Update on worms/composting: so I got the folks who sold me the composting kit to come in and take a look at it. They did not have much useful stuff to say about the worms (actually maggots, but that word makes them sound more gross than they are). Anyway I basically rooted out all the worms and threw them all out, and the problem seems to be solved for now, though I'm sure not permanantly as these things breed like mad. Anyway the good thing though is the lady who came was quite happy at the state of my compost and showed me how to sieve the material to get the final fine-grained compost which gets applied. So I do have a small quantity of compost at this point, and once I get the sieve needed, I can get a bunch more. This is all quite gratifying.
For those of you who may wonder why I keep harping on composting, I really get a lot of satisfaction out of it. When you go around Bangalore you can see piles of garbage lying here and there and its really sickening. In our old place, the servant maid would take out the garbage everyday when she was leaving. I didn't follow up, but I guess she would just be casually chucking it in a drain close to our house. I asked around but didn't find out about any working solution to garbage disposal. On a macro scale the city government is way behind in coming up with working ways to dispose garbage. So now I'm really happy to be able to take care of most of our household garbage ourselves.

My manager at ex-work has been taking some interest in my sabbatical, and he recently called him. Apparently another friend of his is also looking around for something different to do and my manager told him about biodiesel and that I knew a little about it. The friend asked if he could meet me, so the three of us met up last night and I put some fundas. It was quite interesting and I'm happy to meet lots of different people and see what they're up to. This chap was BITS Pilani/ XLRI Jamshedpur/ McKinsey/ Various tech companies in the US/ Moved back to India to start the Indian office of an MNC/ Made a big stash of money and quit.