In the Netherlands

We came to the Netherlands today from Paris. We spend a day here and then some time in Belgium and London the day after and then catch the flight back.
I'm wondering how to blog this trip, there are too many directions and angles to it, and its going to be difficult and boring to do it just serially and chronologically. I'm hoping to get lots of comments and use that to decide what to blog about.
Also have to start thinking about what to do next now that this big item is off the agenda :-)

Siddharth -- saw your comment about the Hindu and feel strongly that the Hindu is in general as excellent paper. I'll write a rebuttal when I'm back.

Best to all from a superb hotel (www.nh-hotels.com) somewhere in the Netherlands....

In Switzerland

I"m blogging off an internationalized computer (seeing all the UI in German), and a different key layout than usual in .... Switzerland !

Its been great, as expected. Rome was lovely and vibrant, Florence was gorgeous and awe-inspiring and we just spent a day deep on a snowy mountain in Switzerland.

Its a packed schedule and difficult to blog at this terminal so Ill sign off for now.

We're all set (touchwood)

We picked up the tickets and passports today from Cox & Kings and got a last minute shock to see that the Bangalore - Mumbai leg was unconfirmed, but that seems to have gotten sorted out.

Here's our itenary:
18th night: Leave Bangalore and spend the night in Bombay airport (wince), catching an early morning flight on Qatar Airways to Doha and into Rome on 19th evening.
20th: Guided tour of Rome and the Vatican City (St. Peters' basilica, Colosseum (sp), Piazza Venezia, Circus Maximus, Forum Romanum, Trevi Fountain. Drive to Arezzo in Tuscany.

21st: Drive to Pisa, then Florence, (Signoria Square Ponte Vecchio) and drive to Padova near Venice

22nd: Venice (walking tour, canal cruise, Piazza San Marco, Murano Glass Factory) and drive to Innsbruck Austria

23rd: Drive to Swarovski Crystal World in Wattens and then to Liechtenstein, and on to Switzerland. Visit the Aare Gorge and spend the night at Hasilberg

24th: Mostly on our own, we're skipping the optional tour of Mt. Titlis

25th: The Jungfraujoch -- a train ride to the highest altitude train station in Europe, a walk on the Aletsch glacier, then to Interlaken and Harder Kulm

26th: On to Geneva and the Chamonix Valley.

27th: On to Paris (la France!), guded city tour.

28th: Free day in Paris (we're skipping the optional Disneyland tour), and a 'formal' evening with a cruise on the Siene, and the Bonheur show at the Lido.

29th: The Grevin Wax Museum and shopping at Galleries Lafayette in Paris. On to Netherlands.

30th: Some cheesy stuff in Netherlands ( cheese farm, clog making factory!), instead of Rembrandt and the pot-laced cookies. Lame-o. But atleast we take a canal ride. Drive to Antwerp for the night.

31st: City tour of Brussels, drive to Calais, and take the Eurotunnel to ... London ! Guided tour of the city. But we don't do much else in London. Pity.

1st: Leave London in the morning and reach Mumbai early morning on 2nd June. Transfer to Bangalore flight and reach home at 11:00 am on 2nd.

Well. I'm tremondously excited but also stressed out that given my super-high anticipation, something will get screwed up :-). Mood swings and all that :-).I'm kind of a Europhile and while I've seen some of Europe earlier there's always so much more. Nowadays, when I go sightseeing I can sit and stare at a single monument or temple for a long long time, if given the time and enjoy myself quite happily. And in 2 weeks I'm going to be taking in stuff like all the history of Rome (after having read Colleen McCullogh's series of masterpieces on ancient Roman history, to actually be there in person), Venice, Switzerland scenery, Amsterdam, and all the other good stuff. I don't know how its going to go, but its *NOT* going to be uneventful either way.

We're still figuring out packing, but if there's space, I'm going to take a laptop and see if I can squeeze in some internet time.

Hyderabad

We're back from Hyderabad today morning. It was a very good trip, meeting several good friends and relatives but not a lot to blog about.

I was glad to be back on a train, and in 2nd class. It seems that I start getting itchy if I don't ride a train fairly often. My last time was in November and that too AC. AC is nice of course but you don't get to see the scenery properly and you don't feel the outside breeze so its hardly like a journey.

I took my camera along but kept forgetting to take photos so missed a few good photoops. I haven't yet reached the zen state of photography where I view the world through a virtual lens always looking out for the right photo-op. The picture above is with friends at a restaurant (Shakuntala and her husband Ramakrishna). And the one below has my nephew Siddhu in it.



There is a story with Siddhu: he was 15 minutes away from submitting his original certificates (a crossing the rubicon/laxman rekha thing) to a college in Trichy to join the engineering course there, when he heard that he had qualified to join the government architecture college in Hyderabad. Not just qualified but was ranked 3rd! After some heavy-duty decision-making, they (he and dad primarily) decided to go with the architecture and he hasn't looked back since then. He's having a ball of a time and doing well too. Its really really fantastic and a little scary to see him escape the engineering treadmill by just a whisker. He's a great kid and I look forward to see him do well in life.

We picked up Priya's B.Ed. degree certificate, which was the actual reason we had gone to Hyderabad. She met her principal and teachers and was happy.

==
To complement my previous posts on summer fruit, here's a pic of the original summer fruit: mango

Taking stock

Second (first one is here) in a series of intermittent posts to gauge progress and see where things are going

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I've been meaning for a while to talk about my state of mind during this 'sabbatical'. I'm pleased to say that (so far)it has been really good. I am enjoying the flexibility, lack of responsibility and lack of work a lot. Perhaps a little too much :-). I don't feel even a little like I am transitioning to a state without structure or feeling a lack of direction. So far I've managed to plan enough activities, so that I'm doing stuff all the time although at a relaxed and easy pace. I feel like this is exactly the state that is most suited to my mentality. I guess this is a stage and things will continue to evolve, but for now -- this is great ! I love the lack of 9-5 and having to be at work every day at X time. I have had to be alert to my state of mind though. Every now and then, I feel a little disoriented and then I have to sit down and try to see why that's so and sense what's the right thing to do. Its quite cool.

As far as this blog is concerned, it continues to be a big part of the sabbatical and its a great outlet for whatever's in my head. I find that I absolutely need to spill my guts onto the blog and that frees me up to go on and do the next thing. The
AdSense program is also on track. Thanks to those concerned. :-)

Timbaktu is certainly on the cards. There are lot of things going on there and a lot of things that I want to understand better out of general curiosity. There is definitely the opportunity to contribute (a lot) and its quite openended in how much can be done. But the lack of structure also makes it dicey. The organization also seems to have some flaws in its setup and in discussing with some of the people there, some of the inherent flaws and difficulties in NGO work came out, so there are difficulties too, in working there. Going to Europe will be fantastic.

There are going to be some difficulties in managing time and tasks. I cant be away from Bangalore for too long at a stretch as Priya is not comfortable being alone. I also don't know how difficult it will be for her as she tries to transition and how much support she would need in the process. There are some other tasks that I need to take care of, and I'll have to juggle them in somehow.

Overall: I'm very happy ! Its a great beginning. I got some work done, there's lots more serious work to do but that should not be an issue. I am thinking in the background about what the long-term activity should be after the next few months, and while there is no clarity yet, there are enough interesting possibilities. This is also a fairly crucial year for Priya to try to gain some non-trivial skills and break into a new career.

Updates

Beard: I gave up on the idea of doing a series of photos on the progression of the beard, as nothing interesting came out of it. Here's how I look currently. It looks even better in full size image :-)


Composting: (Previous posts here and here)



Composting is proving to be a little bit dicey as expected. Overall its been going quite good. Its amusing to see how, even as we keep adding more and more garbage, the pot never quite fills up because the garbage keeps reducing in size as it loses moisture. A variation of the kamadhenu concept :-). There is hardly any smell if the pot is closed and just a little if it is open, so that is a big relief. However we do have a lot of small black flies which irritate Priya. And we have started getting maggots! This is an expected feature of composting, but its horrifyingly fascinating to see them in practice. They are approx. 5mm long, white, caterpillar-like thingies that crawl around the compost supposedly helping the composting process. We knew (and also found out the gross way) that they love moisture. So what has happened is that in portions of the compost where there is a lot of moisture, you'll find like 10 of these things all wallowing over each other. I wasn't able to get a good photo of them, but didn't try too hard :-)

The first photo shows the current state of the compost. Since its been almost 3 weeks, I decided to start using the next pot for fresh waste. Though the first pot is not full, I thought it would be better not to mix fresh waste and partially decayed compost.


Shvoong: Long ago I had written about writing reviews for money at shvoong.com. I did write 5 reviews and quite enjoyed it. However the money was so pathetic that I'm giving up. Chapter closed.


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We're off to Hyd today.

Introducing ...

It had to happen. I had written sometime back about starting a blog around writing/books/stuff like that. Enough things have come to mind that I would like to blog about, that I decided its worth starting such a blog (thereby opening yet another channel to diffuse my energies. Oh well). Its over here , with three posts (and one comment) to start with. It won't get updated anywhere near as often as this blog, I expect.

Setback

We were to leave on Thursday night for Mumbai and catch the flight to Europe from there on Sunday night after spending the weekend with Vibhat and Jing. However we got very unpleasant news from our tour operator Cox & Kings that the date we had booked for (15th) was overbooked and we would have to go on some other day. They gave us a choice of 13th and 19th. The 13th date was a funny situation where the tour was actually for NRIs in England (the basic tour started and ended in London). The local Cox & Kings manager did an aggressive sell for the 13th date, going to the extent of slightly dissing the 15th tour ("it'll be a mostly Gujju crowd and Gujju food..."). Unfortunately for him, I'm very allergic to sell jobs so I got more convinced that we shouldn't take the 13th and we decided to go on the 19th.

Of course we are very bummed about the whole thing. We are spending a huge amount of money (2.5L on the tour itself and then lots of smaller stuff) on this and it really off-putting to suddenly have the schedules changed on us like this. Also we won't have the time with Vibhat in Mumbai. I'm not good about making a fuss in these kind of situations so all we got in return from Cox & Kings was 1000/- each to cover for some of the expense of cancelling and re-booking tickets to Mumbai from Bangalore.


Given the extra time, one thing we are doing is making a quick trip to Hyderabad this weekend. Priya has to pick up her B.Ed. degree certificate from ICFAI and it will be good to catch up with some of the friends in Hyd, including Siddhu, my nephew.

A. Roy

Here's a snippet from an interview with Arundhati Roy:

Interviewer: Given the relentlessness of the onslaught of globalisation,
would you say your views paint you into a small corner?

Roy: I'd say our views paint us out of the small corner - the small, rich,
glittering, influential corner. The corner with 'the voice'. The corner
that owns the guns and bombs and money and the media. I'd say our views cast us onto a vast, choppy, dark dangerous ocean where most of the world's people float precariously. And from having drifted there a while, I'd say the mood is turning ugly. Go to Kalinganagar, Raygada,Chhattisgarh - you'll see there's something akin to civil war brewing there. The adivasis of Kalinganagar have blocked the main highway to Paradip Port since January.

There are districts in Chattisgarh which the Maoists control and the
administration can't reach. I'm not saying that there will be a
beautiful political revolution when the poor take over the State, I'm
saying we could, as a society be convulsed with all kinds of violence.
Criminal, lumpen, political, mercenary - the kind that has broken
across so much of Africa. So it really is in the enlightened self-interest of
those jitter-bugging in the glittering corner to sit up and pay heed.

Bannerghatta National Park

We (myself, Priya, my mother-in-law and Priya's sister's daughter) went to Bannerghatta National Park yesterday. They had a wildlife safari (going around in a van to see wildlife in a semi-natural environment) and a zoo. We got some good pictures ( but we wern't so close to the tiger as the picture would suggest!)


PS: I also added a scary spider photo to one of the previous posts :-)

But seriously

I had gone to Timbaktu with a somewhat vague mandate -- Mary (co-founder) was feeling that she was getting swamped with desk work and not doing any field work and was hoping I could take on some of the documentation/reporting work so that she could be freed up a bit. One of the specific things she wanted to do was see if the quality of the monthly reports that each worker turns in could be improved. She felt it was lacking in a.) articulation of all the things that had actually been done and that could go into reports to funding agencies etc. b.) lacking in some of the background context and missing some of the more subtle things. The monthly meeting was to be held the weekend I was there -- she had specifically asked me to be there for that. I spent the first couple of days generally hanging out and reading various things and trying to get some understanding of what I might do there. Mary was usually very busy and was running around doing stuff, and she hadn't quite crystallized what she wanted herself. Pretty soon I started getting stressed about the lack of structure and lack of clarity. We then went for the monthly meeting. By then I had got a sense that it would not be that easy to break into the community of people and start vibing with them and so my introduction at the meeting would be important to break the ice. There was some kind of a 'moment' at the meeting -- I was introduced and I explained what I was there for, reasonably clearly and confidently in Telugu and it seemed to jell with them. Several of them asked questions and people who knew me said nice things about me, and some of the workers came to me after the session to ask if I could help them with some of their documentation and other stuff. I felt a lot of relief, like an important barrier had been overcome.
After the monthly meeting Mary asked me to do a specific task -- read through all the monthly reports and summarize them. She was concerned that like in previous years the reports would get filed away and neglected until it came time to do the annual report or some donor reports, at which point everything would get dug out and much chaos would ensue as people would try to understand the reports and recreate the numbers and try to remember other stuff that wasn't captured in the report, but was needed -- stuff like that. So I spent 3 days slogging through the reports and talking to people to get a better sense of the projects. The reports are all in Telugu and it became apparent pretty quickly that my Telugu wasn't yet up to the level of going through these reports with any speed. So instead I would just sit with the person who wrote the report and ask him to describe or recite the report verbally to me in Telugu which I was able to grasp. That way progress was much faster and I also learnt a lot more. I didn't finish the task while I was there but made enough progress that I felt comfortable that I could complete it the next time I was there. I also helped one of the groups a little in putting together a small presentation for some people from a partner group that would be visiting (see photo).

I got some depth into the work of some of the groups and here are some comments:
--One group is the womens' mutually aided cooperative societies. Some version of this is becoming popular all over India, though I don't know the extent of the penetration yet. Here, the women pool together their savings and run a small bank-like institution, with deposits and loans. The activity seems to have been a spectacular success with year on year growth in deposits in the 25% range, and current deposits around 2 crores. This is with with poor to very poor women contributing small amounts of as less as 10 Rs. a month.
-- Another small group that has not yet taken off in a big way is their work with disabled people. Exposure to the information in this area was quite painful. When people are poor and then become disabled for some reason or have disabled children, these bear the brunt in an already bad situation. The government has some good programs like free bus passes and pensions for those disabled beyond a point. But the programs are badly administered so that all the benefits do not reach. Timbaktu workers often do the job of getting together and submitting the documentation so that these disabled people get the benefits that they are entitled to. Such a basic task provides so much value and nobody was doing it in this area until Timbaktu took it up and that too in a very small ad-hoc way (so far, funding constraints and all that).
-- Timbaktu runs a few schools in the area. The schools are small and the focus is on quality education and the schools are essentially run free. I'm not sure what's the focus of the school initiative, partly its to just do something useful I suppose and partly its a demonstration in good quality education. The schools are very alternative and do many amazing things with the children like spending a lot of time (upto 50%) on non-academic things like arts/crafts/games. I briefly saw some of the children and they looked very happy and bright and seemed to have a real childhood. My first impression was however that they were not turning out really smart kids or really creative kids. This is a disappointment as their teaching methods are really outstanding. The roll call of activities they do is amazing for any school leave alone a cash strapped rural school (singing, acting, painting, local traditional dances (kolattam), brick making, soap making, lemon-n-spoon race, pottery, multimedia cds ...). The schools were started by a really cool guy (IITM Btech, IITB Ph.D. in Energy Systems), and I believe he would have structured the academics for inquiry and discussion based learning not rote learning. They also don't have grading until 7th std. In such a great atmosphere, I would have thought we'd be churning out absolutely smart creative geniuses so I'm a little disappointed.
-- Watersheds are another important area. More on this perhaps in later posts as this is a fairly complex area, but its very important and interesting work.
-- Timbaktu Organic is one of their recent and cool projects. More on this too later. Briefly this is to encourage farmers to grow organic, and to also start growing millets. Millets folks ! They're the new panacea for rural India. Remember, you heard it here first

Photos below are of the Timbaktu office. Its a pretty cool building.

Tidbits

I'm putting off blogging about the key things of the visit a little bit more, here are some assorted tidbits.

Timbaktu started with one couple, Bablu and Mary, who after doing various things in development work, bought a patch of degraded land in Anantapur dt. to try to heal and regenerate it. The work was very successful. They continued the work in the areas around them, and at the same time, they opened their space to other people who had their own ideas and wanted to implement them. Several initiatives thus emerged: in watershed development, education (several small schools) and recently in an organic farming project. Besides the facilities at the original land they acquired Timbaktu now also has a good 'field office' that they constructed last year.

The original location is run completely off solar power (though they cheat sometimes with generators). So they don't even have a grid connection there. The basic output of the solar is DC power, though some of the buildings have been converted to AC. The bulbs they use for the DC are similar to the ones in cars for interior lights. One of the consequences of using solar is that they have to be stingy with power so some of the houses don't have heaters or running water. I used to pump my own water from the pump in the picture :-), though I wasn't expected to do it, there were workers who were supposed to do that.


Kalyani is one of the interesting people at Timbaktu. She had a lot of commitment to do things differently than the mainstream because of the problems she found in the mainstream, and she joined Timbaktu as a teacher very early when the facilities were far more primitive than they are now. She married one of the Timbaktu people. Couple of interesting things I got from her: I had forgotten to get soap, so I asked her for some and she gave me handmade soap that she had made herself. It was pretty good and I didn't have any problems using it. Its not that difficult to make soap it seems, the children at the school do it as a project. She also gave me homoeopathic medicine for a cold that I got. I thought homoeopathy was good only for long term illnesses and even then the efficacy was dubious. However using the medicine she gave me, there was symptomatic relief very quickly and although the cold still persisted, I clearly felt a lot better for the medicine. She also used leaves of some tree to set up a steam inhalation for me that worked well. One of the school people also told me of a natural medicine that they use to reduce fever and body aches. They have used it on the kids in statistically signficant numbers and they see that it works. I am a lot more open and interested in alternative medicine systems after this.

I got a fairly solid immersion in Telugu during the week I was there, and my Telugu has improved for it. In reading (and to a lesser extent writing) especially, I needed to read some of the reports so I'm significantly better off. One of the nice side effects of the trip.

As I said in some of the previous posts, Timbaktu is structured an a virtual 'panchayat' of sorts, with members being all the full time (paid) members of the group. They try to make decisions through democracy/consensus in a monthly meeting that they have. They address each other as 'anna' and 'akka' (elder brother, elder sister in Telugu). Like: Ushakka, Obuleshanna. Its a bit strange to us outsiders but it definitely builds a sense of solidarity and mutual respect.

Adventures in fauna/Timbaktu nights

The thing I want to spill my guts on first is quite unrelated to what I went to Timbaktu for, and not altogether fun either. This is to do with the experience of dealing with all the kinds of insects and animals at Timbaktu. This visit seemed to be marked by all kinds of animal stuff. To begin with the day I landed there, a cobra was encountered in the middle of the place and caused some commotion. It was finally shooed away without any issue. I slept through that incident :-). However later someone told me that I might want to sleep outside due to the heat, and my fervent feeling was: not after hearing about this cobra !

I was put up at a small 1 bdrm house (hut!) that was used for visitors. The place had not been used for sometime and was deeply cobwebbed and stuff. Although some cleaning was done before I moved it, the spiders etc. were too entrenched. I was initially hugely horrified by the size of the spiders there. They were absolutely huge, upto 2 inches in diameter from one end of the leg to another.


Slowly I got used to them and we co-existed reasonbly amicably. I don't know if they were poisonous. Another time I woke up in the middle of the night and on the wall above my head was this even huger insect which I took then to be a spider but it must have been something else. It had 10 legs for one thing and spiders have 8 and the body structure is different. It must have been 2.5 or 3 inches long. Anyway I was thoroughly shaken by that for a moment, and it didn't help when the thing lost its grip and fell onto the bed. It scrambled around for a little while and while I was trying to drive it away, it vanished, but much to my discomfiture somewhere in the vicinity of the bed.



A dilemma ensued, but I finally gave up and trusting my safety to the benevolence of nature, went back to bed. Nothing further ensued. I encountered that creepy crawly several times again during the trip and was quite comfortable with it by the end. But later that night I was woken up in the early hours by an animal jumping onto my window ledge from outside and then jumping off again. Again, I was thoroughly shocked, but later figured out that it must have been a cat. Basically this kinda represented how the nights were for me. It was a new experience to have entering the house or going to bed be a mildly risky activity. On the last day there, I left the door open for a little while and a small bat got in ! It circled around inside the house for a little while not able to find a way out, while I stood to a corner shielding my face with a book and contemplating spending the night that way. Luckily the guy managed to get out and relative peace returned. On another night I woke up to feel a roach crawling up my hand. Not cool.

On the nicer side, I would wake up in the morning to a cacaphony of bird chirping. A couple of birds would invariable come into the house and hang out on the rafters. Pretty cool.

The idea of personal space had to be regretfully given up. There were always these tiny black flies circling round ones face and after some time one basically agreed to more or less co-exist with them with an occasional half-hearted brushoff. Besides this, if you sat anywhere in the evening for any length of time, all sorts of insects would drop in on you (as in -- drop onto your body) from out of nowhere. Once I found an exquisite tiny, tiny baby scorpion on my hand. It was shaped exactly like a real scorpion, but only about a couple of mm in length. Horrifyingly fascinating.


Due to the heat of the day, at night, the walls of the houses apparently radiated back the heat. It was absolutely still for a large part of the night and even when it started blowing (a deliciously cool breeze) the windows were small and didn't catch enough. So it was really really hard to sleep. (Most people slept outside, but I didn't want to do that). That combined with the insects made the nights quite bad. I typically would wake up atleast 2 or 3 times a night and have a hard time going back to sleep. It was definitely problematic. There is another guesthouse there, that is better in multiple ways, and I intend to stay there instead, the next time I visit. I expect it will be a lot better.

There was also this animal somewhere between a lizard and iguana, something like a chameleon. I'm sure most people have seen this if they grew up India. There were several of these around, and again they grew to nauseating sizes. I got a photograph of one of them (click on the photo to get a better view). Unfortunately it doesn't give a sense of the size of the thing. The photo is just a step away being a really good photograph, if there was a little more light it would have made it.



There was one other amusing vignette. At the office (like pretty much everywhere in rural India) there are a couple of street dogs that are informally part of the office. They play some kind of useful guard role and are otherwise well-behaved so its a useful co-existence. Due to the heat, one of the dogs had come into the building and was sprawled across the reception area. So somebody came by and whacked it quite hard a few times to get it out. The dog completely ignored the person. It was like the dog was saying: "Dude, are you out of your mind, its *hot* out there !".

To round out the animal populace there were a couple of adorable kittens in the mess where I ate.

I'm back

Back is the explorer, back from the wilderness :-)

It was a very 'full' experience, some barriers were broken and I got a lot of exposure that would not be generally possible. One of the things that drove me to go to Timbaktu was a strong curiosity/fascination -- what motivates these people, what are the nitty gritties of how the work gets done, how the financing gets done. All of this was amply answered (atleast at the first layer of the onion !) during this trip. Its a large group of people there, somewhat like a family and it was nice being a part of the family (in a limited way) and people were very friendly and warm. The mountains and trees and stars were there and I felt happy to be out of the city for some time.

Succeeding posts to delve a lot more deeply into individual aspects.
The photo is of one of the houses in Timbaktu.