Ashis Panda -- a nice guy

Ashis is one of the nice people I have met at Timbaktu. He is young, has been working for only a couple of years after BE and MBA. He studied at BITS Pilani where he took part in NSS work and got interested in development work there. So he went to IRMA (Institute of Rural Management, Anand) for an MBA and currently works on a project called Timbaktu Organic. They try to organize farmers to farm organically and then market the produce.

Ashis recently wrote a good article for the BITA alumni paper about his (and his wife's) journey. Its an excellent read. I got his okay to link to it on this blog.

Here is the article


Here is an article about Ramon Aybar who is mentioned in the above

Lets hear it for my sis!!

Sajini


I want to acknowledge my sister's (Sajini) unstinting enthusiasm for my writing and blogging efforts. Since the time she discovered my previous blog (at despoki.net), she has always been thoroughly appreciative of my writing and consistently encouraged me to write more. She reads the blogs fanatically and she was pretty much the only one (as far as I can see) who took some interest in my revenue generation efforts. And she just sent me a check so that I could meet the target I had set for myself for earning some money through the blog. That way I can stop worrying about blog traffic or ad-clicks. So thanks for all the interest and support, sis !

While I'm doing thanks, let me also acknowledge the other regular blog readers and commenters who have made the blog more interesting and given me a reason to continue blogging. Thanks Arvind, Sidharth and Sukesh (aka Anonymous). Your interest makes the blog go ! And if there's someone else who reads the blog on a regular basis (atleast once a week), I'd love to know who you are.

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Another blog milestone: I'm 4 short of 200 posts (including both the blogs). So its close to an average of 1 post a day since April since I started the sabbatical, although I actually started blogging earlier.

Head on over there !

I've been seeing that traffic on the other blog is only a tenth of the traffic on this one (such as it is). Why ?!!!! Head on over there, lots of cool stuff there !

Skype (a little more)

Today I talked to one person in Australia and then one person in the US using Skype. Worked fine though the person in Australia had some trouble hearing me, so I guess I need to get a mike after all.
Skype rocks !

Skype

Its quite embarrasing for a putative techie like me to be caught discovering Skype in October 2006 but here goes.

After some earlier half-hearted attempts dating back to 2002, I downloaded Skype again recently and it works like a dream. The biodiesel group that I am talking to uses it so they asked me to get on it too, so I did. Its simple and elegant, and so far (I've only had one conversation yet !) I've been able to get away without using a mike or headphones and still get good clarity. Skype positions itself as a way of making phone calls using your computer, though they're basically a more targeted Yahoo Msgr with Voice which I talked about earlier. Still its pretty cool. I came back from our Nemeli trip (yeah, we're back, I'll blog about the trip later) and came online to check mail and bingo! somebody notices that I'm online and Skypes me and we have a conversation. Powerful (and empowering).

That's all for now (ie very early Thu morning) folks.

To Nemeli!

Okay, sudden trip.
Both of Priya's parents have got Chikungunya, the current scourge of rural south India. So we thought we would make a quick trip down to their village (Nemeli, border of TN and Andhra) and bring Priya's mom atleast back here with us, so she can get some rest and care.

More when we come back. You can google Chikungunya for more information, I also talked about it in a previous post about Thippatheega kashayam. I am a stupid fellow, I should have gotten some of that medicine with me on one of my many trips to Timbaktu

RSS, Syndication, ATOM and all that

I finally spent some time, and got the basics of this working. FYI in case you are interested.

Lots of sites nowadays allow you to do 'RSS' or 'Atom' syndication. What this means is that you can have a program on your computer that will keep checking when new content comes onto those sites and let you know. Using the program on your computer you can therefore from one central place, check a lot of different websites for their latest content. (If you're such a web junkie as to need such a tool, probably your first priority should be to wean yourself off the net in the first place, but we digress).

So here's a simple and relatively lightweight 'reader' (that's the program that sits on your comp. and monitors websites):
Feedreader , http://www.feedreader.com/

And you can syndicate my blog by entering the following URL into feedreader:
http://despoki.blogspot.com/atom.xml

I left out a lot of details, but feel free to mail if you want to seriously do this.

Happy Deepavali

Taking stock

A 'taking stock' post has been long overdue.

I've been going through a small down period.

Regarding what I've been doing at Timbaktu, there are things that I am happy about and other things less so. I have enjoyed doing stuff there a lot, I have learnt a lot, and I have met and interacted and become friends with some really cool people. What I've done for them has not been that great but its certainly helped them and they have been very appreciative. Its fulfilled the long hankering I've had to work with an NGO. However I've not engaged deeply enough with them, since I don't stay there or work full-time. I've told them that I would like to finish the 'engagement' in December. Right now there is a big messy project that I've taken to update their website and another pending small project to do a small Access database for them that has been causing me inordinate problems (if somebody knows Access well, and wants to help out with this one -- very welcome).
There were times when doing NGO work seriously full-time seemed like a very attractive option. But that option has really not come together to be a serious possibility at this point.

The chief purpose of the trip to Hyderabad was to talk to somebody about a work opportunity that came up unexpectedly in... biodiesel. There's lots and lots of stuff that I could talk about biodiesel, its something that I've been following for a while now. However I'll leave it for now with just a website that gives an excellent introduction to the topic: www.treeoilsindia.com. The opportunity has lots of positive and negative things about it and its weighing on my mind quite heavily.

Besides that, there is a small opportunity (more about it later) to give some training sessions for graduating students at an engineering college (what the real world is like kind of thing), which is something that is close to my heart. If I was really keen I could perhaps expand that into a job, or find something else along those lines.

Other than that -- lots of things have been going through my mind but without much direction and resolution. 6-odd months off from work is a long time and twinges of guilt for not doing a 'real' job are becoming more frequent. Also some kind of dissastifaction with the kind of opportunities that are coming up as they are not the 'perfect' opportunity. That I think is something that can be dealt with -- if I do commit to something and go with it, managing the shortcomings is more doable, then when one is in an uncommitted state. Especially when I'm in Bangalore, I tend to slip into a 'lassitude' state.

There are some long pending things that I'm glad to be resolving. The driver's license was a big deal, and right now, I'm in the process getting some stuff done regarding the flat that we bought (a 'khata transfer') that also has been long pending. When I went to Hyd, I did some stuff regarding the lost registration for my car, but that is proving to be a harder nut to crack.

The blog(s) has also reached a level of staticity. Partly because of the above broodings, I haven't been blogging that much. Blog traffic has also levelled off, and ad clicks is down to zero :-). So some ambivalence on that front too.

So that's where things are at. Comments are very welcome.

Timbaktu Annual Report

The Timbaktu Annual Report for 05-06 which I spent a lot of time on, is available at their website now (www.timbaktu.org). Look under the What's New section. The photos are not of good clarity, we hope to fix that. Its worth a read, though its long and wordy. Comments welcome.

And a few more

I wish ...



Sculptures on the campus of the JNTU School of Fine Art where my nephew studies. I was wondering among the sculptures and brushed against one, and the head fell off and broke :-). The guard was not too happy, but twasn't my fault, the head had already come off and someone had just placed it back on.





Slightly random photo of handwork being done on garments. Off Commercial Street in Bangalore

More Timbaktu Photos

This is a really striking sight in the area. Since the time I have been going there, I have never seen any standing or flowing water. Seeing this much amount of water at one go was somewhat disorienting :-). The interesting thing is that this water was there only because of a 'check dam' (see below), that was constructed by Timbaktu only this year. This is a very striking demonstration of the value of small local water harvesting and storage structures.




Groundnut field



A 'ear' (?) of millet




Millet field

Timbaktu was gorgeously green this time. There have been good rains recently and the fields near the office had grown tremendously since the last time I was there. Here's a lovely movie (8MB) of swaying fields. (Seems to work better by right-click and saving to disk).

Quick post -- Meenakshi temple

Two not-so-great photos of Meenakshi temple, that don't do it justice

Budgeting

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An interesting part of my sabbatical has been doing the budgeting for it. Till now, I have never done any kind of serious budgeting, I never kept track of how much I spent each month or had any targets for saving x amount of money. Taking a break from a job meant being much more clear about the financial position and how much was being spent each month etc. It has been very useful experience to try to do this kind of planning and that's one of the positive outcomes of the sabba. I have been quite ...perhaps 'reckless' in the planning actually -- I set things up so that if the sabbatical continued through Dec 2007, I would have completely exhausted all my savings. I intended to wind up before that though, but set end 2007 as a 'drop dead' date.

Here are some of the calculations I did: 25,000/- per month for the monthly payment on my houseloan, 4000/- p.m. for the basic household expenses (kitchen and other stuff, stuff that mostly falls in Priya's plate). 16,000/- for all other expenses. Besides that there were a number of 'capital expenses' items that I estimated would be required. And an emergency fund and some buffer. Among the capital expenses was a decent amount (2 Lakh) set aside for travel.

So here's what happened in the past few months of implementing. The first thing that caused a problem was the travel budget. I was very keen on doing the Europe trip, but in some subconscious denial of the expense that it would actually involve, I didn't do an realistic calculation. All counted, the Europe trip took close to 3L so that sent that portion of the budget for a toss. The other part was that I had underestimated quite badly in putting just 16,000/- for other monthly stuff. Partly because I/we continued to do a fair bit of travelling which we are very keen on doing and I didn't want to compromise on that. Also we had got used to a particular lifestyle earlier and didn't want to start getting miserly. So I recently redid the budget and upped the monthly expenses by a third. During the course of the past few months it has also become clear that it makes sense to keep the sabba. to around a year. So the earlier budget underestimate doesn't hurt too badly.

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I'm leaving tomorrow to Timbaktu and will go to Hyderabad from there. Be back in about a week.

Kodai photos

http://www.flickr.com/photos/despoki/sets/72157594308573174/

Kodai photos - 2

The Kurinji flower is a Western Ghat speciality. The shrub blooms only once in 12 years and that too all the shrubs in an area bloom at the same time (synchronised). It bloomed this year, but we missed the peak.



Fresh carrots are a popular snack there



View of the resort


Hotel room -- wooden floors, a rarity in India




In front of a church. Story here - Priya had earlier been quite censorious of the other girl's short skirt. Later we asked someone to take a photo of us. Much to Priya's annonyance the guy included the other couple in the photo too, for no reason at all. I was much amused at the comeuppance.

Kodaikanal

Dew-laden flower -- closeup

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At Kodai, the weather was chilly, but I found it bracing. This is offseason but there were a moderate number of people around. I think off-season touristing of places like Kerala and hill-stations like Kodai is a great idea, if you have the patience to bear with the weather.

As I mentioned earlier, we were taking advantage of a friend who's a member of Club Mahindra which is a timeshare holiday thing. CM doesn't have a resort in Kodai, so through a second-level exchange the Kodai availability came through RCI (the international timeshare company) and then Sterling Resorts another Indian timeshare company, which actually owns the place. This trip was enough to convince me of the usefulness of timeshare holidays. The resort was good, the management was good, there were no hidden charges and everything went fine. Signing up for a timeshare right now is too expensive for me in my current state but I have really bought into the idea and would love to go on more such holidays.

There is not much to do in Kodai if you are an active sightseer ie. want to see lots of famous places or ooh-aah sights. But if you enjoy just chilling in the middle of nature and mountains, or trekking, its a great place with many nice locations. There is a lack of sync between me and Priya along these lines that reduces the potential of a vacation although we still do have fun. And of late I have been sticking to group trips where someone carts you around and you dutifully stare at the sights. I really need to get out of this mode and do something more 'real'. This trip we did do two nice things -- we went all around Kodai lake (6 km) on a tandem bicycle. Priya doesn't know how to cycle but she put enthu pedalling. The bike was old and clunky and it was quite hard work but we had a good time. The other thing we (I) did was get a traditional Kerala (Dhanwantari) massage at the resort, followed by a steam bath. It was quite interesting and I'd do it again, but there were no obvious benefits.

Apparently there are 'magic mushrooms' growing naturally in Kodai that will give you a high. We saw them and we brought one home with us, but since I'm not 100% sure that they are the the right ones, don't want to test it out.

We briefly touched Madurai. Due to logistical issues we didn't spend much time at the temple which was again a bummer. I guess I still haven't learnt how to do this properly.

We got lots of good photographs, perhaps I will upload more of them later. I took my camera manual along with me and started reading it and am discovering that there is more to photograhpy than point and shoot :-).

Blogger is not uploading photos properly right now, so more photos later.