My article on Solapur

I wrote an article for the Six Degrees  News website. Six Degrees is an international development news website that focusses on grassroots reports. My article was about a government programme called Jal Yukt Shivar in Maharashtra. Here it is:  

http://www.sixdegreesnews.org/drought-management-successes-in-solapur-india/

I’m excited about having done this. I’ve not been officially ‘published’ for a while now, if at all, though I guess there were opportunities at Arghyam that I’ve passed up due to other work. Six Degrees is founded by a friend, Binayak Das, so it didn’t require pitching from my side, and I didn’t get paid for it. 

Whatever I do (if I do anything at all!) in the next phase of my life, I hope writing will be a part of it. This blog has been a source of great fulfilment but time to grow beyond it. And it would be good to be able to generate some income from writing. 

I learnt some practicalities about journalism on the trip. One was the difficulty of really evaluating the success of a programme or initiative from a visit. Though I have a background in the water sector, I’m a generalist and not technically trained, so it was hard to really gauge. And for a large scale programme like this, unless you visit lots of locations, you can’t conclude anything with any degree of confidence. Your ideas about this will be appreciated. 

Anyway, on the visit to Solapur in Maharashtra, based on which I wrote the article, I had the opportunity to meet the current District Collector. It happened quite easily, after a couple of phone calls, which was quite surprising. At Arghyam, it was really painful getting meetings with IAS officers. He was a very cordial and a nice person. However the really interesting bit was about the previous Collector, Tukaram Munde. He really seems to be a larger-than-life person who managed to achieve spectacular results. I have some sense of administration from work at Arghyam, and this chap in my opinion is off the charts. The District Collector (or Commissioner as he is called in some districts) has a really difficult job. There’s just too much stuff, too many subjects to work on. There are around 30 government departments/programmes that he is the head for. The DC of Sholapur told me there are literally hundreds of committees that he  chairs. Then there is the lack of good quality and quantity of HR to work with, including corrupt people. And unlike the private sector, you can't fire people easily. There are many restrictions and rules to getting work done, much less flexibility than in the private sector. There is the political system to be managed, which could be quite formidable. And in the first place, many of the programmes are ill-designed and ‘dead-on-arrival’. So I’d say, as far as serious impact is concerned, the DC is also for the most part, ‘dead-on-arrival’. However, Mr. Mundhe somehow managed to crack the system and actually get it to deliver. For the life of me, I cannot visualise how he did it. He is now head of Navi Mumbai district and making waves there too. A man to watch (and you can watch some of his exploits by searching on the web). 

Back to the trip again. There is a ‘power’ element in the field trip portion of visits like these , the government staff down the line from the DC are very deferential. At the same time I also got the sense that they thought I did not understand the stuff, and were patronising. I also find it tiring to meet a large number of people in a short span - my comfort level certainly is in meeting fewer people and developing stronger connections with them. 

I wonder where Jalyukt Shivar is going. There seem to be many issues with the scheme, much more so in other districts. But it also seems to have huge potential from the Solapur experience. This programme seems to have the tantalising potential to be the ‘Holy Grail’ for water security in drought-affected districts. But many a slip between the cup and the lip. At the same time some other large scale success stories are emerging from other districts like Dewas in Madhya Pradesh. Is there a trend here ? In the past, it was always about NGO models and touting them, but there were very few examples of successes at scale. Are we entering a tipping point where we get more and and more successes at scale. I fervently hope so. 

An interesting side point is that Solapur district has 2 products with the GI (Geographical Indication) tag, Maldandi jowar and Sangoli pomogranate. Here is a full list of GI tagged products in India: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Geographical_Indications_in_India 

It seems this idea is taking off in India.

Some more photos from the trip below:

Check dams storing water

Compartment bunds under construction

Dry open wells that are now recharged with water

A farm pond

Local farmer

A new kind of hotel

From travels in small town India I have had enough experience of hotels in the Rs 2000/- and below range. With a few exceptions the experience has been uniformly uninspiring. 

Things that make the travel experience less than fun include:

• the hotels are grimy and dirty 

• rooms have cheap plastic furniture that ages very fast and looks shabby 

• cobwebs

• walls always have stains, discolourations or yikes, cracks 

• power cuts 

• kitschy out-of-place decor if at all. A hotel I went to recently had a life-sized wooden sculpture of the famous Marilyn Monroe image.  

• yucky toilets - of course the thing that most spoils a hotel experience. Smelly, leaky taps, non-functional plumbing,   

• highly dubious bed linen and blankets 

• Restaurants if-present , have the deadening standard pan-india menu , you find in countless hotels countrywide. I call it the ‘panneer butter masala’ menu 

There is a deep and pervasive lack of interest in maintenance (and it runs much deeper in India than just hotels). I wonder why this is. Is it so expensive to keep a room clean and have everything work the way it should be ? 

The other ‘design pattern’ is the choice of building and furnishing material that ages rapidly or starts looking bad quickly and easily. Flooring material, Nilkamal chairs, wall paint 

I therefore propose a new kind of hotel. The design philosophy is: 

austere, spartan, impeccable, fanatic about cleanliness, local culture and aesthetics 

Have less stuff or less facilities, but keep whatever you have looking good and maintain it 

Have a breakthrough in bathroom quality. 

Figure out how to keep the walls clean - maybe use whitewash which is cheaper and repaint more frequently  

Start working with a whole new set of materials that do the job  without degrading in appearance and quality rapidly over time  

Figure out a new menu tapping into local expertise and local traditions 

I read the logic of Tata’s Ginger chain of hotels somewhere and they seem to be on these lines. And pilgrim spots like Tirumala tend to work on these lines of austere and functional. We can build on these and other experiences  

Using a Matrix sim card

User experience with using a Matrix SIM for foreign travel.
When I moved to Singapore, I brought with me a Matrix SIM card. While my experience leaves a bitter taste in the mouth, I'm not a fan of random badmouthing of companies that I see on the web. Below is my experience. Its only 1 persons' experience, and its spiced up a little bit for drama. There is also negligence on my part that contributed to the final outcome.

I had bought a plan for 1000 free minutes calling to India at approximately 2,500/- Rs. I expected I would spend this amount on the card. The final amount I spent over 3 weeks is upward of 19,000/- Rs.
In India I did not have knowledge of Singapore calling rates as also data usage, so I was not able to evaluate the plan I took properly. After coming to Singapore, I got busy in settling in at the school, visa matters etc. here and didn't pay sufficient attention to understanding how the phone charges were going. I realized too late that the data and local calling charges on the card were very expensive. I probably even crossed the 1000 Min limit on calling India.

The critical problem is that there is no convenient way to track usage (local calling, free minutes to India, data). This is mindbogglingly bad. To be on this kind of a plan, and not to give people a way to know where exactly they are in their usage is such a bad customer experience, that it crosses the line to where it merits an investigation by the government. After 2 weeks, and multiple phone calls to customer support, I started getting SMSes and recorded phone messages telling me what my balance was, but even then it didn't tell me the breakup for various services. And why did it start only 2 weeks into my trip ?
When one has some number of free minutes but doesn't know when it going to get over, its very problematic. Its hardly practical to keep noting the duration of every call you make.
The other thing that wasn't nice was that local calling rates were very expensive. Again its something that you can't evaluate very well back in India. The calling cards seem to be set up so that you get attracted by the free India calling minutes and then get screwed by the local calls.

The Matrix experience is quite schizophrenic. Any aspect of their service that has to do with generating revenue is extraordinarily good. Any aspect that might lead to revenue erosion is extraordinarily bad.
On the plus side:
1.) When I first contacted a salesperson in Bangalore, he was very knowledgeable, pleasant and courteous. He was also extremely responsive and reliable in follow-up to get me to purchase the card. 
2.) They ran ads on TV and cable sometime back. I found those extraordinarily entertaining and well-made. They also have a cute little box in which they give you the SIM card and usage instructions. These guys remind me of Indigo, the airline, for their branding and marketing ideas. And check out their website.
3.) When I had some trouble getting data service on my phone, the customer service was extraordinarily response in giving me detailed instructions and following up with me over a period of 2 hours until I got it resolved.
4.) The service worked well and call quality etc was all good. I would give them good marks for this.
5.)The most annoying thing is that its remarkably easy to get a phone connection here in Singapore. All it takes is your passport and you can get a SIM at any number of convenience stores around the city. But because I had the convenient Matrix SIM available, I postponed getting a local Singapore SIM. I also postponed setting up WiFi in the apartment properly so I could use WiFi data. These really cost me dear.

Two other people that I consulted about Matrix told me that they had the same kind of experience. That's a total of 3/3 bad customer experiences! 

If you are going ahead with Matrix anyways, things to keep in mind:
Of course the basic thing is that you have to keep an eagle eye on your call usage!
Understand the local calling rate. Check whether the local calling rate applies to incoming too.
Know your data usage. I had an unlimited connection back in India, so didn't really know how much was my average usage. Found out after I came here and paid through my nose, that it is much higher than I thought!

Note: Happy to get feedback from Matrix and hear their side of it. I did send them the substance of the above as a customer complaint and didn't hear back (Oh, yeah, that's another thing, they opened three customer complaints as a result of my calls, and I never heard back on any of them).


Their ads were so good, I will link them in here :-)

On education

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"

The vegetable pushcart man as hero

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.

This year's Padma awards

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 ?

Terminal City

Shiv Sena goons in Mumbai attack the house of the court-appointed advocate who is to defend Ajmal Kasab

(Photo from Dharmesh on Flickr, click through for more)

Bangalore roads

There seems to be a major inefficiency with Bangalore road repairs. Potholes are never fixed. But every now and then major roads get a big overhauling, but they get into bad shape very soon. I read in the newspaper once that contractors don't like to do pothole fixing ; they prefer to do the major overhauling (which seems pretty obvious, less painstaking, more expenses and more profits). But keeping contractors happy is hardly the city's first priority. And from the above it would seem the major resurfacing also is substandard.

Given the huge amount of money in road construction, it seems there are huge inefficiencies in this. I would love to see contractors reined in and forced to do a lot of pothole repairing. Certainly an area of civic engagement. I wonder if some people have already looked into this.



On a different note, the above is a bad quality video of a BMTC bus (the articulated type, which is almost double the length of the standard one) reversing on a narrow section of Indiranagar 100 feet road because a section of the road got suddenly shut off due to metro construction. Someone should be fired for the driver not being informed that the route was no longer available (alternatively the driver should be fired if he was illegally using that route which was anyway in pretty bad shape due to the construction). One of my background ideas is that some white collar jobs like bus and train driving should be paid a lot. Not only is this appropriate, because the drivers have peoples lives in their hands, but it also creates some nice churn in the traditional ideas of what occupations are cool to do and what are not. Remember how when we were kids we wanted to bus and train drivers and suchlike. It would be nice if these remained respectable career options on growing up.

Diwali (contd)

In most Indian cities Diwali has become a festival of noise and street pollution, rather than a festival of lights. I remember 3 or 4 years back we lived near Ulsoor lake and the Diwali there was horrendous. There were a group of young people bursting extremely loud crackers late into the night. It was just obscenely loud and it seemed that their parents also did not see either the pointlessness of the exercise or the insensitivity to the neighbours. (The neighbours should have protested, why that doesn't happen in India is a muse for a separate day, and why I personally don't protest, for yet another day).They have these grotesque electric crackers taken to the extreme that go on for ever (5, 10, 15 minutes and more). Nowadays its not so bad as they don't allow lighting crackers inside the apartment complex we live in, so we're shielded from the worst. Today I saw an amazing sight -- on a busy main road near my house near a messy traffic intersection, with 2 cops directing traffic, some IDIOT decided that he must prove his ownership of the road by lighting one of the 5 minute wallahs on the road. The traffic stopped for 5 minutes and the traffic cops did not feel it necessary to chastise the culprit. C'est la vie (en l'Indee).

Specific problem above apart, we need to reinvent our rituals and practices to be genuinely in tune and authentic to today's life. How does one practice Diwali or any other festival in the city in a way that makes sense ?
IIT Kharagpur used to have a contest between hostels for who does the best lighting up of the hostel with diyas for Diwali. That seems like a nice practice, encouraging beauty and creativity instead of sound.
The legends behind Diwali are pretty confusing to me atleast, they seem to be multiple stories and ideas. How does one relate to any of those in a modern rationalist world ? Can we find some essence of the festival and place it in a modern context ?

Another unrelated thought is how incredibly alive and vital some of our Indian festivals are, particularly Holi and Diwali. I can't recall such spectacular exhibitions of light (sound), and colour in any other country's celebrations.

Some self-indulgent photos below, as we played with a camera and diyas on Diwali

Vaishnodevi - 2

BTW, they've introduced a new way of getting to the top of the mountain -- helicopter ! For 4000/- Rs roundtrip you can take a helicopter ride up, and land pretty near the temple.

After the darshan, I had a plate of delicious rice and rajma at a place outside. Then got back to where the swamiji was co-ordinating the stuff. By then my parents had also made it safely up and they went through the darshan too. My dad was not too happy at the pony ride up and contemplating walking down but I talked him out of it and he went ahead and took the ride down again. My mom also got started going down by the doli. I spent a while there helping the swamiji with his stuff. There was one woman of our group who had not been too well the whole tour, and she had anyway come up and she looked so out of it it was quite disturbing. The swamiji helped her to go through the darshan and along with a friend she headed off to catch a horse down. Meanwhile camera-lady was also there with a friend and getting ready to head down by horse too. I realized at this point that all the walking and sleep-deprivation had finally caught up and I was pretty tired and in not too good a shape to do the trek down. So I thought I would go with them. We headed off for the pony station only to be told that there were no ponies and we would have to wait awhile. Much confusion ensued for some time with various people tried various strategies. There were a few pony minder who agreed to do the trip down 'unofficially' at a higher rate than the standard. Unofficially, because there is some system governing the pony stuff, and these people were not supposed to go down at that time. The sick woman and her friend headed off. Meanwhile camera-lady's associate was not willing to shell out the extra but she was, so she was getting somewhat upset and acerbic with him. So after some back and forth it ended up with myself and camera-lady heading down together on ponies and the other chap (and another person who had joined us) still looking around. We headed off and basically it was okay and somewhat fun, though the prospect of spending 2 hours on that pony was quite formidable. The way it works is you are riding the pony and the minder walks alongside guiding the pony and making sure things are going okay. The minder will occasionally fall behind and leave you on your own and it gets pretty scary then, because the pony negotiates the oncoming traffic including other ponies and dolies on its own, and do you trust a pony to do that ? The 2 hour odd ride down by horse and 3 hours up is actually pretty punishing. Its a combination of extremes : boredom (sitting on a pony for so long), discomfort (bouncing around as the pony negotiates all the ups and downs) and concern-to-panic (every time the pony looks like its going to bump into someone or something). In my case, add an extra twinge of guilt every now and then for riding an animal in the first place.
I was physically quite comfortable in riding the pony. There were some theoritical fundas I read somewhere at some point about how you have to 'roll' your body with the motion of the pony and not resist and it worked quite well. I was feeling quite terrible about the unethicality of riding a pony and that too breaking the rules but well, having done it no point whining. We passed a checkpost at one point where something quite strange happened. One of the minders went to the checkpost to do whatever. Some stuff ensued and then finally a guy came out, shouted at him a bit. Then he asked him to squat in front of him and actually whipped him a few times with a thin stick. I was quite horrified at the behavior, but didn't do anything. There was not that much scope to do something given that we were breaking the rules (and perhaps that was what the driver was getting punished for in the first place), and it got over very quickly. The driver took it without complaining, it seemed to be something he expected. Anyway we carried along some more when my pony started exhibiting the disturbing behavior of kind of 'tripping'. One of his front legs would buckle and then he would right himself. The driver said that this was because the path was slippery from the light showers that were going on. I was feeling more and more bad for the pony. The buckling became more and more frequent and finally it became clear that this wasn't working. So we got off (the other pony also was seeing the same problem) and walked for a while instead. While this was happening it started raining quite heavily so we had to shelter under one of the covered sections of the path. It started raining heavily and then it got to raining *very* heavily and then it kept getting worse and worse. I was transfixed by the absoulute fury, so to say, of the weather. The wind was racing. A small stream of water had formed on one side of the pathway as the water from uphill was collecting together and pouring downhill. I watched in horrified fascination as the size of this stream kept increasing and increasing. There was an electric wire (someone later told me it was a phone wire not electric) running overhead and I was having visions of this thing being brought down by the wind. The gale kept going. I started getting really concerned about all the other people from our group on the track. As I was one of the quicker ones, there must be lots of people especially older people behind us. And my parents -- I didn't know if they had made it down. What about the sick lady. She looked in pretty bad shape, imagine how she must be in this rain. She didn't look like she had a raincoat either (I had a decently warm coat that was quite waterproof). To make my mood worse, a couple of other people from the party joined us in our shelter. The lady was completely soaked she didn't have any jacket or raincoat. She didn't look in any good shape at all. Finally when the weather got slightly better she and a few others pushed ahead on the theory that they were already soaked so it was better to keep going and get to the hotel room early rather than just wait there. I felt that was a pretty bad idea as the path was really slippery so I and camera-lady stayed put. Finally maybe an hour and a half later the fury of the rain more or less ceased and we got going with an umbrella. Camera-lady had walked up which was quite an achievement as I expect she did not get a lot of exercise in her normal life. So she was getting to the end of her endurance and it was still 5 or 6 km down. We briefly considered taking the ponies but I was anxious to just push on and it was hell of lot more slippery obviously so didn't seem a good idea. So we struggled down for the remaining kilometers, one of my more miserable experiences in recent memory. It was very much a mental problem the actual walking was not so bad. But we were so keen on getting it over with and getting back to the hotel and I was so worried about all the other folks and my parents. It was getting towards 5am by this time and it was light. Towards the end of the ordeal
we see sauntering down on a pony -- my dad ! He looked in decent shape but he hadn't seen my mom. He went ahead and we soldiered along. Finally it all got over we got down, got an auto, got to the hotel and my dad and mom were both there, my mom having reached earlier. Apparently her party had been almost all the way down when the downpour started so they were able to get out quite soon after it stopped.

When I reached the hotel after getting off the auto the first person I met was the swamiji waiting outside with instructions -- "pack your bags and be ready to leave as soon as possible". (The next leg of the trip was Amritsar). It was really pissing off, I was about ready to drop dead, and he was pushing us on to the next stage. I gave him a short reply that I was more concerned about whether my parents were back.

Anyway back to the room and a shower. I was inclined towards saying 'screw it' to the tour group and staying on for some more time in Katra to recover my breath so to say. Since so many people were still on the way down, one portion of the group would start immediately and the next portion would consist of the latecomers and start later, and I was inclined to go with them. But my parents felt that since we were down and basically okay we should just push on. The next shock was seeing our suitcases which had stayed on top of the bus all night. My expensive new VIP suitcase wasn't so hot we found out -- it had let the water in, and essentially every single one of my clothes in there was completely soaked and unwearable.The only things left were a few items in a bag that we had taken into the hotel room. My parents had better luck. I was not done with just that either. I had carried my passort along with me for IDing on the flight from B'lore to Delhi. I was concerned that it might have gotten damaged so started looking for it and I couldn't find it in the suitcase. I must have left it in the hotel room at Siddhibari !! Not only that, the train tix were there with it and I couldn't find them either. I spent a *very* unpleasant few minutes after that, contemplating breaking the news to my parents and their freaking out completely, possible courses of action and telling the organizers about it and all the chaos it would cause. All this was broken when I noticed that there was a separate zippered section on the top and something was bulging out of that. A quick check and it was indeed the missing stuff. I have this unfortunate tendency to store important stuff in good, safe places and then forget where I stored it. The case here again. Anyway struggling from all this avalanche of crap and from the continuing lack of sleep we packed up, lugged the suitcases down and managed to find seats on the already crowded buses pretty much concluding the interesting and unhappy chapter of Vaishnodevi.

The swamijis didn't look too concerned about the fate of the remaining people, they left a couple of the organizers back to take care of them and headed out along with us. I was particularly concerned about one older gentleman that my dad had made acquaintance of (he was the large gentleman of the three seater in the bus journey). He absolutely wanted to take the helicopter up as he wasn't in very good shape. But the service had been suspended at that point perhaps due to weather conditions. Having come thus far, he didn't want to cop out so he took a palanquin. I saw him up on the top about the time I was leaving. He was dressed in very light clothing. So I was wondering what had happened to him, and was very relieved to see him reach the hotel just at the time that the buses were leaving. Anyway, as it turned out there were no major issues and everybody did turn up in reasonable shape without falling seriously sick. The one sick lady continued to be sick through the rest of the trip and ran into more trouble later, I think she would look on the entire tour as one of the nightmare experiences of her life.

Leeeets gooooooooooooo !!!!!!!

All right !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Today Jan 20th, I let the guys in my group know that I am planning to leave Juniper. Now that this is official, I can start this blog, which is to be about the next phase in my life.

For a while now I have been fantasizing about stepping off the beaten path and doing something that is not governed by the usual parameters. These for me have been: keeping up with peers in terms of money made and position achieved, having financial security. Not that there has not been genuine work done and satisfaction for what was achieved. However the pull to do the same work but in the context of service has been strong. So now I step off (as many many have done before me) and the excitement is big.

There has been a lot of thinking that has gone into this decision (more than required, since I brood too much instead of acting). Recapitulating all that would be boring, so hopefully the context will seep into the blogging over the course of time.

One question is: how often do I commit to keep this blog updated ? On a chronologically regular basis or event-driven ? What kind of stuff will go in here ? How honest do I commit to being. This is important to settle so that I have a goal to keep myself honest, else very possibly blogging will peter out. Some reflection on the purpose of the blog and what I am trying to achieve with it needs to happen before settling on something. The next entry in the blog should settle these questions then (or atleast make the first working pass). Actually using blogspot is an experiment, since the previous blog was on despoki.net. One disadvantage of using blogspot is diffusing my online presence, which would otherwise be at one location. Again need to decide on this.

Okay enough for now and happy blogging !