Creating a firebreak: You intentionally burn a strip of land clean, so that in case there is a real fire, it cannot jump the strip of land and you are safe on the other side.
Shramdaan: Once a month the group works together to do some improvement works. Here they are laying mud on the road to smoothen out bumps.

1.) Kid of one of the workers
2.) Guesthouse where we stayed. Really cool place.

View from the terrace of the school
Strange rock formation that lines most of the hills in the area. Nobody was able to explain to us how these formed. The local story is that you can follow the trail of these rocks and they lead to Tirupati !

Timbaktu

I had another exciting weekend. This is getting to be a habit. May it continue !!

I went to Timbaktu Collective last weekend with Santosh, a friend at work. There's more info about Timbaktu at www.timbaktu.org. At high level its a non-profit group, not necessarily that different from others, but among the very good ones. Here are some things about it:

They work in areas like land restoration, womens empowerment, children etc. There was a very interesting presentation about how they worked with the government on regulating the water release from a local dam in a way as to maximise benefit based on the farmers agreeing as a community where the water should go. I don't know if you find that interesting, but I do. One of the key issues going forward in water, will be to get agreement from stakeholders on how to use the limited amounts of water available.

I saw a forest fire upclose while I was there !! There was one in the hills a couple of kilometers away from Timbaktu. It was a pretty awesome spectacle.

The architecture and construction were great and I'd love to be there, from that point of view.

This visit for me culminates several strands that have started over the past few years. I first heard of TC way back when I was in the US on some mailing list and was very intrigued by the name. Later I bought this *great* book called Bapu Kuti about alternative development models and there was stuff there about Timbuktu. Still later when I was doing the RIN project http://www.geocities.com/ahminotep/Writings/RIN_project.html

I talked to Shambhu Prasad who is associated with TC, and encouraged me to visit there. And finally the founders of TC were featured on the cover of a weekly newsmagazine here in India (The Week). So finally I did go there so and its great to complete that loop. Yesterday after returning, I went back to read the Bapu Kuti article again and it was fascinating to correlate what was written about the people to what I had just seen in person.

TC operates as a 'virtual' panchayat of all its full-time members. They meet once a month and give reports and come out with to-do items and make decisions. Its pretty interesting structure and has some of the useful elements of corporate working in it. Its mostly funded by donations at the current time though, which is not so sustainable.

The setting is gorgeous (in its way). Its in the barren hills of Anantapur and is surrounded on 3 sides by hills. I liked the scenery very much. And I'm more and more struck by feeling the truth about the cliches of going back to nature etc. The break from city life is refreshing and stronger than refreshing, I feel it causes some change in you.

Before I left I had contracted a cold, and I wasn't able to take appropriate care there due to the circumstances. I had severe earache one night and since then I have had a persistent ringing in the ear. I am quite concerned about this, I think it may be permanent. I've heard about this in the past, the medical term is tinnutis (probably got the spelling wrong).

The founders of TC, Bablu and Mary are pretty striking people. Their background is really interesting and you would find it interesting but I won't blog about it much. He is Bengali, she is Keralite, they both learnt the local language and settled in AP. Bablu in particular is a great bear of a man and radiates energy. There were several other remarkable people there.

In talking with Mary, I found out that one of their problems currently is keeping up with the documentation and reporting required by their donors. I suggested that I might help them out for some time with that, and they responded very favourably. More about that soon ! I did spent some time their continuing to think about what I should do after quitting the job and I am converging towards spending some time doing odd jobs and volunteer work. I would enjoy this immensely as I would get to work with many diferent people and do many different interesting things. And I would be looking around for what to do on a permanent basis. There are already several things that I am seeing, including TC, which I could usefully do.

Okay, I had an exciting event today.
For a while now I have been going to this used bookstore in the MG Road area (Bookworm) of Bangalore. I have good vibes about the owner he's a really straightforward and honest guy with good values. At the same time he seems to run a profitable and expanding business. I've had an itch to get involved more as I usually get when I see something cool (like bangalorewalks!). Today (actually yesterday), I went to this guy to sell off some old books that I have at home, I'm trying to prune my collection. I started talking with him and asked him how his business was doing and any issues and so on. He said that things were going well but he needs to publicise his business more and he is having trouble procuring good used books (history , philosophy , travel, stuff like that). I also told him that I was going to be kinda footloose in a little while. He then brought up that there are all these used bookstores in the US that sell good books really cheap and he feels that if these are bought and shipped to India by air or sea freight, he could still sell them at a profit. But he doesn't have any contacts or way to do this.
Obviously this set me thinking and I got all excited. Coz -- this is sooo cool. Atleast in theory. In a completely natural organic way I ran into a business opportunity (however small) that I'm naturally very interested in (books -- passionate about), and have some network that I could leverage to make it happen. Anyway -- there is a huge amount I could already write about this that is floating in my mind but I'll not do that, right now anyway. I am certainly going to experiment with a sample shipment and see what happens. I talked to Arvind in the US about it. Anyone reading this, I am *really* enthusiastic at this point about following this up and seeing where it goes. Any help would be verrrry welcome.

I added AdSense to the blog, but it doesn't show much at the moment, probably because there is not yet much content on the blog ..

I've been having various low level issues (corpspeak!) with my nose for a while now and talked to a doc about it today. He took one look at my nose and says that I have a (massively) deviated nasal septum and that it will continue to cause me trouble. Only solution is to get it operated. I'm greatly amused -- this is the most interesting thing someone has said about my body for a while now (the previous one was way back in 2001 and was a compliment about my sexy legs -- I kid you not). A deviated nasal septum -- who woulda thunk it.

Okay, I'm punting for now on all the big questions I brought up in the previous post. I'm just going to post for a while and see how it goes. I *would* prefer that the blog is at despoki.net, but currently I'm too tempted by the simplicity of custom blog sites like this one.

Okay here's some of the threads of my thinking. There are many ideas crowding my mind, and not much clarity about what's the right thing to do.
-- Srikanth (http://www.egovernments.org/) thinks I would work for a role in his group. The job is based in Delhi.
--Paul (http://www.rinovations.org/) invited me to go to Chennai for a couple of days and check them out.
--I want to visit Timbuktu (http://www.timbuktu.org/), but I don't think I will get any specific ideas about what to do from that trip.
--I have been in contact with an old IIT acquaintance who went off the beaten path a while back and will visit soon. It should be very interesting seeing someone from my background doing stuff like organic farming. I may post our mail thread .. (privacy invasion question).
--I was reading a magazine article on rationing, PDS (public distribution system) etc. and it struck me like a ton of bricks, which it does from time to time: shouldn't the basic immediate focus simply be to *provide enough food for everyone who needs it by any means possible*. It is such a huge failing of society that this doesn't happen.
-- Pratham (http://www.pratham.org/) and their Bangalore chapter Akshara (http://www.akshara.org/) do very good work. Pratham is notable as they have managed to scale significantly. They also seem to have another strength of innovation, they say that they have evolved a methodology to get children reading in about 6 weeks. And do that at a cost of Rs 100/- per child (this is important because the learning levels in government and possibly even private schools is pretty bad). Its pretty exciting
--Priya is interested in getting into the animation industry and in doing some background reading, its seems to be an area that is poised to take off. There is some temptation for me to ride that wave myself :-). There are other things that I can do in software that would be quite interesting. I'm of course looking to do something alternative, but once you decide to do that, the advantages of staying mainstream start showing up very clearly :-)

--Biodiesel. Less said the better. But one comment is the divergence between doing something nice like biodiesel that could also pay off significantly monetarily, versus doing something in NGO space where money won't be there. Its a difficult choice. Not that there are opportunities and people queing up for me in either area, but nonetheless. I am in 'first principles' mode right now and want to pretend that anything is possible.

I'm stabilizing a bit at work, earlier in the year, I was spending upto 90% of the workday brooding about these things :-).

I've agreed in principle to have a baby :-) Less said the better.