Vibhat

We spent the day (Sunday) with Vibhat Nair who blew in from Bombay on a weekend visit. Its always great fun. He's smart, stimulating, and cares about people. But he also makes a lot of fun of me. This time he claimed that I 'like to suffer' and that this blog is not interesting. Well, he has a big paunch and its not looking likely to reduce anytime soon. And he snores a fit to bring down the roof. So there !!

He lives in South Bombay and was not affected by the recent train bombings, instead apparently his home was used a refuge for the night by his mother and a bunch of her colleagues/friends who couldn't get home, and it ended up being quite a merry night for them.

I'm back from Timbaktu just for a day or so since Vibhat was here, and it was a Sunday, and I head back tomorrow again, Monday. I am working on their 2005-2006 annual report and its pretty late and I spent a lot of time in July doing other stuff, so I'm trying to push hard to get this done (or get what I committed to do for them, done).

At the end of this week, I'll go in to Juniper and sign the required papers and get the required signatures and then formally 'disengage' from juniper. Sobering but necessary. I haven't made much progress on my new laptop search.

McLeod Ganj

The highlight of the daytrip, for me, was a visit to McLeod Ganj. This is high up in the mountains, much higher than Dharmasala, and its one of the Tibetan settlements. Quoting from Lonely Planet: " While Dharamsala is synonymous with the Tibetan Government in Exile, the actual headquarters is about 4 km above Dharamsala at Gangchen Kyishong, and most travellers hang out at McLeod Ganj, strung along a high ridge 10 km above Dharamsala. McLG is a picturesque place with lots of westerners and nice bookshops. It has a western (ie. european or american) feel to it, not like India. We visited a Buddhist 'Kalachakra' temple (at the Institute of Buddhist Dialetic Studies or something like that). It was quite beautiful but one couldn't get into the details and get a real sense of the significance of the place and the various statues and relics, so I just took away some superficial impressions.

When I set up this trip up north, I was really hoping to spend some time by myself wandering around Dharmasala/McLeod Ganj and taking in some of the Tibetan feel of the place. As it turned out, this didn't happen. I reached later than I hoped, and had one day free, but once I landed at the Ashram, I felt that it was more appropriate to stay in tune with the rest of the people and do what they were doing rather than go off on my own. I also didn't prepare much for the trip. Reading through Lonely Planet now, it seems like the Dalai Lama actually lives in another portion of the temple complex we visited and that there is a walk around the boundary of the structure, that takes you past his house and stuff. I'm disappointed to have missed that.

Blogger is currently having problems with image upload so a few images I wanted to put on this post are not happening.

Also: I'm planning to go off to Timbaktu tomorrow so a break in blogging. I still have to write some more about the trip, about going to Vaishnodevi and Amritsar. Vibhat says he is doing a surprise visit to Bangalore this weekend, and is hoping to come to Timbaktu too. And finally today I went to work and met a lot of people and had a lot of loaded conversations that I am trying to digest. I will be formally leaving at the end of this month or a little later, when my leave of absence ends. The most immediate and urgent consequence of this is that I need to buy a laptop as I will lose this one, which belongs to the company. So lots happening here.

Day tripping

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Okay moving along from the empirical metaphysical --

The last day at the camp was a day long outing to a bunch of temple type places in the area. The temples themselves were mostly unremarkable. However I managed to break somebody's camera (!) during the trip which certainly warrants a mention. What happened was, at the first temple of the day, my mom asked me to take a photograph of her with the swamiji. I did as instructed, and another lady saw this and realized that it was a nice idea and asked me to take one of her too. She handed me her camera and what with having my own in my hands already and what with being somewhat clumsy, I dropped both cameras. My trusty Nikon Coolpix came through okay, but hers' (a snazzy but presumably delicate Sony if I remember) conked out. The telescopic zoom got visibly askew and wouldn't retract back. The lady got understandably very upset but cooled down after a while. I spent the next couple of hours mortified and the rest of the trip feeling obligated to her and trying to get photos of her. (I am now tasked with printing and sending these photos to her back in Vizag).

I was describing this to my wife last night who (predictably) started berating my klutziness when I shut her up with -- "Look, I am the guy who broke my nephew's arm with my clumsiness. So this doesn't even count." The same goes to the rest of you out there !

Himachal is beautiful although I am unable to work up the energy to go into paens. I will try to include some of the photos I took. And Himachali women are definitely very cute. I didn't take any photos though, for fear of being slapped.


Typical Himachali temple.




They do this at several temples, visitors string up this kind of colorful cloth on a tree. I didn't enquire into the meaning behind the ritual.

Brief note: there was actually one noteworthy temple that we visited. Here there were atleast three places inside the temple complex were there were fires that supposedly kept burning by themselves without any outside fuel. It was kinda vague and hurried so I didn't get a good sense of what it was about, but I think the basic premise was correct and the cause was natural. There was one place for example where there was a small pool of water and a priest would give a spiel for a couple of minutes, and then with a flourish bring a burning stuck over the water and there would be a flareup for moment. It looked very much like what you might expect if there was a small accumulation of inflammable gas that then caught fire.


Related post here. Next post: McLeod Gunj


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Link of the day -- of interest to the academia and wannabeacademia types:

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php

About the Chinmaya Mission

Okay so here's something about the Chinmaya Mission and why my parents were at Siddhibari (or Siddh..baaadi as the locals call it).

The Chinmaya mission is dedicated to to the rediscovery and propogation of Hinduism. It is not so much a zealous missionary organization trying to make new converts as much as trying to get Hindus to rediscover Hinduism. Their website is here , and it has a good biography of the founder Swami Chinmayananda. They have a huge number of branches in India and abroad and seem to be doing well.
As part of their work they often organize religious tours and religious camps and the one that my parents went on, was one such. The religious camp was at the ashram at Siddhibari in Himachal Pradesh, which has the distinction within the mission of being the one where the founders' remains are interred.
Overall, I'm neutral to the mission. I feel most of the well known swamis like Chinmaya and Ramana Maharshi genuinely had something going, though what it is I do not know :-). Vaguely one expects that there is value in pursuing the Hindu holy and philosophical literature, and occasionally I do so myself, but on my scale of priorities it doesn't come that high (especially with having been schooled in the J.Krishnamurti tradition of rejection:-). Why keep going back to the Vedas when we can instead approach the world clean and with an open mind learn ?

The camp routine consisted of various activities spread out through the day starting very early in the morning and ending early at night. I took part in the last day of the camp and got some flavour. There was meditation, religious lectures on various topics, shloka recitation, going to the temple things like that. I was mostly unmoved by the activities.

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This is an appropriate point to link to one of the most wonderful and crazy site ideas on the web:
Saarlo's Guru Rating Service. Chinmaya is not rated too highly here :-)

Right to Information Petition

A post about the Right to Information over there

Interlude

Original large-size painting in Panduri Srinivas' house (in his kid's room). Panduri has two nice large originals in his house and I think its a really good idea as decoration.

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I have been wanting for a while to do a "Taking Stock" mail about how things are going in the bigger picture of the sabbatical, but have not done it for various reasons. Anyway, here is a quick note about one aspect. This is that I don't feel *at all* like I am on vacation or that there is a sense of lassitude and since I don't really have to do anything, I start finding it difficult to do anything .. stuff like that. This was one of the concerns I had about doing this sabbatical. Au contraire, I feel like I have built up a lifetime of backlogged stuff that I need to/want to get done. Not to mention that there is always a lot of work at Timbaktu. Regarding the backlogged stuff, there is always travel (though I have had a surfeit of that at the moment), stuff to do to get my affairs in order (like get a new driving license!), then lots of smaller stuff around the new flat that could do with some maintanance work, help Priya with her classes when possible, go back and start doing RIM work, things like that. On the backburner are still more things: learn languages (Hindi, Telugu, Kannada, French), get more exercise and play games like squash or tennis, and some bodybuilding (!), take some technical classes on software stuff that I didn't learn very well.

So the way time is going is a very nice aspect of the sabbatical. It is somewhat strange, I don't feel the lack of a regular job at all, I am always running from place to place doing some stuff or the other (though perhaps not very efficiently or very momentous things) and it keeps me in a state of mind that is more or less akin to having a full-time job (and one that is more all-round enjoyable than my previous one!). I am curious about the side effects of getting used to this new way of spending time and what adjustment problems it will cause to go back to a regular lifestyle.

To Siddhibari

Panduri got me dropped off at Old Delhi Railway station for my night train to Pathankot, Dauladhar Express. The journey there, from NOIDA/Indirapuram was somewhat surreal, the kind of scene you might see in a Mad Max or waterworld picture. Most of the way, the power was off, including the streetlights and it gave a surreal feel (driving through the capital of the country and you can't see squat). The traffic was heavy and messy and towards the end when we hit old Delhi just a crazy mass of humanity. At Old Delhi station I was stressed out and trying to get my bearings. I was trying to find out the platform for my train, but everyone spoke Hindi and I didn't understand. Finally I played it safe and got a porter to take me there. As it turned out, it was the same platform I was already standing on, he just walked me down it to the location where my compartment would be ! Oh well. The weather was unbelievably sultry (Delhi had not yet got the monsoon but was overcast and humid), and waiting there for the train stands out as one of the uncomfortable experiences in recent memory. The train journey was interesting for being my first in *real* north India (and I was travelling sleeper), but nothing specific to report. I got off next morning at Pathankot, which more or less fit the description of Lonely Planet as a 'noisy chaotic city that you want to get out of as soon as possible'. I got onto a rickety Himachal Pradesh Transport Corporation bus that took me to Dharmasala. It was a 3 hour-odd bus ride through some very scenic terrain in Himachal, but unfortunately I was tired and interested in getting to my destination so did not have the eyes for it. At Dharmasala, I lugged my suitcase from the bus stop up a steep flight of stairs to a taxi stand to take me to the "Chinmaya Tapovan Ashram" at Siddhibari which turned out to be a 10-odd km journey. I was of course interested in Dharmasala and trying to see signs of the Tibetan government in exile but of whatever I saw it had a lot of goverment offices and small shops and pretty much that was it. The Tapovan ashram was in a very scenic location (see photo) and I was welcomed by my parents and some decent food, which was very welcome.

Back in Blore

After a very messy streneous but nevertheless good trip.

I was there in Vizag since Saturday evening and took the train yesterday to Bangalore. Didn't blog while at Vizag, was recovering from the trip. Didn't do much of anything at Vizag :-).

Anyway. Here's blogging about the trip:

I flew an airline called SpiceJet to Delhi. It cost about 4000/- Rs, I booked the e-ticket easily online at makemytrip.com . The flight was delayed 2 hours and I ended up spending about 5 hours through lunchtime on the flight, without anything to eat, just a bottle of water. Going by flight saved me a 1.5 day train journey which would have cost 1500/- odd 3AC. I think that about sums up the good and bad of Indian air travel.

Catching up with Panduri Srinivas in Delhi was very good. Panduri was my classmate in Timpany School for a long time and during a couple of those years we were quite close and vibed a lot. He stayed on in Timpany for his 11th and 12th, then studied Civil Engineering at Andhra University and IIT Kharagpur. After that he wrote the UPSC exams and joined the Indian Engineering Services. Since then he's been mostly working with the National Highway Authority of India with postings in Orissa, Hyderabad and for the past several years, New Delhi. He lives in Indirapuram which is the other side of the highway from NOIDA. Construction is booming in that part of Delhi, just like Bangalore. Its quite frustrating to see so much happening and not have any kind of finger in the pie :-).
Srinivas himself lives in a nice little gated community of say 100 flats distributed between several low rise complexes. Its quite striking how similiar it is to a american apartment complex. He says its appreciated in value about 4 times since he bought it :-). Srinivas' wife Suseela works at a nearby hospital as a doctor while also doing a course. She was mostly friendly and hospitable. They have a son Tanmay.
I plumbed Srinivas for fundas regarding how its like working for the goverment and so on. Had a lot of interesting conversation that is difficult to capture on the blog. He does seem to deal directly with the Union minister in charge of roads which is quite cool. He also feels that projects executed by the NHAI are typically done well and without a lot of corruption unlike other road projects. He knew Satyendra Dubey well ( the highway engineer who was murdered) and has a quite different insider's take on what happened there, than the story in the media. I think he's doing quite well in his job and is seen as a rising start, but wants to quit at some point and join the private sector. I hope to keep in touch with him and visit again in Delhi. They are quite constrained by Suseelas' job and the kid's school so they don't travel much nowadays.

From Delhi, on by train to Pathankot in the Punjab.

Next trip

I leave by flight day-after tomorrow to New Delhi. I will stay there a night with a classmate from way back when, from Timpany, Panduri Srinivas. It will be good to meet him after so long. Then on a train to Pathankot in Punjab. Get off at Pathakot and go to a small town/settlement called Siddibari. This place is a Chinmayananda mission and my parents are currently there (or just reaching) for a retreat of a few days. I will join them towards the last part of the retreat, but won't actually take part, will wander about a bit on my own. The place is close to Dharmasala and Mcleodganj where the Dalai Lama has his residence so it would be great to wander around there for sometime. On 11th, with my parents (and a large group of other Chinmaya folks) we will be heading to Vaishnodevi to climb to the top of the mountain and see the shrine. A little bit concerned about this part as its going to get quite cold and I am also quite out of shape. From Vaishnodevi we go to Amritsar and then back to Vizag with my parents via Delhi. I will stay in Vizag for a few days and want to spend some time with my nephew who is studying for IIT and engineering entrances. Hopefully I can help him in some of his preparation. I also am hoping to meet a Mr. P.D. Kameshwara Rao, a social worker who works a few hours outside Vizag. My friend Balaji, spent some time during his own exploratory stint, and came away full of affection and regard for the man. He continues to keep in touch with him. I haven't got PDKs contact info from Balaji so a little dicey on that front.

Overall, quite excited :-). It will be great to spend some time travelling in north India where I have hardly spent any time so far, and also go to Vizag which has been on the agenda for a while. Perhaps a cautious rapproachment with my mother with whom I am not currently on the best of terms is possible.

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This is the 99th post on this blog ( I am trusting blogger counts correctly). Mentioning it now, in case I forget to mention it for the 100th one :-). Its been great fun.

A humanities evening

Okay here's the blog about the event I went to with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Upendra Baxi. Actually I'm finding it quite hard to say something concrete about the event. Its all quite nebulous and ambiguous. I can't say I didn't understand anything at all :-), but at the same time if you ask me what the talk was about, I wouldn't be able to say much. I think :-) they talked about 'subaltern' stuff, a specialty of GCS, which means (vaguely) those who don't have a voice. They touched on the law of course since that is Upendra Baxi's area, and I think they tried to pursue some points about how the law could be used to aid subalterns and so on.

Anyway. Having said the above, actually I came away with a good impression of both these people. The thing is, they are not random abstruse intellectuals (or atleast not *just* random abstruse intellus !), GCS does social work in Bengal, and Upendra Baxi is a cat on human rights (Ramaswamy Iyer, in his book I talked about earlier, speaks very highly of Baxi, says his book, The Future of Human Rights, 'blazes with a deep commitment to the idea of human rights'). So I think they are grounded people, but being college professors, they also get very deep into some specialization. They came across as very friendly and approachable and nice people. The discussion was hopelessly discursive and vague as one might expect from humanities people.

The other interesting thing about the event was the crowd which was obviously a different one from the software crowd and quite interesting to see.

Finally, re. celebrity spotting, it was a very productive evening. U.R. Ananathamurthy was there. He is a major local literary cat, prof of literature at Bangalore University and many other things. (there is a landmark Kannada movie called Samskara, that he is associated with in some way, probably wrote the book on which the movie is based). As a minor additional bonus, I think Ranjit Hoskote was also there, he is a 'cultural theorist' and writes occasionally for the Hindu. He wrote a book of poems recently that was thoroughly slammed.

Photos: 1.) GCS (on the left) talking to Anantamurthy. 2.) Baxi is the person in the white shirt 3.) audience shot

(The photos show people milling around and talking, but that was after the event, the event itself was conventionally done, the two speakers were in front and talking and the audience was seated).

Puppetry

One of the highlights of my previous trip to Timbaktu (the one before the latest), which I forgot to blog about, was a puppet show that I saw.
Timbaktu often uses puppet shows and street theater and songs kind of stuff as a way to spread awareness about something. Last time when I was there, the organic farming group was planning to use a puppet show to explain the concepts and advantages of organic farming. They way they do this is to 'outsource' the task to professional puppeteers. They explain the message that needs to be got across and the puppeteers then put together a show around the theme. When I was there, the puppeteers wanted to show what they had put together (first draft kind of thing) to the Timbaktu people and refine based on the feedback. So I got a chance to see that show. And it was great !

Traditionally this art form ('tholubommalaata') is used to portray scenes from the Ramayana during the Ramanavami festival. The way they did the show was to intersperse an organic farming story with the "Sundarakhanda" scene from the Ramayana (Hanuman going to Ceylon to meet Sita). The organic farming skit was really good, the Sundarakhanda scene was nice but rather slow. The farming portion was done very humourously - with very strong characterisation and great speaking styles. Technically it was marvellous and highly skilled. They use a white silk screen and manipulate paper figures behind the screen. They use bright overhead lights on top with the effect that you don't see the humans at the back. Overall, entertainment of a high order and not at all something that you would expect to see in an impoverished village area.

BTW -- the link I showed in a previous post to a report on the Timbaktu website is actually quite neat. There is some cool stuff at the end about some of the traditional arts and games, in particular one called 'utlamaana' that is particularly imaginative.

'Thippatheega Kashayam'

I've got a bee in the bonnet from something I ran into at Timbaktu.

So for a few months now, we have been hearing about this viral fever called 'chikungunya' that has been rampaging in south India. Its mainly affected Karnataka and AP and in very large numbers -- order of 25000 atleast according to one report I read. Its not fatal, the symptoms are fever and severe body aches that last upto 2 weeks. Its transmitted by mosquito bites. There is no cure for this, currently they just use symptomatic relief drugs and wait for the fever to run its course.
Since my first trip to Timbaktu I kept consistently hearing about a treatment for this fever that they more or less discovered themselves at Timbaktu. This is a herbal portion that they make from the stem of a local plant -- 'thippa'. The potion is called 'thippatheega kashayam'. They have been trying it widely, on the students in the school, on Timbaktu workers, and the villages around the area, even in Ananatapur town and they are very convinced at this point that this is a very effective medicine and brings the fever and aches down much faster than otherwise, in most cases.
For some reason, despite all the talk about the effectiveness of this thing, I did not hear anything about them trying to spread the word about this widely. On this visit I asked Mary (co-founder, and the person I work with actively there), about this and she said a couple of things : a.) from their experience word about this kind of stuff spreads quickly on its own, and her lots of people in the surrounding areas have started using this b.) they talked about this to some doctor friends in Anantapur, who have also started prescribing it, and they expect that these friends are working to publicise it within the medical community.
It seems to me that this is a very cool thing -- a low cost (presumably!) local, herbal medicine that works where no other current solution exists, for a widespread problem that is causing a lot of suffering. I'm getting somewhat worked up about this and wondering if something can be done to research this more and if it holds up, to spread the word widely.

Two scorpions and a baby Russells viper

Lots of interesting stuff to blog about from Timbaktu this time, but let me get some scary stuff out of the way first. This time around was a record of sorts -- in the 5 days that I was there, 2 people got bitten by scorpions and 1 person by a baby Russells viper (sp). The scorpion bites are not too newsworthy. Timbaktu is quite a deserted jungly place and there are quite a lot of scorpions especially after the rains. They like to come indoors probably because it is warm and dry and the inevitable happens. One of the bites was somewhat ironic -- you are always advised to wear footwear to reduce the possibility of getting bitten by a scorpion or snake. So this person woke up at night and wanted to go to the bathroom, so he put on his slippers -- and there was a scorpion on the slipper.

The snake bite was a big event. In fact this has been the first snake bite in the history of Timbaktu it seems. One person was doing some work, trimming a tree or something and didn't watch his step and stepped on a snake and got bitten. Another person who was nearby then ran for help to Dinesh, one of the people there. Dinesh is an expert on snakes and catches and handles them without fear. Then the guy who ran for help felt something heavy in his 'lungi' which he had folded to half length -- and found the snake there ! He jumped and managed to brush it off, and Dinesh caught it and put it into the bottle as seen in the photo. What had happened was, after getting bitten, person had shook the snake off his leg as one would do by reflex, and it was flung onto the other person's lungi without him noticing. It was a baby Russels viper, perhaps 3/4 of a foot long, but poisonous nevertheless. The bitten dude was rushed to Anantapur and now seems in stable condition. Its lucky that the snake was caught and identified as without that you don't know what kind of antivenom to use.

Personally, I'm concerned but not scared off. I don't work there, I spent most of the time at the office at another location. The guest house I'm staying at is as safe as they can make a building at Timbaktu, and there is a caretaker who adds a bit of safety by inspecting and cleaning the place. I'm quite scared and therefore quite careful to check the bedroom for stuff when I come in etc.