Dastakar Andhra

Today, I went to an exhibit of sarees (!) by a group called Dastkar Andhra. I had heard about them in various contexts before. The Andhra chapter works with weavers in villages giving them various kinds of support and input especially design input on the kinds of things that will sell in urban India. All the sarees are handlook. I had a nice chat with the lady who was in charge. Among other things they have a program to have stay-at-home women become small scale resellers of the sarees, and make some money doing so. This is not something new, but I was tempted to join in this case, since I thought what they were doing is cool. Luckily sanity asserted itself, but if you know anyone who would be a good reseller, let me know. I bought two sarees for about 500/- each, one of them was a khadi one. (Khadi refers to material created on the spinning wheel, the charka, made popular by Gandhi). An interesting thing was the bag they packed the sarees in. It was made of newspaper but done very well. The bag is very sturdy and note the ropes for carrying, the attachment holes for these to the bag is done in a sturdy clean way, lot of attention to detail. Apparently these bags are done by blind children at an orphanage in Secunderabad, and they are sold at Rs 2/- per bag. Its pretty cool. I am getting upset by how much plastic I and Priya use, but haven't yet got the discipline to carry around a cloth bag.

The lady said that they also sell to FabIndia which I have already blogged about so that was cool. They are also working on something called a 'decentralized spinning machine'. Lots of detail there which I will pass on.

Belur, Halebid and Sravanabelgola

I had mentioned briefly about our trip to Belur, Halebid and Sravanabelgola in a previous post. I thought I would add some more to that.










Take a look at the photos here of the temples at these places. Here's what strikes me. The architecture is completely different from other South Indian (I don't know much about North Indian) temple architecture. There is none of the gopuram stuff at all. These temples strike
me as elegant and stylish. They strike me as really *modern*. The clean straight lines and low roofs are as if they were designed by some cool architect of today. In fact there is a description of a fictional modern worship place in one of Ayn Rand's books that is similiar to these temples.

We actually saw naked Jain monks in Sravanabelgola :-). Quite a striking sight to see groups of naked grown men.

The temple carvings are intricate and gorgeous, the photo below is hardly the height of their achievement. One wonders at the different values they had in those days when hordes of craftsmen would painstaking labour for years over the infinite sculptures and carvings that populate our temples.

Last day at work

It was among the happiest days of my life. People were so nice and I felt on top of the world in all the affection. It will take some time to blog about it. Right now, stuff goes on and I'm need to start doing stuff that I was planning to do this weekend. The sense that I am in a different place in life hasn't sunk in, partly because there is something to do immediately (going to Timbaktu in a few days).

Joan Miro

Countdown: 1 day.
"I feel strangely calm"

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For the art mavens among you'll Google looks especially nice today.

Composting !!

Last weekend I went to an open house by an organization called The Daily Dump. This is a small group that came up with a bunch of products to do 'composting'. Basically this is to take all the kitchen waste (ie. organic waste) in your home and handle it right there in your home by turning it into compost. Compost is a high quality fertiliser for plants. How to do this? Simple -- kitchen waste decomposes and over a time period becomes compost by itself.You just need to manage this process in order to fit it into the structure of the household and that's where this groups' products comes in. They sell a set of three pots that are stacked one on top of the other. You fill the first two pots with the waste and when it decays to a certain extent you transfer it to the third pot and give it some time (1 month - 3months) and it becomes compost.

Why would you want to do this? In Indian cities garbage disposal is a big mess, the government doesn't do a good job. So you see piles of garbage lying around creating a horrible, stinking, unsanitary mess. When the government does collect the garbage it ends up in a landfill which is bad for the environment. So if citizens take care of their own kitchen waste (which is typically a large part of the waste generated in the house), its a great thing. Personally I think its fantastic to be able to take your waste and watch it slowly transform intosomething as benign as compost. BTW, the waste goes down hugely in the process as you might expect, to 25% or less o f its original volume/weight.
So this group, the Daily Dump, was publicising its products in the open house. They had a bunch of interesting environment-oriented talks as part of the open house. One was by a guy called Vishwanath, who is apparently quite well known in rainwater harvesting circles in Bangalore. (You don't know what rainwater harvesting is? You can check out his site: rainwaterclub.com). Another was T.K.Ramkumar, one of the leading lights of Exnora in Chennai. I know Ramkumar from RIM, so it was nice bumping into him at Exnora.
It felt great to get into all this stuff. This is what I was missing so much in my soon-to-be previous life in software. We bought one of the pots sets and are waiting for it to be ready for pickup. I'm excited to be composting :-)

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Update on Narmada and Bhopal: Medha Patkar and other NBA folk stopped their fast today. I'm not sure why, but they won a moral victory with the Union Goverment internal assesment pointing out flagrant violations in the rehabilitation work from what was to be done. Also the issue escalated in an interesting way with the Gujarat Chief Minister Modi going on a 51 hour fast as a counterpoint to the NBA. He's not a pushover, that guy. Anyway it seems its now up to the Supreme Court to decide whether to allow dam construction to continue or not.
The Bhopal folks also got an audience with the PM who agreed to some of their demands, so they called off their fast too.
I dunno how to call the game in both these cases.

Finalized !

Countdown: 3 days

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I talked to Mary at Timbaktu yesterday. We're going ahead with the idea of me working for them for some time. I will go there the coming Sunday or Tuesday and spend a few days initially there and take it from there.

So its decided. I am going to be spending a significant part of the next few months in the middle of nowhere with no heated water, limited phone, electricity and net connectivity. Its going to be bloody hot. And I have only a vague idea of what I intend to achieve there. So why ?!

Basically because my thing in life seems to be to stumble on new and interesting and important things, and I feel that I have to follow them up. What they do at a place like Timbaktu is so different from what 90% of us do, or care about, so I expect it to be very mind-broadening to spend some time with them.

It could be a difficult adjustment (I spent two days there earlier and ended up with tinnitus!).

Countdown: 4 days. I'm scared out of my pants.

Not really.

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Two other people I talked to recently are a sister of a good friend in a past life, and a Timpany (school) classmate.

The sister is a nice person who did her bachelors and a masters in the US and now works at Pratham in New Delhi. She is one of those rare people who have the commitment to take up social work right from the beginning as a life calling, and also bring to it intellectual strength, sense of proportion and fun and a mainstream network. I think she is also lucky in having been brought up in a very healthy empowering family that made some of this possible. We talked about her work at Pratham and general issues about this kind of work and where she is going and where I am going etc. I hope to keep in touch.

The Timpany person did architecture instead of engineering and joined the government in India (gasp!) and now works as a reasonably senior poo-bah in the NHAI (National Highway Authority of India). A government job is pretty cool in some ways -- you don't have to struggle to negotiate with government bureaus like I do for example, if you are in government. Also if you're reasonably high up, the perks like the bungalows and stuff are pretty cool. And basically the challenge of creating or implementing good policy is great. However I guess mostly you just get bogged down in petty political crap, and you're lucky (and strong) if you don't get infected by the culture of corruption.

More conversations -- Balaji

One person that I have been talking to, every now and then, is R. Balaji. Balaji is an interesting guy. He is an old friend of mine. We studied for JEE together in Vizag and I was struck by how singleminded his focus was and how he could keep studying for the full day without a break. After joining IIT he took a 4 year vacation from studying :-), for reasons best known to him. After IIT he basically dropped out quickly from the mainstream. He spent a long time (2-3 years if I remember right), basically doing the kind of exploration that I am thinking of doing now. It was an extremely non-conventional step that he took so early in life, and the level of independence in thinking that it implied is huge. He just spent those years travelling to all kinds of projects, talking to people, seeing what they were doing and trying to find some answers to the questions and inner turmoil. At one point he put his chemical engineering skills to use and started a handmade papermaking unit as an employment generation scheme for backward villagers in a remote area of Andhra Pradesh. After a huge amount of thought and discussion, he finally decided that the non-mainstream stuff did not have any compelling answers for his questions and returned to the mainstream. He came back to IIT, did an MS, took a job with HPCL in Bombay, got married, got children :-). That is pretty much where he is at this point. He has done well at his job and executed some challenging projects with solid outcomes and recognition.

Balaji is pretty negative about the non-mainstream stuff at this point in his life. He has been consistently cautioning me about the negative side of these efforts. I don't know quite what to make of his comments. He feels most of the people in these efforst are confused and don't have clarity and finally this reflects on the work. To make a non-mainstream effort viable, one needs a lot of strength and commitment and this is not often there. It seems he is basically into critiquing all the efforts and none of them meet his standard. He has the ability to get 'under the skin' of people and point out their deficiencies. That usually shakes people, and probably makes his evaluation even worse. This critiquing approach is a good one, and I know he is a serious guy. However, the critiquing mentality is also a detached one. When you are detached, the whole equation changes. My approach is 'human' -- I am sympathetic (to a fault) to people's honest efforts, even I percieve problems with the approach. Also I am coming to this much later in life with a lot of experience compared to him and I also think I have less baggage. I am open and curious and I don't have an inner turmoil and I am not using this non-mainstream stuff as an escape. So I will be open to what he says, but its not seriously concerning me at this point.

Clustr Maps

If you scroll down to the very bottom of the main page of this blog (http://despoki.blogspot.com), you'll see a map with red circles and squiggles on it. The map is from www.clustrmaps.com, and shows geograpically where the hits on the site are coming from. I can identify a bunch of the hits from US and India, but there are some more which I don't know about. Take a look at the clustrmap on this page (nice site by the way). The distribution of the hits is quite interesting, almost as if it is tracing through all the internet-heavy parts of the world.

Arun Pai

Countdown: 5 days !! Butterflies in the stomach, mainly because of all the undone work at the current job. I will end up leaving feeling guilty about not winding up seamlessly. Priya is off tomorrow to Chennai, her school year is over.

We had a 4 day weekend here and I had lots of interesting conversations and meetings. Its going to take a while to blog it all. Here's the first.

I talked to Arun Pai who is the founder of Bangalorewalks.com. I've been on several of the walks, and have talked with him a little and felt it would be useful to keep in touch. Arun is actually 1 year senior to me at IIT Madras (I didn't know that until recently), he is '91 Mech Godav, football team captain (also sports sec ?). He went to IIM after that, worked for Anderson, worked with a chap called Mahesh Murthy at a Indian VC firm called Passionfund and did various cool things. Mahesh Murthy is quite well-known, he does a column in an Indian business magazine. Currently he does a very interesting company called Pinstorm that is into helping advertisers to get the best bang for their online advertising buck. The size of the online advertising market is quite large (~ a few billion dollars) but making intelligent decisions about online ad purchase is still a young science and these folks are the pioneers.
Arun himself was fairly instrumental in pioneering the field of outsourced online tutoring. Here, a guy or gal in India will be on VoiP with a kid in the US along with a computer whiteboard and do the tutoring. Its quite a big business now apparently. We also talked about CareerLauncher which Arun was associated with for some time. It was started by his wingmates from IIM. They are a corporate, professional, nationwide version of your neighbourhood coaching center.
Other stuff we talked about: business ideas in India. There are two interesting ones 70mm.com is India's version of Netflix. And Easylib.com is a neat one: an online book lending library.
Arun also pointed me to a nearby open house that was held this week for household composting products. More (much more!) on that later, as I got very enthusiastic about it. In connection with that I also heard about Shristi , a design school in Bangalore.
Arun spent about 5 months before starting Bangalorewalks, just exploring various interesting business ideas that came to him. One that he followed up seriously before giving it up was children's book publishing in India. He felt strongly that there were no good books with Indian context and background for children and so wanted to go into that. After checking it out, he finally backed out as he felt the business model that it needed was not what he wanted to do.
We finally talked about the usefulness of doing an MBA (he went to IIM immediately after doing his B.Tech.). He felt that it *was* useful in a couple of ways (don't remember what they were ;-) ).
Arun hosts his website on nettygritty. They are very cheap he says (as low as 2000/- a year for a low end package), and based out of Bangalore. BTW, despoki.net has expired (and the people at Yahoo! didn't inform me ! What's wrong with them!!). I am considering switching my loyalty to Nettygritty.
We talked a little bit about nonprofits. His wife was associated with Akshara and Pratham. Another high profile local group is Janaagraha

That's it from Arun Pai, an all round good guy.