Composting, Timbaktu and Europe

I picked up our composting pots on Sunday. I am now seeing all the possible problems with composting at home and not that sure about whether this was such a great idea:
1.) Since we live in an apartment, the pots are sitting on our balcony. If it starts smelling or having flies its going to be a mess. Even others someone finicky is going to have an issue sitting beside decaying garbage.
2.) I'm sure there is going to be some trial and error to get this right, and in the meantime we're going to have all kinds of wierd stuff happening in the pot. And I'm not going to be at home a lot of the time too.
3.) There are smaller things like the extra work involved with maintaining this thing rather than chucking the garbage out without a second thought.

I'm still excited though.

I'm going off to Timbaktu tomorrow and expect to be there for about a week. Obviously this is a pretty big deal. I haven't stayed in a rural environment for such a long stretch since being a child (The night sky in Timbaktu, as any rural place, is gorgeous). And after talking for a long time, I will actually be doing some hands-on work.
They have limited internet connectivity, so I likely won't be able to update the blog much, if at all, until I'm back in B'lore.

I'm definitely excited.

We're going to Europe !!
The Europe trip that I made a passing reference to, in one of my previous posts, is on ! We got our UK visas, we should get the Schengen and Swiss visas soon (fingers crossed!), and I made the final payment today. Its obviously a huge thing for me (and Priya). I haven't taken a long vacation since marriage (and that doesn't count as vacation!). We went for 5 days to Kerala and that was the most. So its going to be great to be out travelling for 2 weeks, and too through Europe. Its a group tour and will hit a bunch of high spots (London, Amsterdam, Paris, Switzerland, Italy).

We're *very* excited.


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PS: For those (like Anchal!) more interested in my culinary doings, I cooked again today. This is the first time, after then previous episode which I blogged about, and this time was 'unsupervised'. The uninteresting looking goo in the photo was the result. This was a mixed vegetable dish that I used to cook as a graduate student and came out much better then. It didn't help that this time around I forgot (!) to add the key vegetable -- 'simla mirch' (capsicum)

And jackfruit ...

Summer fruit are great

Ideaexplore

Here's a strange but potentially useful site: Ideaexplore. Its a collection of ideas (ie. new ways of doing things, ways to solve common problems, new business ideas). Anyone can submit an idea, and anyone can use the idea freely without obligation.

Here are 4 ideas from the site that I like:
==
A disturbing noise (sound) can be eliminated if it is taken through a microphone, shifted 180 degrees out of phase electronically, amplified and played with an audio speaker. May also be sold as a toy "Cone of Silence" to absorb anything you say.

Road Rollers are too heavy for moving from one site to another. A lightweight but strong & high-power roller can use a tank of water or sand to increase its weight & capacity at site. The same road roller can be used for various weight categories.

My college's Disability Resource Center scans in and auto-converts books to Braille, but math/economics/chemistry books must be entered by hand because the scanning software can't "read" the formulas. Software capable of this would be immensely helpful.

In flood-prone areas, build high-rise flats/condominiums instead of single-family homes so that the homes will stay dry in floods. Build parks on the remaining land.
==

/Sajini/ Milan, Pisa and more ..

,Hi!! Just a quick update. We left Houston on Friday, the 21st by Lufthansa via Frankfurt and arrived in Milan the same day. A few quick comments and impressions:

1. In Italian Milan is Milano, Florence is Firenze, Turin is Torino, Venice is Venezio and so on .....
2. Milan was great, shopper's paradise, big name brands - Dolce and Gabbana, Armani, Christine Dior, Prada, Chanel etc, etc. Lots of little outdoor cafes all over the place, with great coffee. Statue of Leonardo Da Vinci.
3. Very good public transportation system, took the subway everywhere. Very few people speak English here but they do know how to say - No speak English :-)
4. From Milan, we went to Pisa (leaning tower of Pisa) but did not get to see the tower as a bus was waiting to take us to Il Ciocco, the site of the conference. We plan on seeing the tower on the way back home
5. The conference center at Il Ciocco is located at a high altitude and it was a breathtakingly beautiful 1hr and 30 min drive. Very green. Hard to describe in words. Will post pictures when I return home as there are only a couple of internet access stations in the hotel. Food that is served here is out of this world. Who knew pasta would taste so good :-)

More when I get a chance later :-) Adios

--Sajini

Last day at work (contd.)

It was a really memorable week at work. I went out to lunch with various people on 4 of the days (and discovered a bunchof new restaurants in the process). The highlight was the final day which was a lot of good stuff. The new manager who is taking over from me took me out to lunch and then took me to a new-age store nearby (Ostara, in Cambridge Layout) and bought me a small elegant chinese-style bamboo plant for luck. I was really touched. He was pretty appreciative of my staying back to bring him up to speed and said he learnt a lot while I was there. We went back and then at 3:30 we had a meeting with all the guys in the team (past and present). They each talked about their experience with me and what they appreciated in what I had done. It was really something to hear so many people express their appreciation for what I had done in so many ways. That was absolutely the high point. I always feel guilty for all the things that I didn't do so well, so it was great to hear people highlight the stuff I did do. I think the basic theme was that I was a caring person and was concerned about them beyond just getting the work done.They then gave me a bunch of gifts. There were 4 books (good ones!), a wall hanging and a lamp. We had a ice cream get-together with a broader group of people and Alok said a bunch of nice things and thanks. I tried to meet one-on-one with most of the people in our team to say the last goodbyes and pass on any last feedback about their work or where they were going in the next year.
I'm really glad to have stayed these last 3 weeks and finished up with the work in a reasonably complete way. I feel that I am leaving in a really good with with a good transition and lot of goodwill, and this will be a source of strength going forward. This job has really created a whole bunch of relationships and perhaps I can get to work with some of the folks again in the future.

2000!

According to the AdSense data, I crossed 2000 hits today, for this blog. That's quite a lot! Even accounting for the number of times I (and Sajini) :-) visit the blog.
Here's to lots more hits. Like this

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.

---

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.

Introducing ..

Sajini (veterinarian based in Houston) is my sister. Seshu, her husband, (recent assistant professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio), and her are going to Italy for an academic conference and I thought I invited her to 'guest blog' here for the duration of her trip. Here goes ..

Narmada and Bhopal

Countdown: 7 days !!


Something interesting (and perhaps remarkable) has been going on in Indian political activism recently. First, background. There have been two peoples' protest movements (among others) going on for a while -- one the Narmada Bachao Andolan and the other by the victims of the Bhopal gas tragedy. The Narmada movment is about the construction of 2 large dams on the river Narmada. The huge amount of people displaced to make space for the dam, and the doubtful benefits of the dam itself is the chief story there. It has become a highly polarised issue with strong advocates both for (mainly government and 'establishment') and against (displaced tribals and citizens who have taken up their cause). More info from the point of view of the NBA is at www.narmada.org.

The Bhopal issue is much less complex and much more sad. Its around the terrible response of the goverment in rehabilitating the victims of the Bhopal gas tragedy. The story is heart-rending and while I don't remember all of it, one piece of news gives some idea: in July 2004 the Supreme Court forced the government to distribute a significant amount of the money that it got from Union Carbide to the affected peoples. Your life is ruined by poisonous gas and you have to sue your own goverment to get the compensation money 20 years later !
You can read more at www.studentsforbhopal.org

Fast forward to the current date. In an imaginative joining of forces people from both the Narmada protest and the Bhopal movement have marched to New Delhi to press their demands with the government. In the case of the Bhopalis several people including some of the survivors of the tragedy marched *500 miles* in 5 weeks from Bhopal to New Delhi. Various stuff happened including police attacks. The Narmada end gave up hope of getting a response from the government at one point and went
into a hunger strike. A few people, including the well known Medha Patkar have been striking for several days now. Medha was arrested by the goverment for the crime of attempting suicide and is now at AIIMS where she and one more person are still subsisting on lemon water. The Bhopalis asked for an audience from Manmohan Singh and were basically refused. I have a high opinion of the PM but in this case -- the survivors of a terrible natural disaster march 500 miles and you don't have to courtesy to meet them ?! They also are now on a hunger strike.

In both cases the pressure is mounting on the government to do something and there are signs that it can happen. The extraordinariness of thie situation is the drama of two well known protest movements joining hands like this. They have set up camp across from each other in New Delhi and are feeding off each others' courage and resources. Its a great moment.

Part of the pressure on the government comes from ordinary people emailing/faxing/phoning government officials (including NRIs calling the Indian consulates abroad). If you want to do this the above websites give you a way of doing this without much trouble. Emailing and online faxing is effortless from the sites, but calling is the most effective.

Fax: http://www.studentsforbhopal.org/FaxAction/fax_action.php
http://petitions.aidindia.org/narmada/

Email: http://www.studentsforbhopal.org/FaxAction/email_action.php

Phone numbers: http://www.studentsforbhopal.org/MarchToDelhi.htm

Mmm ... blackberries

Blackberries
Originally uploaded by ahminotep.

The first I've had for a long time. Lusciously delicious.

The man in the mirror

Countdown: 11 days

I've been having a fairly difficult time in the last week or so. I've been thinking about (as usual) what I should do and what interests me. In the course of this, I find that if I look back at my life, nothing really stands out. Overall, there is no strong sense of accomplishment or fulfillment. Pretty rough. Also, I find that I haven't got a 'core competence'. Ie. something that I specialize in and know inside out and can bring to the table to any venture that I join or start. There are some small things like good written communication in English (which is what I am going to be using at Timbaktu), but that seems hardly enough ya ? I've not gone in depth enough in whatever I've done and learnt. Bluntly -- pretty sad.

Well, this is kindof why I'm doing this sabbatical thing, so -- bring it on. Open that can of worms.

There are a few things that I now feel are important and that I should use to help me navigate going forward. One is the things above -- I should do things that I feel really good about and I should structure it to get a sense of accomplishment. Then, I should find a way to dive deep instead of scratching the surface. I don't know how to do this, in the past I've just run into a wall when I try to push deep enough and I don't know what I did wrong or how to have a breakthrough. Related to the above is some thinking around 'problem solving'. I'm bad at problem solving, and occasionally I get very frustrated because I feel I'm sinking in a sea of unresolved issues. The only way to break the impasse it seems is to give problems a lot of importance as soon as they arise and prioritise and focus on them and solve them. Whereas usually they get lost in other seemingly urgent tasks or distractors and they keep hanging around the background. At another level, problem solving is a highly satisfactory and fulfilling process. So more reason to take it on. At yet another level -- whatever I want to do in life either in social work type things or other things -- it seems the only way to do it is to find some particular problem and just work at solving it. Otherwise things become too diffuse and you can't measure progress or see results etc. So find some problem, and get to the essential heart of it and solve it there and move on. It sounds so fine in theory.

I'll stop here on this thread. May not blog too much for the next couple of weeks, while things wind up at work, and while I work my way out the funk triggered off by the reflections above.

Endnote - I've been occasionally thinking of starting another blog around books and movies. Never mind the question of readership (will all two of you'll reading this blog be interested in that other one ?). I read a lot and see a fair amount of movies and in both cases, I feel I'm an expert in judging the quality and occasionally get a lot of satisfaction from discussing or expounding. However plain reviewing books/movies sounds dull and I would get sick of it myself. So I'm not sure how to structure it. One thing I would like to do is answer questions from people (how is this book, what's an interesting book I can read on xxx topic ?). Dunno how many people would have questions and be interested in my answers. The other direction would be a highly interactive thing with many people all writing in the blog (group blogs are doable on blogspot and it should be a lot of fun). Anyone interested, please say so.

Ciao amore.

The coolest ..

Priya forwarded this to me. Its among the coolest things I've seen recently. (And no its not a con. Please check it out).

Its a sound file but it didn't work properly in my browser. So if it doesn't work for you, right click on the link and download to disk and try to play it from there. It worked with Windows Media player for me, don't know if other players also work.

Here it is.

Cheers.

Oh, the horror

At Priya's instigation, I've decided to get a beard (french beard, goatee, don't know what its called). I will take a photo every day or so and then blog it to show the evolution. For now here's something to whet yawls appetites. (the image below is grainy, click to get a better one).




PS: I fiddled with some HTML, let me know if the blog isn't displaying okay. Thx

Art photos

Click on the images to go to the Flickr page with some detail about the photo. (Once you are on the flickr page, you can navigate to the other photos directly without coming back to this page)

And more updates

Some follow-ups on stuff I talked about earlier in the blog:

Book business idea: One of the ideas I had was to buy good used books in the US and sell them in India. There seemed to be an 'arbitrage' opportunity here, based on talking to a bookshop owner here. Since then this idea has languished. Initial impression is that there aren't that many good used books available at really low ($1 - $2) prices. I nevertheless want to do atleast a 'pilot' for my own satisfaction and see how it goes.

Tinnitus: I had talked about a persistent ringing in the ears due to neglecting a bad cold. Its still there and is permanent as I suspected. It doesn't cause any issues, but I was pretty upset about it for a while. I haven't gone to see a doctor about it. I should.

Fab India: We went back and bought a very nice bedsheet at Fab India:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/29439415@N00/121670901/
It cost about 700/- . That takes care of my perceived obligation to support Fab India. Atleast for this year.

Art: I also blogged about an art exhibition that I went to. I got the idea of taking photograps of some of the artwork, from a book I bought at the exhibition. So I'm uploading some of the photos for those who might be interested. The quality of the photos is obviously not great given how they were taken but still might be of interest. See the next post for the photos.




Endnote:
Priya and I went to Belur, Halebid and Sravanabelgola last week (on Ugadi day) on a KSTDC tour. It was very nice but not necessarily blog material. I want to write something brief about it if I get a chance. Let me just say now: Bahabuli rocks okay !

Substantive updates

Okay here are some substantive updates:

We hired my replacement at work and he comes on board on Monday April 3rd. After that I stay for 3 more weeks and leave on April 21st. I've asked that it be considered a leave of absence for 3 months, so there is some connection still to Juniper for a while.
So I can't back out now ! since my replacement is on board. Its for real !!

Of the options that I talked about in one of the early posts: I finally felt that it was not the right time to pursue eGovernments, so told Srikanth so. I would like to be more free and do stuff on a ad-hoc or part-time basis for some time rather than an intense full-time job. As I blogged earlier, I visited Timbaktu and talked to them and there seems to be something useful I can do there. Here's an email from the person I talked to there:
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Dear Vijay Krishna,

Thanks for your mail. Hope all is well with you and Santhosh.
The need of documentation support is much...given a chance I do
not want to sit at the table at all ..I am begining to feel less human
with too much contact with table and computer.But then, you have to make
a choice..my need is now..for me the details can all be worked out once
things start.

Anyway, it is your choice. i see taht you need to do certain things.
Please get in touch when you are free......good luck Regards... .
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I was suprised at the plainitive tone of the email. Anyway these are very
respected people who have been doing work for a long time and it would be a privilege to work with them. So I will go ahead and work with them in the documentation support area that is talked about. Timbaktu has many donors and donor agencies, and one of the problems with that is that there is a lot of reporting and proposals that need to be made in order to make these donor relationships work. This is what is being talked about in the mail. As any reader of this blog will have found out I can write indefinitely (even if of doubtful value), so perhaps I can channelize this constructively for Timbaktu. We haven't worked out any of the details but I think it will work with me spending about 50% of my time there and the rest in Bangalore. While in Bangalore I can try to do some other stuff so I widen the range of contacts and exposures and learnings.
Sound reasonable ?

There are atleast two things that I haven't followed up on yet, one to meet the people at Rural Innovations Network, and the other to meet the IIT-ians doing organic farming somewhere in Karnataka. Initially I thought that I should rigourously follow the original plan and meet them before deciding what to do. But it just wasn't happening, I wasn't able to make the time and logistics work to meet them. Anyway the Timbuktu opportunity is a good one and I don't want to make a long drawn out decision. I will talk to these other people anyway when I get the chance.

And some other stuff:
Priya has been talking to various animation institutes about taking a course and switching to the animation/graphics industry. Prospects in that industry seem very bright, but it will be tough to make the transition.

Priya's hols are coming up and I would like very much for us to take a European vacation. There is lot of documentation for the visa formalities and I am bottlenecked there currently.

Water and stuff

I am reading a very erudite and impressive book on water called "Water: Perspectives, Issues, Concerns". Here is a solid indictment of modern life from it, in one punchy paragraph:

"Large dams are only one aspect or feature of the modern world. It is possible to marshal an impressive array of evidence against dams; but it is equally possible to build up a strong case against other symbols of 'development': coal-burning and nuclear power plants; metallurgical, chemical, hydrocarbon and petrochemical industries and mining complexes; monstrous megalopolises; the exploding number of automobiles; vast networks of railways and highways built by trenching into flood plains, drainage channels, fields, forests and wildlife habitats, and by blasting hillsides and tunnelling through mountains; the onslaught on aquatic life by giant trawlers and whaling vessels; the staggering global trade in oil and the ever-present threat of oil spills and so on. All these are manifestations of a certain conception of 'development' and a related attitude to nature. At the moment it is difficult to see how a change of direction is going to be brought about and possible doom averted."

Discuss.