Netflix Reviews

Patriot Act:  Excellent stuff. Hassan Minhaj is great. Manages to mix outrage with comedy and intelligent commentary. Have watched some episodes more than once, the ultimate test  5 *
Thackeray: Excellent. I always dig these inside stories of great people or famous people to see how they tick. This one makes the cut. Portrays him well with his extremes, sympathetic but not fawning 5 *
Happy: Quite bizarre but watchable/memorable. Acquired taste. Piles on the violence but in way that you can't take it seriously. 4 *
The Good Place: Uneven. First season was great, and after that struggled to keep the premise going. 4 *
Always Be My Maybe: Watchable 3 *

Comedians of the World: One or two watchable ones, but overall pretty painful stuff. Try Shirley Suagnon or Aditi Mittal. The Indian guys are pretty bad. Even the US guys are pretty bad. I guess with all the glut of good comedy on the web now, the standards are too high.  I must say nobody really gets comedy (atleast standup) the way the best guys in the US do.  2 *

Shaft: Watched the one with the son Shaft Jr. in it.  Pretty mediocre stuff. Usual violence   2 *
Luke Cage: Stopped watching after a few episodes which is the ultimate disqualifier . Not enough meat in the story to keep you watching;  2 *
What / If : Inexecrable. Couldn't make it past the first episode. 1 *
How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast): Couldn't make it past the first episode 1 *
Traitors: Ditto. Seemed promising but didn't pan out. Oh well 1 *
Cuckoo: Nice premise, and couple of high points but I stopped after the 2nd episode 1 *
Osmosis: 1 *

What's this stone ?

In the Tadipatri area of Anantapur district, this stone material (see photos) is omnipresent. It seems to be a kind of granite. Is it slate, or is it the 'Cuddapah stone' that is quite famous? Do leave a comment if you know. Anyway. This area is filled with quarries and stone cutting businesses. Houses and walls made of neatly packed tiles of this material are quite distinctive. The local Bellum caves, a tourist attraction, makes excellent use of this material to create a striking and elegant entrance to the caves.

The debris from the stone cutting is also omnipresent. I wonder if these could be used to create small distinctive items of use at home or perhaps tourist souvenirs. A very good project for designers/design students to work on.

View photos:

https://photos.app.goo.gl/dPygXfMboky1Gt866

Bellum Caves

Bellum Caves in Kurnool district (at the border with Anantapur district), AP, is a very nice discovery. Its one of those places that are pretty interesting and well worth a visit, but are so far out of the way from big cities or major tourist spots, that they don't get the attention. (Another such one that comes to mind is the Lonar Crater Lake in Maharashtra). Bellum is supposedly one of the largest cave formations in Asia. It is quite a maze and easy to get lost in. Its also pretty hot and sweaty inside so prepare for that. There are some fans placed strategically inside the caves to give some relief. Look for the underground pond, called Pataala Ganga.
Other stuff:  There's an unremarkable and wholly unnecessary Buddha statue on the same campus. The APTDC seems to run hotel rooms there, but not sure of the quality and if they are functioning.The other remarkable thing I saw in the area is the preponderance of a local building stone. You see it all around, and there are tonnes of leftover debris from stone cutting. I'm sure there is something of interest in this if you dig a bit.
Getting there : from Bangalore , travel to Anantapur by road and then to Tadipatri, and Bellum is about 45 minutes outside of Tadipatri. You can take a bus to Anantapur and from there, there are very frequent buses to Tadipatri which is about an hour and forty five minutes away. And yet another bus to Bellum caves. So quite a long trek. You can find route information on the APSRTC booking website and phone app. The best idea would be to combine it with other stuff and do a weekend outing to Anantapur. I plan to propose how this could be done in a later post.

See a Google Photo Album of photos from Bellum Caves here:

https://photos.app.goo.gl/c3HNQK495fRkN6xZ8

See a blog post about the stone mentioned above:
https://despoki.blogspot.com/2018/11/whats-this-stone.html

More from the Chitra Santhe

Bought this exuberant dash of colour at the Chitra Santhe.

The moment I saw it, I was captivated. While there was tremendous amount of art that I like at the Santhe, this one immediately grabbed me. Quite mysterious why some things stand out like that. Ironically, even the painter didn't particularly show interest and didn't seem to think that this was a standout piece, compared to his other work! To me, there was no comparison

At one level, the use of the colour is unrealistic and artificial, that kind of colour mashup is not how any real warrior would be dressed. But somehow it just WORKS as a painting! And how!


Cost 2000/-

 Bengaluru Chitra Santhe was amazing. Got reconnected to what Bengaluru can be beyond civic
dysfunctionality.
By my estimate there were upwards of 500 artists showing their work; 1000 if you go by the numbering.
So that might be like 20,000 original paintings on display.
Amazed by the consistently high quality on display (of course this is subjective, but I've spent
a fair amount of time looking at art). Many of the works were great value, costs from 900/- upwards.
Something seems to be out of whack here. With so many artists pouring their creativity into their
canvases at such prices, why isn't there a huge boom in original art sales? People spend quite large
amounts on furniture and interior decoration, and I've seen some execrable stock pieces of decoration
and painting in houses and hotels. Why not instead spend some time picking out a piece of original art that really speaks to you?

If I stocked a few good pieces, would you come and buy from me?

Apologies to the artists for not attributing them in the photos. I did ask them permission to photograph

Idle reflection - Mark Zuckerberg and Travis Kalanick

I was thinking how Travis Kalanick founded what is now (circa 2017) the most valuable startup in the world, but couldn't see fast enough that his personal sexist behavior would end up getting him chucked out of his life's work. Mark Zuckerberg on the other hand strikes me as a guy who has a superhuman capacity to see and ward off an oncoming crisis. (My understanding of him is based primarily on what I read in the news, and that wonderful movie "The Social Network". So my logic is dependent on the accuracy of the movie in capturing Mark's personality, even if not getting all the facts correct). In the movie Zuckerberg is so conscious of crises. When Eduardo Saverin cuts off the payment to the servers hosting Facebook, Zuckerberg goes ballistic (and perhaps that's when he decided to dump Saverin). And at the end when Sean Parker causes another crisis. The movie doesn't show how Zuckerberg resolves the crisis, but clearly he does, since FB is around and thriving. My sense is that its not just external crises. Internally too Zuckerberg is adept at reinventing himself. He started off with the bad-boy antics at Harvard and his early days in the Valley where he humiliates a VC egged on by Sean Parker. Today's he's a model corporate executive atleast to public knowledge. And its not just a facade.

Analysing "Orange is the new Black"

I just finished watching 3 seasons of OTNB and its pretty amazing. It feels like there's enough meat in the show to make it worthy of a Masters' thesis, if not a Ph.D.

The characterisation is pretty amazing. There are no black/whites, its all gray, and superbly done. Nobody, but nobody on the show is without genuinely dark parts in their personality. And those who start off as assholes acquire acquire majorly redeeming qualities as the show progresses.


The show has real empathy for the women in the prison, and teaches subtly and beautifully, the disaster that a modern prison is, as a humane way of dealing with those who chase the law. At the same time, it doesn't offer any simplistic solutions for how to improve the system. I found the show really eye-opening and hopefully altered my worldview permanently. 

In its flashbacks to the lives of the inmates before they ended up in prison, it paints a picture of the the huge struggle that life is for those coming from underpriviledged backgrounds, or dysfunctional families.

It also beautifully plays off the black, white and Latino sub-cultures beautifully. In particular, it does a great job of viewing the world from a black person's perspective, and there is some hilarious skewering of  (for want of a better description) 'white culture'.  "Really quiet sex" :-))). In this aspect the lead character Piper Chapman is really a 'Trojan Horse' to start an exploration of women from a whole host of different backgrounds. The show genuinely does not use the other characters as a background for the lead in a really praiseworthy way. Piper Chapman is peripheral to the social life of the prison and hardly the soul of the party - she is a loner and doesn't participate actively in any of the social groups. Quite a remarkable feat that the show's creators and directors manage to pull off.

As a guy its pretty interesting to see (a version of) how women talk about guys and sex among themselves. It feels pretty authentic.

One of the characters is an anti-abortion activist and it gives the show an opportunity to explore this issue. Its one of the few topics on which the show is one-sided; there is no sympathetic portrayal of a pro-abortion stance.


At one point Piper (the putative lead character) starts  a business of selling used women criminals' panties on the Internet.  I love the deadpan way this thing is handled with no judging of the guys who want to buy these things, or the women who set out to satisfy their kink. The rationale is simple and direct; to paraphrase what's said on the show - some creepy guys want this stuff, and we need the money so lets go for it.

There's some really hilarious skewering of the corporate culture when a private company takes over the prison from the government.














I'm planning to stop watching the show now however. I'm judging that its falling into the usual trap of milking success and extending beyond what's natural. And its time to get back to real life too.

English Vinglish

Notes from teaching English:


I taught English to a small class in February of 2017 at Timbaktu Collective (www.timbaktu.org) in Anantapur district of Andhra Pradesh.  This was part of the new career I'm carving out in skilling and training. 

The trainees was employees of Timbaktu. They were either senior staff, for whom improved knowledge of English had become important over time, in addition to their domain understanding, and office staff who had more need of English usage.  They varied in level but in general had trouble speaking English. They had a certain level of understanding of the language. They knew the alphabet, They had quite good domain-specific English vocabulary in NGO work and their domain. 

My interest was particularly in seeing if I could do 'breakthrough' teaching of some sort (inspired by my participation in Landmark courses) ie. enable people to go beyond some barrier that they might have had. I wasn't so interested in incremental teaching of the language like improving their grammer. In any case, once I started, I found that as far as incremental teaching of the language went, I mysef was quite at sea. I went to grammer textbooks and found the whole thing horribly confusing. It was rather discouraging and I started feeling like learning English is actually very difficult. Which is somewhat of a disempowering position from which to teach! So I didn't go down that path much. 

The class was structured as 4 one-hour sessions that happened during consecutive weeks. So actually the class time was very limited. There were challenges in logistics, particularly in having people keep coming back to the class week on week, as their schedules were unpredictable and this class was not so directly relevant to them. I started with 10 trainees, and was down to 
5 by the end.

I did some things that have promise as English training tools and so sharing about them. 

My fundamental premise was that people can speak/communicate in English at whatever level of mastery of grammer and vocabulary they currently are. What's holding them back is more a confidence/lack of practice/shyness/worry about making mistakes. So I was primarily interested in addressing this. And my experience with these students bore this out - they were able to communicate a lot and get their thoughts out. Good grammer and vocabulary is secondary for this purpose of communication. 
So my approach was - how far can you go in speaking English , with exactly your current level of skill in the language, by just working on mental barriers instead.

1.) Getting people to speak as much as possible is crucial.I believe this is very important and finding effective ways to do this can be a challenge.

 Having people speak only in English in the class, is a well-known technique and I used it.
I got people to do an introduction of themselves in English at the beginning of the first class.
As assignment, I asked people to prepare and do a better introduction of themselves at the second class. I believe the improvement they saw for themselves between the first and second classes was a positive reinforcement. 
Another important practice was dividing them into pairs and having the pair have a conversation. This is something that could be done in every class if enough good topics are there that people are interested in conversing in. Some of the topics we used were:
- someone calls the organisation asking for more information about the organisation or wanting to visit
- a job interview
- talking to your vegetable vendor
- having an argument with your spouse :-)

2.) One new idea I came up with was as follows. It was to schedule a half hour slot individually with each of the class participants and speak English 1-1 with each of them continuously for that half hour. None of them have had to have a conversation in English for that duration in the past. So my hypothesis was that doing the conversation would build their confidence in their ability to speak English. Having such a conversation can be difficult for the trainer - you have to find something that the trainee is interested in talking about or the conversation peters away. Ideally also, you need to have the trainee very present and focussed in the conversation - they need to be just talking, talking, talking, not thinking or having their attention wander. Done well, at the end the trainee is amazed by his/her ability to speak the language.

3.) A third idea I had was to have them prepare a poem or song or other performance piece and deliver it to the class. I did this over two rounds of practice, ie. they delivered it once and then prepared and delivered it again at a succeeding class.  The idea here is that with enough preparation they can deliver it pretty fluently and that gives you an emotional high and builds your confidence and leaves you with a positive feeling about the language, which is important for any later progress to happen. "When I can speak a particular English poem or song like a pro, then I should be able to talk English in general like a pro, right?"  I give them a choice of pieces, pop songs, poems, things that might strike a chord with them and also let them pick anything else that they might want to do. I videotaped the final performance so that they would have it to keep with them. Another way of doing it might be to do it in front of an audience of their peers, which would heighten the emotional impact. 

4.) I experimented with playing songs from the internet (YouTube) with subtitles. Example: "Everything at Once" by Lenka ,"Its a Wonderful Life". The idea was to communicate to them a certain joy and fun in the languge. I don't think it worked very well this time, but fundamentally I think its a good idea, and I need to find the context in which it would be more effective. 

5.) Ashok Ganguly, one of the people at Timbaktu is enthusiastic about English teaching and I had good discussions with him. At one of the classes he made a presentation of some more useful points and ideas around speaking English..roots of words, how languages evolved, how much of a vocabulary the trainees already had etc. I think this was a good interlude, and done well, can add value.

6.) I found one very interesting mobile application called "Hello English". I don't know how effective it is in practice, but was designed very well with lots of games and tools as part of the learning process. There were some videos on YouTube though nothing that was a game-changer.  

Weight loss ideas from Rujuta Diwekar

In my work on myself on losing weight, I've become convinced by, and adopted the diet ideas of Rujuta Diwekar, from her book "Don't lose your mind, lose your weight". (It was her first book and she's written more after that. You can also follow her on FB).  I believe the book expresses international-level thought leadership in this area, which is rife with fashions and fads.

I summarize key practices from the book:

Eat something as soon as possible after waking up.  It does not have to be a full meal, fruit or nuts will do.  Breakfast can follow. DONT start the day with tea or coffee, postpone them to after the breakfast meal.
Eat smaller, frequent meals, not large meals. Eat fat and sugary stuff between meals. DON'T have fat and sugar along with meals like dessert after dinner.
Tune your eating to activity level - eat more when you are active and less when you are not.
Finish your last meal atleast 2 hours prior to sleeping.

And some more:
Eat with attention. You will see when your stomach is full and you can stop eating then
Eating fresh fruit is much better than eating juices
Essentially everything processed is a pain in the ass (or a pain in the stomach). Biscuits, cakes, pizza, potato chips, puffs all of that stuff. Avoid as much as possible. If you're going to have it anyway, homecooked is better than commercial.
Eat protein before and after vigorous exercise - the body needs it to repair the micro-damage that occurs to muscles during expercise

There's a lot more to the book including the explanations for the above practices. Read the book.

My personal experiences:
Cutting down majorly on sugar (other than fruits) has been an eye-opening experience. After cutting down, I realized that sugar was causing lots of ups-and-downs in my mood. I would crave sugar (typically in the afternoon, in anticipation of the evening snack) and then get a sugar high with the snack. After giving up sugar, I found my day to be more peaceful and energetic.

I've compensated for giving up on all the delicious sugar treats by exploring dried fruit instead. I've developed a taste for dates, figs and apricots. They're pretty delicious and give a decent sugar high. I splurge on high quality dried fruit and enjoy them. The intention is to be become a connoisseur of these things, like the wine-lovers, haha! 

I do miss sugar, but not so badly that I give in frequently. I have very little sugar at home, so that gives some leeway during social occasions, where there may be social pressure or the temptation is high. Having those occasional treats keep the cravings manageable.During a recent streneous hike, I hogged on cream biscuits and chikki. And after that indulgence, the thought of sugar made
me queasy for a couple of days!

Overall, life has become a lot more SIMPLE.

Coming clean

I molested a woman once. 

I did it when I was in college (in Chennai). I was travelling on a bus, a crowded public transport bus. I used my knee to brush the bottom of the lady sitting on the seat in front of me (the seats then were designed differently then, as two parts that had a gap between them). More than once. She rushed out precipitately at the next stop.

I was overcome by shame by the next day. I’ve regretted it deeply ever since. It must have ruined her day, and left its mark on her permanently. I wish I could do something about it. 

I did it as a act of hormone-fuelled bravado, telling myself that I saw some chemistry with her. Far from it. 

I’ve been reading the postings from the women’s groups in response to the Bangalore New Year Eve molestation incidents. And then remembered suddenly that I was (once) ‘that guy’. By writing about the incident, I hope to contribute in a small way to a honest dialogue.

To my women friends - I ask forgiveness for the incident. If you want to talk me to about it (berate, condemn, whatever), please do. It would be useful for me too.