishmash. The last part of the drive is by a pretty bad mud road of a few kilometers and if you're energetic, its perfect to do it by walk instead, it makes the overall hike a good effort. At the end of the road, there's a steep flight of stairs in order to cross a rail track. Then down on the other side, and about a kilometer through brush to reach the base of the waterfall. Finally a badly maintained final stretch of steep climb alongside the waterfall to get to as high as you dare. Good fun !

Of course the bigger tourist attraction in the area is Borra caves, a really nice limestone formation. Its heavily promoted and a must do on the Araku circuit but well worth it. We didn't take any photos, but there are probably lots on the net if you're interested.

On the way back there were local markets with fresh produce. We bought a huge mound of seethaphal and spring onions. The spring onions was a funny thing, in most places in India it would be considered a bit exotic and used for curiosity value more than anything else, but here it seems a mainstream vegetable because it grows well, and the 'common man' was buying and carrying around spring onions.

Trip to Araku area while at Vizag

2009-12-25T09:03:00.007+05:30

Priya, I and kid went to the Araku valley area for a two-day trip. Pretty good.

We stayed at a 'eco-resort' called Tyda Jungle Bells. Not particularly 'eco', but it was built within the jungle sort-of, and generally rustic and pretty nice.

The local Dhimsa dance

Funny

2009-12-25T08:57:00.004+05:30

I saw this at an aquarium (ie. a zoo-type aquarium, where they have displays of different types of fishes). I found the unintentional humor hilarious,

And in Vizag

2009-12-20T09:59:00.009+05:30

On board a submarine ! With cousin Ramana and daughter Mohita. Can you see the propellor in the background of one of the snaps.

And everybody gets their turn..

2009-12-17T08:17:00.003+05:30

Cross-dressing ..Grandmommy loves to dress him up

Who's got more hair ?

The 'V' sign behind the head is all the rage at a particular age...

And now in Vizag, with grandfather at a beach park.

2009-12-16T08:51:00.003+05:30

Finally updates start again. Will do the excuses later, hopefully start getting a few photos up every day. These are from a couple of months back.

In his pram (which currently has a wheel off). Chinese product by the way. Another example of China getting into Indian markets in a big way

And in his "Bjorn". Came as a gift from namesake/godfather. Not a sign of Swedish companies invading Indian markets in a big way :-)

The bathed baby. Photos are a significant distortion of the actual state of affairs in terms of my invovlement in giving him a bath or cleaning him.

For those who care ..

2009-10-26T09:44:00.001+05:30

Parle Poppins is alive (though perhaps not well).
I found it being sold in Tirupati, have not seen it anywhere else till now.
However I must say that the taste didn't quite live up to the childhood memories. Lacked a certain refinement.

2009-10-25T17:22:00.002+05:30

2009-10-17T18:56:00.002+05:30

Mary (of Timbaktu) with Vibhat. As you can see, she is great with children

Most of the photos are at my cousin's place in Tirupati, with my cousin Ramana, wife Sarala and children Mohita and Lalit Sai.

2009-10-14T20:06:00.001+05:30

I tried a whole bunch of restaurants during my 'free period' when Priya and the baby were away. One other major find was the Kyra theater in Indiranagar, www.kyra.in which has all kinds of interesting events, though pretty inconsistent. Below video from a heavy metal concert speaks for itself. Quite a learning evening :-)

And finally

2009-10-01T11:48:00.003+05:30

A couple of videos. Not so great, I had a problem editing so its raw video and too long. But a beginning.

These were taken a few weeks back. Since then he's progressing nicely, has started turning over from lying on his back to lying on his tummy (major milestone!), vocalizing and laughing and responding to stimuli a lot more. He's currently at Priya's parents place with Priya and I am (ahem!) missing him.

2009-08-30T09:34:00.002+05:30

A movie I did at work about how borewells are drilled. I'm quite happy at how it came out :

New movies

2009-08-29T00:57:00.002+05:30

Vihbat Krishna:

and this one is a visit to Mushtikovela near Timbaktu as part of the Asha fellowship work:

Vibhat Krishna

2009-08-19T20:22:00.002+05:30

Vibhat Krishna
Originally uploaded by !**sid-art**!

Vibhat Krishna is famous ; his photo made the EXPLORE list on Flickr (top 500 photos uploaded each day).

Videos

2009-08-19T20:14:00.001+05:30

Was looking for children's videos on YouTube and got diverted into other things like Pink Floyd :-)

An arabic children's song with Anne Geddes visuals:

Someone's Pink Floyd Top 40:

2009-07-29T21:27:00.005+05:30

Its more than a month now since the baby came in, so lots of changes obviously..

He's putting on weight well, but according to the official nos far too well! He went from 3.41 at birth to 4.54 after a month -- according to the doctor that's really high. 20 gms. per day gain after an initial 10% loss is normal, which would be around 3.70. Huge difference. I asked the doc whether that's cause for alarm or satisfaction :-) and he said neither. We'll wait and see.
Visually he's plumped out nicely and we're happy to see him this way.

There were some colicky type things for some time and he cried a lot but the doc told us we weren't burping and 'gassing' him enough, and that problem seems to have gone away. But he doesn't sleep easily and wakes up very easily so its been somewhat rough going lately. The books say that some babies are sensitive and easily disturbed and he seems to be fitting into the category.

He feeds really well from Priya. He was completely without problems on that front, he latched on like a pro on day 1 and pretty much never let go after that. His poop looks really healthy. I marvel at the coolness of the human system, where a 2-3 day old baby has his system working normally enough to get pretty standard-looking yellow poop!

Like all eager parents we're seeing him progress far faster than ordinary :-). He began sticking his head up quite early in the 3rd week or so. He's also kicking and rolling his arms around very actively, squirming like crazy. Its quite a change from the tiny, vulnerable kiddo at launch! He can't move forward yet, but manages to rotate himself quite a bit when put on his back.

Mostly I've not been getting too involved :-), and I haven't done a real serious diaper change yet, though did some simpler versions :-). My parents are at our place as is her mother and so I don't really need to get involved with the yucky stuff.

The house is cramped and a mess, but so it goes.

We went to the corporation office to name him on Saturday. "G. Vibhat Krishna" it is. We didn't get a real consensus and I got irritated with the process of trying to find a name after a while which was a pity. The final naming happened without too much consultation or feedback, so keeping my fingers crossed that we didn't make some boo-boo.

I was (and am) completely entranced by him, unexpectedly. So of course are most else in the house.

My dad had an unfortunate accident, we were driving on scooter and a car bumped us from the side. Apparently there is a hairline kind of fracture and he's been asked not to walk at all, in order not to strain the area. This was quite a shock, and unfortunate. It may need my parents to postpone their departure and go right back to Vizag without visiting anyone else.

Haven't been taking much photo/video unfortunately, although there are lots and lots of kodak moments.

Priya's been having a pretty rough time of it along with all the fun moments. Because he's breastfeeding and doesn't sleep easily, she can't get much of a break away from him. She had severe aches in her finger joints (which might be from iron supplements that she's now stopped) and currently a stiff neck from sleeping in a awkward position.

2009-07-05T21:08:00.002+05:30

Have included photo/video of a lot of people without asking permission -- please let me know if you'd prefer I dropped the bits with you in it

2009-06-24T23:14:00.003+05:30

Up next: videos :-)
PS: Oops didn't mention. Boy.
PPS: Thanks all for the good wishes.

A first look at the kid

2009-06-23T23:44:00.003+05:30

Well ... what to say.
(BTW -- The lady in the photo was one of the nurses who helped with the delivery).
Photos with family can be expected soon)

News commentary

2009-06-17T08:20:00.001+05:30

Tuesday's Hindu had two headliner articles side by side, one on the Iran election situation (probe ordered into poll fraud charges) and one on the BRIC/SCO meetings in Yekaterinburg. The Iran article had "Ahmadinejad puts off Russia visit" and calls the trip a "visit for a regional conference". The BRIC/SCO article said "Yekaterinburg will also mark the re-entry of Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad fresh from an election victory the West regards as tainted".

Perhaps the two stories should be more aware of each other. The Iran article could have said visit for the BRIC/SCO conferences (see adjoining article)" . And the BRIC/SCO article should certainly have been updated to reflect Ahmed's travails.

===

Today's news had British Airways asking staff to work for free voluntarily for upto a month due to its serious financial travails and leading from the front the CEO and CFO are working for free in July. I find it infuriating. People who get paid a lot less are in much less of a position to forgo a month's pay. The CEO and CFO should forgo a year's pay and ask others to forgo a month's pay -- that seems more appropriate

Time magazine on Twitter

2009-06-10T21:31:00.004+05:30

Time magazine joins the Twitter hype by doing a nice cover story. A really nice excerpt from the article below showcasing Twitter at its (current) coolest (who knows where Twitter will go in the future):

The Open Conversation
===
Earlier this year I attended a daylong conference in Manhattan devoted to education reform. Called Hacking Education, it was a small, private affair: 40-odd educators, entrepreneurs, scholars, philanthropists and venture capitalists, all engaged in a sprawling six-hour conversation about the future of schools. Twenty years ago, the ideas exchanged in that conversation would have been confined to the minds of the participants. Ten years ago, a transcript might have been published weeks or months later on the Web. Five years ago, a handful of participants might have blogged about their experiences after the fact. (See the top 10 celebrity Twitter feeds.)
But this event was happening in 2009, so trailing behind the real-time, real-world conversation was an equally real-time conversation on Twitter. At the outset of the conference, our hosts announced that anyone who wanted to post live commentary about the event via Twitter should include the word #hackedu in his 140 characters. In the room, a large display screen showed a running feed of tweets. Then we all started talking, and as we did, a shadow conversation unfolded on the screen: summaries of someone’s argument, the occasional joke, suggested links for further reading. At one point, a brief argument flared up between two participants in the room — a tense back-and-forth that transpired silently on the screen as the rest of us conversed in friendly tones.
At first, all these tweets came from inside the room and were created exclusively by conference participants tapping away on their laptops or BlackBerrys. But within half an hour or so, word began to seep out into the Twittersphere that an interesting conversation about the future of schools was happening at #hackedu. A few tweets appeared on the screen from strangers announcing that they were following the #hackedu thread. Then others joined the conversation, adding their observations or proposing topics for further exploration. A few experts grumbled publicly about how they hadn’t been invited to the conference. Back in the room, we pulled interesting ideas and questions from the screen and integrated them into our face-to-face conversation.
When the conference wrapped up at the end of the day, there was a public record of hundreds of tweets documenting the conversation. And the conversation continued — if you search Twitter for #hackedu, you’ll find dozens of new comments posted over the past few weeks, even though the conference happened in early March.
===

PS: I read this article in the print edition of Time (yes, there is such a thing as a print edition) and then tried to find it online. I found the above excerpt at a couple of other sites, but Time magazine didn't feature in the Google search results list.

Sign of the time(s) ?

Meanwhile at work

2009-06-06T21:14:00.003+05:30

Unique footage of how things look inside a borewell and how water accumulates there to be pumped out.

A very good article on how water is mismanaged in apartment complexes. Read it if you live in one:

http://www.indiawaterportal.org/blog/2009/05/29/water-security-for-the-residents-of-apartments-gated-communities/

And a first person account of cyclone Aila from Kolkata from friend Sangeeta Deogawanka,

http://www.indiawaterportal.org/blog/2009/06/06/weathering-the-cyclone-aila-at-kolakata-a-personal-account/

2009-06-06T21:13:00.001+05:30

This kid is making quantum leaps in real time:

Book review

2009-06-06T20:10:00.002+05:30

Penguin Classics has a really innovative marketing program to encourage interest in its books. It sends free books from its range to interested readers who are then asked to review the book and they blog it at www.blogapenguinclassic.co.uk . Read an explanation of their concept here: http://www.nmaawards.co.uk/2008winners.aspx (click on "Entertainment: Blog a Penguin Classic") I stumbled across this on Twitter http://www.twitter.com/penguindia , and they did send me a book to read and review. I just did the review (was not as difficult as I expected), and sent it to them (haven't heard back yet) and here it is:

===========

Penguin Classic's "Five and Twenty Tales of the Genie (Vetaalapanchavinsati)" by Sivadasa, translated from the Sanskrit and with an introduction by Chandra Rajan is an interesting and educative read. Penguin is to be commended for imaginatively adding value in the design of this book, starting from an excellent translator, to an exhaustive and learned introduction by the same translator and an appendix containing 'bonus' stories.

Many of us (Indians) will have been exposed to these stories in one form or the other earlier. They are alternatively known to us as the tales of King Vikram and the vetaal (betaal). I read these stories (actually not these stories but other stories in the same format!) as part of the "New Tales of King Vikram and the Vampire" series of the Chandamama magazine, and many others of my generation will fondly remember this. Chandamama did a good job with those stories with questions and answers that honestly probed moral and ethical issues as well as encouraged reasoned thinking, a salutary experience probably for a young mind.

The construct, for those not in the know is as follows: as a consequence of of string of events, King Vikramaditya is set the task of bringing down a corpse hanging from a tree in a cemetery. The corpse is possessed by a genie which then tells King Vikram a story. At the end of the story a question pertinent to the story is asked by the genie. If the king answers the question correctly the corpse/genie flies back to the tree and the cycle starts again (if the king knows the answer but remains silent he will die -- but the reader never gets to know if this is an empty threat as this option is never exercised by the king in the story). "Now tell me O King.." is the genie's inevitable refrain at the end of each story. In this fashion the genie tells 24 stories, asks 24 questions and gets the right answer. The 25th time, something different happens and leads to the resolution of the story.
The structure then provides an opportunity for good storytelling, the potential of which is fully realized. The crown jewel in each story of course is the Q&A at the end. We are keen to challenge ourselves to answer the question too and see how we fare in comparison to the king.

To a modern reader the stories are amusingly long-winded and digressive. A conversation in the story will normally include a half-a-dozen poems and asides expounding on all manner of topics breathtakingly irrelevant, it would seem, to modern's mans mind, so boringly obsessed with sticking to the point and getting on with the story. In today's world, therefore, it takes a certain kind of mood to sit back, relax and appreciate the storyteller's efforts. But if one does, the rewards are there. There are thoughtprovoking discussions of human nature that resonote even today. This is also an authentic peep back into time to see how Indians of a bygone age lived. I found the actual stories inconsistent in quality but uniformly interesting. The Q&A at the end is also varied, sometimes the question is thoughtprovoking and the answer is insightful and satisfying, sometimes not so much.

The substantial introductory notes by Chandra Rajan are quite an impressive piece of scholarship. Chandra Rajan obviously cares a great deal (sometimes it seems, too much) about her subject and more generally, ancient Indian literature. This is shown in her dedication of the book to Vyaasa, Vaamiki and Vishnu Sharma, "the three greatest storytellers of all times". She throws much light and useful context on the stories and the King Vikramaditya of history.

"Five and Twenty Tales of the Genie" is a set of stories within a 'framing' story. In fact some of the stories contain a further level of story within. This technique of stories within stories is seen very often in Indian literature (including the Ramayana, Mahabharata and Panchatantra), resulting in massive story complexes. The translator also introduces us to the idea of recensions which are different versions of a story or story complex that arise in the course of oral transmission. The bonus stories alluded to in my first paragraph are stories from a different recension of this book, by Jambalabhatta.

The poetry forms a central part of the enjoyment of this book, so I will excerpt a few here.
Central to the framing story is the attempt by the villain to gain 8 great Siddhas or powers:

To be minute as an atom, or enormous as a mountain,
light as air or heavy as rock; to be invisible at will,
to have all one's desires fulfilled, to subject others to one's will;
and t have lordship of the world.

King Vikramaditya's actions are defended through the following statement of ethics:

Pay a man back in his own coin;
do harm unto him who has done harm to you;
I see no harm in that;
adopt foul means towards an evil man.

Sivadasa makes the following claim for the book:

A simple and straightforward narrative
pleases some learned readers;
some, wiser, delight in the figurative -
irony, ambiguity, metaphors,
while others love a tale filled with flavors
of fine sentiments plentiful and pleasing.
So there's something here to please every palate.

As Rajan says, it is not an unjustified claim by the author of the vetaala tales.

The book is quite frank about sexuality:

Ha! For the enjoyment of a woman!
What can give greater pleasure in this world!
No, not even the Elixir of Life!
All senses, altogether, all at once,
find in it their perfect fulfilment!

At least one tale is disconcerting in its emphatic position that women are inferior to men:

Woman, and she alone deserves censure
here in this world of ours; not men, never,
for men are directed to, and instructed
in matters of good and evil.

Here is Sivadasa on secrecy:

Even if it be a trifling matter,
if to rulers of the earth it relates,
it should not be uttered, said Brhaspati,
in the open assembly.

Magic spells, medicines, matters of sex,
good works, cracks and flaws in one's house and home;
forbidden foods, slander, vital secrets:
a shrewd man does not broadcast these to the world.

Heard by six years, a secret breaks;
heard by four ears, it stays secure;
and not even the Creator himself
can get to the bottom of a secret
that is heard by two ears alone.

Climbing right up to the top of a hill,
going in secret to an open terrace;
in deep woods or in some spot desolate:
in such places is a secret disclosed.

An interesting aside from the translator is regarding her choice of the word 'genie' to translate 'vetaala'. The author gives a nice description of the word 'vetaala' and explains why she rejected various English words for its translation (including 'vampire' which was often used in the past) in favour of 'genie.

A lot more could be written about the book, but let me stop here in the hope that I have accurately described the book and given some people reason to make a note to read it. This is a book that will not appeal to all, I had mixed feelings about it. But it justifies its selection as a Penguin Classic.

Awaiting the new arrival

2009-06-01T00:33:00.003+05:30

A progression of baby names

2009-05-31T08:18:00.002+05:30

I started off Noam (after Noam Chomsky) and a feminine version of it Naomi. I don't think that stands a strong chance :-). After that I found that of the standard Indian names I tended to like the short simple ones - Radha , Meera , Chitra (We don't know the sex of the baby yet, btw) . My wife complains that she wants a modern name not old-fashioned ones like this. Its monsoon time now, so I considered Varsha or Megha (especially if the rain gods didn't bother us on the way to the hospital for delivery). The wife has been playing it low-key probably because she is waiting to get the first syllable from the religious practice, which I am opposed to.

Two strong candidates are Vibha and Vibhat. Why? Because they are a combination of mine and Priya's names!

Suggest your favorite baby name and the best one gets a prize.

====

It is getting pretty close to delivery time. A few niggling health problems are a source of concern but not unduly so. I am having a hard time disengaging my mind from work and focussing on preparing for the arrival. The baby finally turned head down, perhaps as a result of visualization exercises mentioned earlier !

2009-05-29T06:05:00.001+05:30

<<Forwarded by Ajit Rao>>

Inaugural Speech for the new batch at the Symbiosis BBA program, Pune -

23rd June, 2008 - By Chetan Bhagat

Good Morning everyone and thank you for giving me this chance to speak

to you. This day is about you. You, who have come to this college,

leaving the comfort of your homes (or in some cases discomfort), to

become something in your life. I am sure you are excited. There are few

days in human life when one is truly elated. The first day in college is

one of them. When you were getting ready today, you felt a tingling in

your stomach. What would the auditorium be like, what would the teachers

be like, who are my new classmates - there is so much to be curious

about. I call this excitement, the spark within you that makes you feel

truly alive today. Today I am going to talk about keeping the spark

shining. Or to put it another way, how to be happy most, if not all the

time.

Where do these sparks start? I think we are born with them. My 3-year

old twin boys have a million sparks. A little Spiderman toy can make

them jump on the bed. They get thrills from creaky swings in the park. A

story from daddy gets them excited. They do a daily countdown for

birthday party ? several months in advance ? just for the day they will

cut their own birthday cake.

I see students like you, and I still see some sparks. But when I see

older people, the spark is difficult to find. That means as we age, the

spark fades. People whose spark has faded too much are dull, dejected,

aimless and bitter. Remember Kareena in the first half of Jab We Met vs

the second half? That is what happens when the spark is lost. So how to

save the spark?

Imagine the spark to be a lamp's flame. The first aspect is nurturing -

to give your spark the fuel, continuously. The second is to guard

against storms.

To nurture, always have goals. It is human nature to strive, improve and

achieve full potential. In fact, that is success. It is what is possible

for you. It isn't any external measure - a certain cost to company pay

package, a particular car or house.

Most of us are from middle class families. To us, having material

landmarks is success and rightly so. When you have grown up where money

constraints force everyday choices, financial freedom is a big

achievement. But it isn't the purpose of life. If that was the case, Mr.

Ambani would not show up for work. Shah Rukh Khan would stay at home and

not dance anymore. Steve Jobs won't be working hard to make a better

iPhone, as he sold Pixar for billions of dollars already. Why do they do

it? What makes them come to work everyday? They do it because it makes

them happy. They do it because it makes them feel alive. Just getting

better from current levels feels good. If you study hard, you can

improve your rank. If you make an effort to interact with people, you

will do better in interviews. If you practice, your cricket will get

better. You may also know that you cannot become Tendulkar, yet. But you

can get to the next level. Striving for that next level is important.

Nature designed with a random set of genes and circumstances in which we

were born. To be happy, we have to accept it and make the most of

nature's design. Are you? Goals will help you do that. I must add, don't

just have career or academic goals. Set goals to give you a balanced,

successful life. I use the word balanced before successful. Balanced

means ensuring your health, relationships, mental peace are all in good

order.

There is no point of getting a promotion on the day of your breakup.

There is no fun in driving a car if your back hurts. Shopping is not

enjoyable if your mind is full of tensions.

You must have read some quotes - Life is a tough race, it is a marathon

or whatever. No, from what I have seen so far, life is one of those

races in nursery school, where you have to run with a marble in a spoon

kept in your mouth. If the marble falls, there is no point coming first.

Same with life, where health and relationships are the marble. Your

striving is only worth it if there is harmony in your life. Else, you

may achieve the success, but this spark, this feeling of being excited

and alive, will start to die.

One last thing about nurturing the spark - don't take life seriously.

One of my yoga teachers used to make students laugh during classes. One

student asked him if these jokes would take away something from the yoga

practice. The teacher said - don't be serious, be sincere. This quote

has defined my work ever since. Whether its my writing, my job, my

relationships or any of my goals. I get thousands of opinions on my

writing everyday. There is heaps of praise, there is intense criticism.

If I take it all seriously, how will I write? Or rather, how will I

live? Life is not to be taken seriously, as we are really temporary

here. We are like a pre-paid card with limited validity. If we are

lucky, we may last another 50 years. And 50 years is just 2,500

weekends. Do we really need to get so worked up? It's ok, bunk a few

classes, goof up a few interviews, fall in love. We are people, not

programmed devices.

I've told you three things - reasonable goals, balance and not taking it

too seriously that will nurture the spark. However, there are four

storms in life that will threaten to completely put out the flame. These

must be guarded against. These are disappointment, frustration,

unfairness and loneliness of purpose.

Disappointment will come when your effort does not give you the expected

return. If things don't go as planned or if you face failure. Failure is

extremely difficult to handle, but those that do come out stronger. What

did this failure teach me? is the question you will need to ask. You

will feel miserable. You will want to quit, like I wanted to when nine

publishers rejected my first book. Some IITians kill themselves over low

grades ? how silly is that? But that is how much failure can hurt you.

But it's life. If challenges could always be overcome, they would cease

to be a challenge. And remember - if you are failing at something, that

means you are at your limit or potential. And that's where you want to be.

Disappointment' s cousin is frustration, the second storm. Have you ever

been frustrated? It happens when things are stuck. This is especially

relevant in India . >From traffic jams to getting that job you deserve,

sometimes things take so long that you don't know if you chose the right

goal. After books, I set the goal of writing for Bollywood, as I thought

they needed writers. I am called extremely lucky, but it took me five

years to get close to a release. Frustration saps excitement, and turns

your initial energy into something negative, making you a bitter person.

How did I deal with it? A realistic assessment of the time involved ?

movies take a long time to make even though they are watched quickly,

seeking a certain enjoyment in the process rather than the end result ?

at least I was learning how to write scripts, having a side plan ? I had

my third book to write and even something as simple as pleasurable

distractions in your life - friends, food, travel can help you overcome

it. Remember, nothing is to be taken seriously. Frustration is a sign

somewhere, you took it too seriously.

Unfairness - this is hardest to deal with, but unfortunately that is how

our country works. People with connections, rich dads, beautiful faces,

pedigree find it easier to make it ? not just in Bollywood, but

everywhere. And sometimes it is just plain luck. There are so few

opportunities in India , so many stars need to be aligned for you to make

it happen. Merit and hard work is not always linked to achievement in

the short term, but the long term correlation is high, and ultimately

things do work out. But realize, there will be some people luckier than

you. In fact, to have an opportunity to go to college and understand

this speech in English means you are pretty damm lucky by Indian

standards. Let's be grateful for what we have and get the strength to

accept what we don't. I have so much love from my readers that other

writers cannot even imagine it. However, I don't get literary praise.

It's ok. I don't look like Aishwarya Rai, but I have two boys who I

think are more beautiful than her. It's ok. Don't let unfairness kill

your spark.

Finally, the last point that can kill your spark is isolation. As you

grow older you will realize you are unique. When you are little, all

kids want Ice cream and Spiderman. As you grow older to college, you

still are a lot like your friends. But ten years later and you realize

you are unique. What you want, what you believe in, what makes you feel,

may be different from even the people closest to you. This can create

conflict as your goals may not match with others. . And you may drop

some of them. Basketball captains in college invariably stop playing

basketball by the time they have their second child. They give up

something that meant so much to them. They do it for their family. But

in doing that, the spark dies. Never, ever make that compromise. Love

yourself first, and then others.

There you go. I've told you the four thunderstorms - disappointment,

frustration, unfairness and isolation. You cannot avoid them, as like

the monsoon they will come into your life at regular intervals. You just

need to keep the raincoat handy to not let the spark die.

I welcome you again to the lost wonderful years of your life. If someone

gave me the choice to go back in time, I will surely choose college. But

I also hope that ten years later as well, your eyes will shine the same

way as they do today. That you will Keep the Spark alive, not only

through college, but through the next 2,500 weekends. And I hope not

just you, but my whole country will keep that spark alive, as we really

need it now more than any moment in history. And there is something cool

about saying - I come from the land of a billion sparks.

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator

2009-05-17T13:43:00.004+05:30

This weekend I re-looked at my Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a tool to help you understand your personality type. At a Juniper manager training we went through a MBTI type identification exercise and I found it pretty useful.

Very crudely MBTI consists of 4 types of 'being'

1.) Where people prefer to focus their attention and get energy:

Extroversion (symbol E, from external objects and people) Introversion (symbol I, from their own mental space)

2.) The way they prefer to take in information

Sensing (symbol S) , Intuition (symbol N)

3.) The way they prefer to make decisions

Thinking (T) or Feeling (F)

4.) How they prefer to orient themselves to the external world

Judging (J) or Perceiving (P)

There are more detailed descriptions of what each of the above mean.

There are a series of questions you answer and they help to identify your type on each of the indicators and then arrive at a composite type (for eg Intuition - Sensing - Thinking - Perceiving, ISTP) of which they are 16. The model has an extensive description of the broad traits of each type. At the training there was also a discussion on how these type behaviours and how they manifest in the workplace and how people of different types work together well (or not). I think this exercise is of particular value to people to remind them that their worldview is not universal, and particularly that there is an entire personality model built around various ways of being and that ones own way of being is just one type, and is no more valid or correct than others.

The value of this personality typing exercise I personally found included:

-- to revisit the fact that I feel inadequate about several things ; this exercise suggests that you feel comfortable in your natural strengths and build on them.

-- placing your own abilities and weaknesses in a broader framework like this means that you can then see the really irritating things that others do within the same framework and see that the other person is not objectively wrong in behaving a certain way.

There's probably lots of material on the web about MBTI, and I would encourage you to find out more. But the real value would come from doing it with an expert who would put you through the questions to find out your type and the discussion that follows.

Personally I had a fair bit of trouble in fully identifying my type. I identified it as INFP (Introversion, Intuition, Feeling, Perceiving). I had a lot of ambiguity between Feeling and Thinking. I think it comes out of preparing intensively for the IIT entrance and then doing engineering, where the whole atmosphere is logical and fact-based and feeling plays no role. Also the model points out that there are different degrees to which people are able to clearly identify their type and less-clarified type may be due to lack of freedom to explore or suppression in childhood etc. I think a lot of Indians would exhibit this kind of thing, since a lot of Indians (especially poorer people) would grow up in a situation that precludes freedom and exploration and development.

Some links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator - MBTI on Wikipedia

http://www.myersbriggs.org/ Myers-Briggs Foundation

http://www.personalitypathways.com/type_inventory.html Some more introductory material

Kid update and on visualization

2009-05-14T16:26:00.001+05:30

The due date for the baby is 20th June. The baby is not yet in a head-down position. The following surprising exercise was suggested by the pregnancy guidebook that we bought: do a daily 10 minute visualization where you visualize the baby moving into the correct head-down position. The guidebook was written by a panel of physicians (UK or US based I'm not sure) and most of the info is completely factual and scientific. So I was quite surprised to see this. I have a feeling there would have been a bit of heated debate around it. The exercise was accompanied by a statement that a particular Dr had seen 89% success in the baby moving around to the correct position on using this exercise. I guess that is their way of saying 'caveat emptor' .

More generally in several self-help and other such systems, visualizing good things is a recommended technique. I try it now and then (when it occurs to me!). I do think its a useful thing, though (like meditation) most of the time my mind drifts away too soon. The interesting thing for me about it is as follows: most of the time I'm quite pessimistic about things and prepared for the worst and so on. So its a striking change instead to imagine the best or imagine fantastic things happening. This is not related to whether they will happen or not -- it is just that it is such a different feeling imaging outrageously good outcomes, rather than being guarded. It seems quite plausible that that kind of change in thinking and feeling will trigger changes in behavior and outlook that create the positive outcomes. But it seems to be a good exercise just for the change in mental state, irrespective of the outcome.

Siddhu

2009-05-12T21:41:00.004+05:30

It was done by photography not animation. According to the artist: "Took a total of 256 photos and time-lapse'd them! Took solid 4 hours for a 50 second split!"

Pixar's Luxo!
Originally uploaded by !**sid-art**!

Creativity explosion

2009-05-12T21:40:00.001+05:30

Multiple Exposure Disorder:)
Originally uploaded by !**sid-art**!

Siddhu is in overdrive

Friend roundup

2009-05-10T17:29:00.004+05:30

Arvind and Nandita in Tokyo and visiting Mt. Fuji

http://picasaweb.google.com/goestoinfinity/NanditaTokyo?

and some more:

http://picasaweb.google.com/goestoinfinity/GinzaDeptStore?

PS: Privacy issues? Let me know and I'll remove the photo...

Siddhu celebrates Mothers' Day:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sidwork/3512828816/

Zenrainman laments the lamentable hacking down of Bangalore's beloved trees:

From a Water Portal event this weekend

2009-05-10T17:11:00.002+05:30

Kannada song

2009-05-10T16:00:00.002+05:30

Very cool traditional Kannada song that you may appreciate even if you don't know the language. Its from the Voices from the Waters film festival. Video was taken by me, which explains the bad quality ...

2009-05-10T15:08:00.000+05:30

I attended a grand wedding recently and particularly liked the beautiful fabric decorations that they had on the walls and ceiling.

"Beautiful Minds" videos

2009-05-09T21:01:00.003+05:30

I had blogged earlier about going to the "Beautiful Minds" event.
View here: http://despoki.blogspot.com/2009/03/beautiful-minds.html

Here are videos I took at the event. The one by Nandan was rated 5 stars by someone and had the most views so it gets pride of place:

Ullas Karanth:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWGHiJZiYH0&feature=channel_page

Hasnath Mansur:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYE17jaOJJU&feature=channel_page

Subroto Bagchi:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPw5r5wTH5s&feature=channel_page

Mahesh Bhat:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suzWDtWrnIM&feature=channel_page

2009-05-06T14:32:00.005+05:30

Quite a remarkable video. It captures with a certain quiet clarity core aspects of American foreign policy, after cleaning away obfuscation and non-essentials.
Americans should see this video to understand how some people abroad perceive it.

Noam Chomsky would be happy.

Forwarded by zenrainman

(Arvind you can start vituperating now)

Addendum: I guess one thing is that this is somewhat dated. My personal theory is that the US is now in historic decline. However historical context does not hurt

xkcd

2009-05-02T09:32:00.006+05:30

xkcd.com is a truly cool comic. Whimsical, occasionally X-rated (there, see the jump in interest), occasionally I don't get it.

PS: At their website (not in the image above) mouseover of the comic image shows a nice tidbit extra

Bought a frig

2009-05-01T18:22:00.001+05:30

We bought a new frig recently. Every frig in the shop was marked with an electricity consumption 'Star' sticker that told you how much power it consumed and what the volume of the frig was (click on the pic to see a nice closeup). It made picking the make/model remarkably simple (normally a very fraught process with me and my wife). I picked out the energy efficient models in the relevant size range which straightaway reduced our choices to 2, and my wife then picked one of those (though she cribbed about the color).

Really, this is quite remarkable. Any standardization between makes and models is useful to make a choice and a standardization that is relevant to environment friendliness is so rare to find. I have no idea who does this star rating but god bless them (and I hope they do a good job of it).

Most of the manufacturers had atleast one 5 star rated model.

BTW -- I read somewhere that the frig is one of the most or the most powerhungry devices in the house, so picking an energy efficient one really does make a difference.

streisand-art.com

2009-05-01T03:48:00.002+05:30

We recently got a version of the above painting as a gift for someone at Streisand Art in Indiranagar. Its a pretty unique shop and business model, the shop is crammed from top to bottom with paintings (mostly oil on canvas), perhaps two thousand of them. It seems they have 500 artists over the world doing this stuff for them, and their only retail outlet seems to be in Indiranagar, Bengalooru, India! Also think I read somewhere that the owner is Barbara Streisand's brother.

While mass produced art is not something I'm generally a fan of (remember Thomas Kinkade, painter of light?), there were a lot of nice paintings in this shop. There is something to be said for owning (and patronizing/supporting) real paintings by artists as opposed to reproductions of the greats. I felt a rekindling of the old interest in art (haven't been to many galleries lately).

2009-04-26T20:34:00.003+05:30

From a forward at work.

I confess I didn't have the patience to spend much time on this, but in case
you do..

The picture contains a whole bunch of famous people, can you identify all of them. Click on the pic.
Maybe we can do this as a group task, start commenting with all those you identify.
Person who can identify the most gets a prize of a guest post on this blog.

From here and there

2009-04-26T19:47:00.003+05:30

1.) I started tagging my older posts (scroll down and look for the "Labels" section on the right hand side of this page). Still a huge task if I want to tag all the posts from day 1. However, I'm quite happy to see on going through some of the older posts that I actually like them and find it worth looking at them again. Too often, when I go back to look at something I wrote, I feel nauseated, so this is a good surprise. If/when this exercise is completed it might show some interesting patterns about the kind of things that interest me and that I write about

2.) I went to the other end of town for a meeting today, and bought organic mangoes from the lady of the house who runs a small shop out of the house selling organics. This seems to be a cool idea. Organic food seems particularly amenable to having lots of small neighbourhood shops selling them. I want to set up one

3.) And a note on one of the bees in my bonnet (or should I say closet): clothes. Think about this: you could evaluate your clothes by dividing the cost of the item by the number of times you wore it. You'd look for a low number to come out of the ratio as that would indicate that it didn't cost you much and you used it a lot. It seems an interesting way to evaluate the worth or the value you get out of it. Couple of points: especially for women, I think the value would be concentrated on a low end and a high end, with a dip in the middle, rather than evenly distributed. This is because there would be some pretty expensive thing, and then precisely because it was so expensive, we would wear it very few times, so that its worth by the above calculation would be very high. For eg. all the suits I've bought I've used only a couple of times, and then they've gotten too tight for me :-(. And then you'd have stuff like jeans, whose worth would be very low.

4.) We were at the doctor's clinic over the weekend, when a couple rushed in. Shockingly the lower portion of the woman's sari was completely stained in blood and she was in great pain and moaning. The doctor was quite upset -- this was her consultation clinic with no facilities for taking care of patients and the lady had been sent there mistakenly by a hospital. They were sent off to another nearby nursing home.
It was painful to watch. Since the doctor was a ob/gyn, it was probably a pregnancy or an abortion related problem. The couple was from a lower economic background. A sad reminder of how the other half lives, which we are insulated from, most of the time.

Mayawati

2009-04-18T23:23:00.002+05:30

The Economist's recent article on the Indian elections:
http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=13492427
is centered around Mayawati. It triggered the following:
A necessary though not sufficient step to get past identity politics and caste hierarchies will be to have CMs and PMs from the dalit castes. Perhaps we should just have Mayawati as the first and most unsavoury of these and have done with it.

Photo from raman raina on flickr, click through for more

And our man in Vidyaranyapura

2009-04-18T23:03:00.006+05:30

The sensitive zenrainman has started a series profiling the lives of ordinary working class people whom we come across all the time but never really know well because we don't care to. I heartily applaud the project. Here's one, of a 'green leafy vegetable' seller in Bangalore. Sopppppuuuuuu !!!!

More from zenrainman:

A beautiful ecological home in Bangalore:

and

beautiful owls !

Our man in Tokyo...

2009-04-18T22:51:00.005+05:30

Arvind Narayanan's recent photos from Tokyo can be viewed here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/goestoinfinity/EbisuNearMuseumOfPhotography#slideshow

Above photo is from that set. When will we in India ever figure out the attention to detail that went into the pavement in the picture ?

Our man in Tokyo

2009-04-18T22:45:00.004+05:30

Arvind Narayanan is very excited by this artists photography and recommends it. I was not overly impressed:

http://www.yanagimiwa.net/My/e/project/19.html

Tickettttt !!!!

2009-04-18T20:34:00.008+05:30

I feel bad for BMTC bus drivers (and the traffic policemen, but that's a post for another day). They have to deal with so much crap on the road; scooterists (like me) weaving in and out, stupid-ass pedestrians (like me) crossing right in front of them, arrogant car drivers who think they take priority over the proles in a BMTC bus (not like me) and so on.
Wouldn't it be interesting if bus drivers in India got paid very well. Like say 60,000/- a month. Reflect on the effect of such an action.

Driving quality would improve a lot, roads would be safer for everyone. The socio-economic hierarchy would get some nice churning. Society would be placing the right value on human life and safety. And not the last, several kids who excitedly say "bus driver" or "train driver" when asked what they'll be when they grow up, will end up fulfilling their childhood dreams.

Seems like a good idea, no?

Image by kumar_08 on flickr; click through for more

2009-04-17T22:12:00.002+05:30

I get many enthusiastic missives from Mohammed Abubaker and his friends of the sort:

Dear Friend, With due respect to your person and much sincerity of purpose I make this contact with you as I believe that you can be of great assistance to me.My name is Mr.Mohammed Abubakar,from the Republic of BURKINAFASO,West Africa. Presently i work in the ministry of 'Energy and Mines' as the secretary in charge of foreign contractors payment.I am contacting you to seek for your assistance and possibly, partnership for investment purposes in your country, if you sincerely make up your mind to assist and also cooperate with me fully to actualize my dream;I promise you will never regret knowing me.To enable us discuss further on how you can fully render assistance kindly get back to me soon with this my private box.Thank you very much for your anticipated cooperation. Sincerely, Mr.Mohammed Abubakar.

No doubt you have been presented with such business opportunities too. There is surely a hilarious story to report, that will result if one follows up on one of these mails with the same false sincerity that it was sent. But somehow I don't have the energy for it. Perhaps someone else can pick up the challenge...

Nattering Nabobs ?

2009-04-14T10:57:00.001+05:30

Met up with an ex-colleague Aparajith who went off the beaten track to do a Ph.D on the history of engineering at Imperial College UK.

Photo at a restaurant in Bangalore

Tell it like it is, Manmohan !

2009-04-14T08:38:00.003+05:30

Manmohan Singh rips into L.K.Advani today:

"Mr. Advani has the unique ability to combine strength in speech with weakness in action. This is not the kind of strength we need"

"..But unline the NDA's prime ministerial candidate, I will not be found weeping in a corner while hoodlums tear down a centuries-old mosque. Nor will I be found wringing my hands in frustration while one of my Chief Ministers condones a pogrom targeted at minorities."

Not all good though: He offered a weak defence regarding the lack of justice for the killings of 1984.

A little fun with Vibhat

2009-04-12T01:36:00.004+05:30

Vibhat (good friend) sent me mail after a long time. Mail thread went like this:

===
From: Vibhat Nair
Subject: What is your phone

I seem to be missing it. How is ptiya with her pregnancy?

====
From: Vijay Krishna
Subject: Re: What is your phone
My phone is a Nokia low ender, don't remember the model (I want to start a website http://cheapestmobileinindia.com) . 'Ptiya' is doing fine !

More later,

Vijay Krishna

====
From: Vibhat Nair
Subject: Re:What is your phone

Dude: you are a true nerd. what is your phone no.?

====
From: Vibhat Nair
Subject: Re:What is your phone

And. Oh the sensitivity to typos. What will you do if you go an iPhone ?

====
From: Vijay Krishna
Subject: Re: What is your phone

What will I do if I go an iPhone ? Oh, I don't know, maybe I will teach it some english ?

Phone no is 98801 37097. Also Skype seems to work fine, I am x_vijay.
Good to hear from you, btw :-) and even better to rag you,
Cheers,

Vijay Krishna
===

I got the better of that exchange didn't I ?
Here's a contest, why don't you come up with *your* smartalecky response to Vibhat's mails, and we'll see who's wittier. If you insist (and yes, Arvind, we know you insist), you can take Vibhat's side instead and take potshots at me.

Ready steady go.

The Rise of the Shoe-ice Bomber

2009-04-10T10:04:00.002+05:30

A brilliantly satirical piece by Sainath.I had no idea the man had this talent in him. Replete with puns:

The Rise Of The Shoe-cide Bomber

By P. Sainath

09 April, 2009
Counterpunch

When Muntader al-Zaidi hurled one shoe then another at George Bush in Baghdad last year, he couldn’t have foreseen the fallout. Doubtless inspired by the Iraqi journalist, Jarnail Singh, a veteran Delhi reporter, tossed his shoe -- a solid Reebok trainer -- at Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram. Jarnail works for the Hindi newspaper, dainik jagran (The Daily Awakening). For the Home Minister, it was a rude awakening. Jarnail Singh was miffed with the Congress Party for fielding two tainted candidates from parliamentary constituencies in Delhi in our ongoing national elections.

2009-04-09T16:00:00.007+05:30

As forwarded by Vishwanath:

My comment : My intaxication lasts for a long time, the fact that the money was mine in the first place (and went to the gourmint because of my incompetence) doesn't dampen it

==============

Here is the Washington Post's Mensa Invitational which once again asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding,subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition.

Here are the winners:

Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period of time.
Ignoranus: A person who's both stupid and an asshole.
Intaxicaton: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.
Foreploy: Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid.
Giraffiti : Vandalism spray-painted very, very high
Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
Inoculatte: To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.
Decafalon (n.): The grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.
Glibido: All talk and no action.
Dopeler Effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.
Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito, that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning
and cannot be cast out.
Caterpallor (n.): The color you turn after finding half a worm in the fruit you're eating.

The Washington Post has also published the winning submissions to its yearly contest, in which readers are asked to supply alternate meanings for common words.

And the winners are:

Coffee, n. The person upon whom one coughs.
Flabbergasted, adj. Appalled by discovering how much weight one has gained.
Abdicate, v. To give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.
Esplanade, v. To attempt an explanation while drunk.
Willy-nilly, adj. Impotent.
Negligent,adj. Absentmindedly answering the door when wearing only a nightgown.
Lymph, v. To walk with a lisp.
Gargoyle, n. Olive-flavored mouthwash.
Flatulence, n. Emergency vehicle that picks up someone who has been run over by a steamroller.
Balderdash, n. A rapidly receding hairline...
Testicle, n. A humorous question on an exam.

===

Vote for your favorite. I liked the Dopeler effect, abdicate, negligent, lymph. Tough call for the single favorite, I'll select lymph

Hindu Muslim

2009-04-04T23:56:00.004+05:30

We're never going to resolve the Hindu Muslim conflicts in India without understanding more about each other and where are these avenues for understanding? I don't know of any.

=======
Photo by audi_jo, clickthrough

Elections

2009-04-04T23:42:00.006+05:30

There are far too many political parties in India now and far too large egos that prevent parties from merging when they outlive their usefulness. I look forward to a period of consolidation when things shake themselves out and become more reasonable. But this election looks like it might end up inconclusive with a period of prolonged instability.

I have also the seeds of a theory that needs building out, that party-based 'competitive' democracy is stupid. It encourages competetiveness instead of co-operation. It encourages negativity -- the opposition party has to keep on opposing whether there is validity or not in the actions of the government. We need to find a better form of democracy. We could start with villages (though I have hardly any 'locus standi' to talk about what should be done in villages) and say that panchayat elections should be by consensus not by competition.

Jagdish Tytler over whose name a permanent pall resides due to broad public opinion that he was involved in the killing of Sikhs in the 1984 riots is standing from a New Delhi constituency as the Congress candidate. Disgraceful behaviour by the Congress party. Even if he wasn't convicted in a court, this is simply not on.

===
Photo of Chiranjeevi in a Praja Rajyam election poster by kalyan3 on Flickr. Clickthrough for more.

Comments:

2009-04-04T23:12:00.006+05:30

Responses to comments:

Arvind left this comment in response to my Hindu newspaper posting, which I regretfully had to delete:
===
Dsyw, I liov toi hxifn nsoespape. Wheif elosp cso I tais to wposivis I wais to sao a bosiu os intellocisllly imspten fokxj wovit an uziantsox rveigistoaone of tss fecis uoefo tsi gixis os "baoxidke vici." Wheoc eisi in Iciks cao I tice to to sxi sdibids on tsi Cislens paydrll? Wsoer esol cib I tnor ta ffi asoi Tsiit pdidifigis? Wso eisk wsidirl esifitiris on ssoript 3 dsou a wsood asi on uncofitrollale tsivin lsik UG fsifine piolich tofiels Tinbokakoo ? Linf lins thi Hondi nispapr.

Dear Arvind: I am seriously concerned. I hope the isolation in Tokyo is not affecting you. Or was the above written under the effect of the local rice sake? Naughty, naughty! Nandita -- I would start tracking Arvind more closely if I were you!
====
Sidharth: Apologies for the self-indulgent post (self indulgent blog?). I was referring to the fact that the Hindu has a blind spot as far as Tibet is concerned; it vociferously defends every action of the undemocratic chinese government in Tibet. So when you see an article with a title like "Tibetans enjoy comforts of progress" it is not even worth reading the article to see if it has anything reasonable in it.
====

Sajini, sorry for the broken link, the right link is:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sidwork/
Enjoy!

=====
Photo of sake by rossorosso on Flickr, click through for more

Stupid-ass Hindu newspaper

2009-04-03T08:58:00.005+05:30

"Tibetans enjoy comforts of progress" is an article today.
Atleast they also had an article by Sainath.

No one else is allowed to criticise the Hindu here! (least of all you Arvind!). Only I do: as a passionate supporter of the Hindu, I am allowed to point out its faults.

PS: In reference to a recent previous post, now to expect the Shiv Sena goons to beat me up for being critical of hindus.

Photo from Dennis Archer on Flickr, click thru for more. Search for 'Tibet' on Flickr for some gorgeous images.

Hot news

2009-04-03T08:48:00.004+05:30

Rather quietly without many people knowing it (well, at any rate without me knowing it, and without announcing it on our class mailing list), C.V.Shankar, physics genius and good man, and May, math cat and good friend, had a baby recently.

Clickthrough should take you to the album let me know if it doesn't (Sajini, haven't yet checked the problem you reported earlier).