Priya's bday

March 29th is Priya's birthday. Wish her ! either by a comment to this blog entry or at her email address abpriya_at_rediffmail_dot_com.

Links

You're not a real blogger unless you link indefatigably to other stuff on the web, so let me take a swipe at it :
Paris by Night : A cool 360 degree picture of Paris by night

Very cool optical illusion . If you concentrate on the picture on the left for a while, the boat in the right picture will disappear.

http://www.thefatmanwalking.com: This person is walking across America to lose weight. You go, dude ! I'm all for it, wish I could do something like it myself.

http://wildevogel.blogspot.com/ : Quite impressive and interesting blog by this artistic guy, BITS alumni software engineer. Last weekend, I watched the play he talks about in his latest post. It was technically very good, but finally disappointing. No 'heart'. imho. (I'm a bit 'heart' guy in reviewing movies and such).

Quick flickr photo

Originally uploaded by ahminotep.

Flickr also allows you to post the photo onto the blog -- like so.

Flickr.com

I've started playing with Flickr. Its a site to store and organize/share/etc. photos. I started off by uploading a few photos and 'tagging' them (like organizing them into folders, except a photo can have more than one tag so its more flexible). You can also browse through other peoples' photographs which is nice but can get boring after a while. So far so good and reasonably interesting.

Then I discovered the "Score Me!" group on Flickr. Here you post a photograph of yours to the group, and at the same time, you rate the previous 5 photographs that were posted. This way you co-operatively get feedback and you can see how your work is evaluated by others and get their technical feedback etc. This is completely cool and at one stroke changes the whole attitude towards Flickr. From being a moderately useful site, it now becomes a fascinating and even addictive site. You're trying to post photos to the group and increase your rank, you're getting useful (and not so useful!) feedback from other people, you are ranking others photos in a serious way so you have to pay attention and see what's really good about a photo and what's not ...

I posted my 'leaf' photo, which I was so kicked about, and which elicited some favourable response from some of the people on this blog, and was much humbled. My average rating was around 5/10 and got some blunt feedback:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/29439415@N00/98654894/. Now I'm really keen about paying more attention to my photography and getting better at this stuff. (One thing I've been feeling the lack of, is any photoediting software. Would appreciate help).

This is (one way) that great communities evolve. And there are probably a lot more things about Flickr that I haven't yet explored. Check it out ! I don't have many good photographs uploaded yet myself. To explore the Flickr site, go to the home page and enter any keyword (like nature, tree, nyc) to see photos related to that. Or try:

http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/

You'll find other ways to explore too, on the site.

Meanwhile, over *there* ...

A quite interesting quiz about nothing in particular.

Three new poems by Arvind ( this, this, and this).

Part 2 of Arvind's story "Vladimir" (part 1 is here)

Cheers.

Changed the look

Some UI fiddling .. the earlier template was not coming out quite right. This one has the "previous posts" link right on top which seems convenient.

I want to change the name from 'despoki' to something more specific for what this blog is about. Suggestions ?

And on other fronts ..

Ahem, moving right along folks, from the Jerry Springer episode below.
A few things that have been happening worth mentioning about:

My aunt who lives in a village a few hours from Bangalore fell seriously ill and was brought to Bangalore. They are not well-to-do people. In such a situation, there is a difficult choice, admit her to a very expensive place like Manipal hoping that it will maximize her chances or take her to a less expensive place and feel guilty about it. Luckily that decision didn't fall on me to make (her children live in Bangalore), and things seem to have turned out okay, it looks like it was not a serious illness after all. I would dearly like however to understand better the cost-benefit of varying levels of hospitals. One hears a lot about money-minded doctors but I've not seen anybody try to analyse the situation seriously.

We bought a couple of pillow covers from Fab India . This place focuses on ethnic/handicrafts/sustainable/organic kind of thing. And the difference is, it does it very well. It was started way back in the 1950s and at this point its a very mature, professional organization with retail outlets in good locations in big cities. The things they sell (clothing, linen, carpets, some furniture) are really gorgeous and hi-quality. Expensive too. I'm really happy that a place like this exists and would like to spend a lot more money there.

I went to an exhibition of paintings by about 70 painters based in Bangalore called "Art and the City" at Venkatappa Art Galleries. It was organized by Ananya, a local arts group. I liked the work, it was pretty stimulating. I'm glad to see the vibrant art/drama world in Bangalore. They were raising money for one of their projects, and they found a local industrialist Ravi Cavale who agreed to buy all 140 odd paintings to support their work. Pretty cool. It would have been upwards of 20Lakh I believe. I've been meaning to buy atleast one original piece of art, and there was one at the exhibition I liked that I might've bought if it was available. I also met one of the artists there, Ravikumar Kashi. He was an unassuming pleasant chap and it was good chatting with him. One of the bees in my bonnet is to meet cool/famous people, and this is a nice one. I haven't met many artists so far.

A funny thing happened ...

Okay there is this friend of mine. From IIT. He was a close friend and we had many ups and downs. He's highly moody and can be rude, hurtful and cruel. When I was getting married the following happened: he called me from the US and I teased him saying that I was taking a dowry. Just as a joke. He was scandalized about it. I left it hanging so that he was not sure whether I was lying or not. And then he wrote this absolutely terrible letter to a bunch of my friends, most of whom he did not know. Basically telling them all that I was taking a dowry and that it was a terrible thing to do, and stuff like that. It was a completely inappropriate, bizarre thing to do. I had to pick up the pieces and tell all these people that it was a horrible mistake. It felt terrible having such a thing happen during such an important occasion. I had a terrible time about it for a couple of days.
Time flows on, and the sharp edge of of hurt feeling gets blunted. He was after all a good friend, and in his mind he was doing a good thing. I suppose. I made an abortive attempt at getting in touch with him at one point.
And why do I say all this now ?
Because two and a half years after the incident he contacts me by a comment on this blog (you can look for it). I'm very happy to be reconciled. And I guess its because of this blog in some strange way.

Taking stock

A gamut of emotions and directions have been happening as I disengage from work and look to what I will do going forward.

There are a few things that hit me now and then with a painful intensity -- stuff that I have wanted to do for a long time and have not done and now I want to fulfil that desire. Travel, playing games like squash/tennis are examples. There is a sense of freedom, from the forthcoming stepping off the conveyor belt and a chance to think and do other things. I find my mind wandering, intensively following up some idea until I can reach some kind of rationalization or understanding about it, and whether it has any relevance to me. For eg. at various points in the last few weeks I spent a few (or more) hours thinking fairly obsessively about things ranging from:
- hunger. Not in a conceptual way but just how it might be ended in India and what are the issues around there. There is a lot of stuff on the web that I brooded about for a while like writings by Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen, the public distribution system in India, the Right to Food coalition. You can google any of these.
- this blog. Its becoming somewhat painful at the moment as I keep thinking of whatever I do and whether its bloggable, and how to increase site traffic and make money from the ads. Currently it seems that practically I can make at most $10/- a month from the ads, which is a letdown :-). Oh well. If I can make enough to cover my broadband cost perhaps that's a nice target to aim for. On that note I spent some time looking up 'click fraud' which is worth a small blog entry at some point perhaps. Basically the whole internet ad system could be resting on fairly shaky foundations since its so easy to do a 'fake' click on an ad ie. somebody clicking with some specific agenda in mind (eg. to make money on their own site) rather than out of a genuine interest to see what's the ad about.
-- other moneymaking ideas. To my own surprise I find that my mind is veering more towards money-making schemes than to service ideas which was what the 'sabbatical' was about in the first place. I dunno what to do about it :-), except follow it through and see where it takes me. I won't judge myself as money-minded or a hypocrite quite yet :-)
-- work has been predictably pretty hard, but one soldiers on with the guilty knowledge that one is not going to be there to face any consequences anyway.

Enough navel gazing.

Cooking

A minor breakthrough -- after god knows how many years (atleast three), I did some cooking. Its been such a long while, I didn't feel up to recreating one of my old recipes so instead I asked Priya to give the orders and I just did the execution. Vankai pulusu and aritikai curry (an eggplant gravy dish and green-banana fry). Verdict: B+.

Shvoong.com

Currently I am getting mildly obsessive about the possibility of making some money doing things that I like to do, during this 'sabbatical' of mine. I found out about this website called Shvoong today. These guys are positioning themselves as a site for "Abstracts". Ie, they want to have short summaries of every book/essay that was ever written, or basically of all human knowledge. The model is that the summaries can be written by anyone, and they get paid royalties depending on how many people read the summary and how they like it. The website makes its money (and pays the royalties) from (you guessed it!) advertising. The same old game again.
I think the business model of this site is pretty shaky given the amount of free yet quite reliable material on the net (eg. wikipedia, which I've found pretty good on occasion and book reviews at amazon). Nevertheless I'm tempted to give this site a spin since I anyway read a lot and like writing reviews. Take a look at the site : www.shvoong.com

Comments ?

Gentle Reader ..

Some notes to readers of this blog:
-- I would of course *very much* like to know who is reading the blog and what they think of it. So please leave a comment if you can, even if you don't have much to say.
--I would love to discuss anything on the blog (since I am interested in the stuff, that's why I wrote it!) so if you want to discuss or know more, I'd be happy to.
--Since I'm going to leave my well-paying job soon, I am experimenting with using Google ads on this site to see if it can make a little money. So do take a second look at the ads on the top of the page and click on any that might be interesting. So far the ads are not so interesting, but I was quite amused recently to see a link for "Philosophy" !! I followed it up and found ads for some very interesting sites including about a remarkable guy called Ken Wilber. So you might actually learn something from the ads !

Timbaktu contd.

Okay, there are a lot of specifics on Timbaktu that I can write about, thought I would do so. Firstly, I uploaded the full set of photos onto despoki.net:

http://www.geocities.com/ahminotep/Writings/timbaktu.html

Kolattam: The TC workers all get together monthly to talk about their work and their plans for the next month. At this time they do a traditional dance called Kolattam. All collective members must learn and take part. It was amazing watching them do the dance which is a very fluid and sensuous one. I guess its not that different from Dandiya. It has clear parallels in the corporate world in bonding and teambuilding exercises, though those are not nearly as graceful ! The collective members are all ages and all personality types and to see them all blend together and become part of the dance was striking. Especially for the more retiring or introverted types, the dance would be a real opportunity to come out and be part of the group. There is a quicktime movie of the dance I took:

http://www.geocities.com/ahminotep/Writings/timbaktu/DSCN0452.MOV

The structure of the collective: They are all employees and get paid. They are geographically spread out and work with people in 3 mandals, but the energy comes from the central location where they meet monthly and where some of the folks like, and a school, guesthouse and other infrastructure is there. TC was founded by a couple Bablu and Mary Ganguly and the structure would seem to have some tension between democratic particapation and the will of the founders who obviously are held in high regard. The members of TC are organized into fairly formal groups of people who are focussed on specific activities, like schools, self-help groups, irrigation .

Monthly meetings: They call these the panchayathi meetings, I suppose one can see them as a virtual village and so these are the virtual panchayat meetings. They give their reports their quite professional and there is animated discussion. These meetings are spread over 1.5 days, Friday evening through most of Sunday. The meetings are quite creatively structured, besides the Kolattam mentioned above, they show a movie on Friday nights using a LCD projector and DVD/VCD kind of things. They use modern audio-visual equipment effectively, and they have a bunch of laptops. During the weekend I was there, they were showing a movie presumably off the web about an organic produce market in Peru, kind-of to sensitise the collective members of the importance of organic farming as well as to show that they are other people doing this stuff around the world. There are many women members so I wonder how these women feel about TC and how they make it fit into their other lives with husband and chidren. The budget of TC is about a crore and most of it is donations from individuals and aid agencies. The decision-making can be somewhat informal -- someone will say after some amount of discussion on a topic "Ok, so shall we go ahead and do this ?" and if there are no 'nays' the decision is deemed to have been taken. I would think that this would lead to domination by the more outspoken aggresive types, or the founders and early members.

Timbaktu organic: This is an interesting offshoot from Timbaktu, a bunch of people are working on getting farmers to go organic and on the marketing of the organic produce. They are quite gung-ho and have made some progress, at this point they have been able to sell as much as they are making and the constraints are on the supply side. We talked a little about millets. There is an interesting story here which I have read a little bit about in the past. Millets is a collective term for a variety of grains that grow in dry climates and are more nutritious and balanced than rice or wheat. Due to the focus on rice and wheat during the green revolution, the millets got neglected and comparitively little cultivation happens. Eating more millets is a great win-win situation for everybody as these are not resource intensive crops (little water needed) and could help poor farmers a lot. There are several varieties with english names and names in the local languages: ragi, korra, foxtail millet are some I found out. You can replace rice with millets in normal Indian meals, and you can make idli , upma etc with millets. Co-incidentally, my wife bought ragi vermicelli recently in Bangalore and it was quite okay.
Eat more millets !!!!!

The people at TC: There seem to be two types of people. One is highly educated urban IIT or engineer types who have 'dropped out' of the mainstream and ended up at Timbuktu. The founders fall into this category. The school is run by one person who is a PhD in energy systems from IIT B. The organic farming is done by an engineer from Mysore and a MBA type. They are all extremely pleasant people and in some cases, highly thoughtful and moral folks who have though through their values and settled on their current way of life. The other type of people are very local types who often don't know english and have done a degree in a local college and ended up here while looking for employment. They came across as fairly confident and capable and pleasant, and I think they enjoy the work a lot and have gained a lot in personal growth from it.
I talked some with the founders and they were more or less what I would have thought of them. One interesting thing is that, for various reasons, they ended up sending their children to Rishi Valley for education instead of educating them locally. They said that Rishi Valley was pretty good but the usual children who went their were pretty rich and that caused their son some trouble in adjusting.

There is a constant stream of visitors of various sorts to the place. While we were there, there were a couple of people from Oxfam Australia, which funds the group. There was a european woman who was teaching the children arts and crafts. There were a couple of young scientist types who were putting together some maths syllabus/ computer education kind of stuff. There was also a prof from IIT Bombay with some of his students who were trying to set up a VoiP over wireless setup to connect the full campus. Whew !

They showed a video about their work in water issues and tank management , restoration of traditional water harvesting structures blah blah. I found it very interesting and important work.