Sensible things to do on (next) Independance day

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"

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

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'

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

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

Photos from Vibhat's first birthday

Rework The World

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:

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

New videos

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