Bijapur talk contd.

Okay here's the detailed dope on the Bijapur talk.
I uploaded a whole lot of photos into a Yahoo album , which comes across nicely as a slideshow. I haven't been able to upload the videos due to a technical problem.

The college is called Dr. PG Halakatti College of Engineering and is run by the BLDE Trust which runs a whole lot of educational institutions in Bijapur. There are a small group of young enthusiastic lecturers there who do a lot of extra stuff and they basically set up my talk. These guys really impressed me. They are quite happy to be in Bijapur instead of migrating to Bangalore. At the same time they are energetic and enthusiastic and want to do something good for the local students. They have been running a placement service for the students in the college and in that connection they called me. They put me up in a nice hotel there (I didn't expect such a nice place). On the first day I met the principal and then sat with them and discussed the talk and logistics. The talk was restricted to CS, IT and EC students but still that would have been abot 150-200 students so we decided to do the course over 2 days, repeating the same thing for a fresh bunch of students on the second day. There was a common session on the first day for all the students to get things started.
The talk was about various things related to getting a job: background about software companies, the written test, group discussion, interview, resume, on-campus and off-campus recruiting. I had spent some time on various websites so I got to know a little about about some of the details of the interviewing process. One thing I was happy about was how effectively these students are using the web to help them prepare for jobs -- pretty much all the question papers of all the companies can be found online. Its a great way to share information so that everybody benefits and improves and the overall level goes higher.
At the training session, another person, Mukund, also gave a talk. He talked about a technical topic (networking). He was one of my reports at Juniper, and he was the person who put me in touch with the people at Bijapur.
On the first day the sessions did not go that well. The students were pretty quiet and did not particapate much. I came up with some stuff on the fly to get them to particapate more and it helped a little. Nevertheless the session was quite successful and the feedback (we passed out a feedback questionnaire) was quite good. The next day I emphasised more on involving the people and the response was much better. At the end of the day we did a mock group discussion with some of the students particapating and the rest looking on. It went very well and I think people really benefited from seeing hands-on how the dynamics in a group discussion work.

Some notes on the photographs: there are two photographs with a group of us standing on the road -- this is the group of lecturers who organized the whole thing.
There are some photographs of me and Mukund interacting with the students during a tea break. Priya was not very appreciative of some of these photos :-)
I feel quite mortified seeing some of the photographs of me talking -- my posture is terrible. I have a particularly bad posture when I hold the mic out to someone to talk -- I put my hand on my hip and thrust my tummy out in a very ungainly way. Defiintely a learning opportunity for me. The beard looks very bad in some views.

I think the students rarely get exposure to someone from industry and someone with some level of polish and communication so overall I think it was a pretty good experience from them, both from some hard facts as well as the general exposure.

I came back from the talk on something of a high, but haven't pursued this direction much because of getting involved with Arghyam. However I feel quite attracted to the idea of being like an independant consultant. I feel I don't have the drive and people-ness to be the leader of an organization, and at the same time I have enough thinking skills (ahem, Arvind) and general smarts and ambition to do something good. So an independant consultant seems like a good midway option.

There was one more interesting aspect to the experience -- the situation of having to be in control or to keep the attention of a roomful of people. I'm sure you would agree that this could be quite an unnerving experience. Luckily these students were amenable people (if not downright silent) so I didn't have that much stress. One of the things that helped me was having done the Landmark courses. Not from learning from the courses per se, but from watching how the course leader managed the whole experience. I was completely dazzled by the way the did it and unconsciously learnt a lot and adopted it as my gold standard. I felt a couple of times during the Bijapur course when I was hitting the high spots that I was like a Landmark Forum leader myself and dazzling the kids. Not that difficult actually since as I said these were people without a lot of outside exposure, but nevertheless a very good feeling and yes, good for the ego.

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I'm off to Vizag tomorrow (today actually, its late Sunday night here), will probably get a couple of posts in from there. Till then.

Vishwanath's position

We had a very animated discussion today at the talk with Vijayalakshmi of Development Alternatives. Vishwanath, one of the people at Arghyam posited the following (I am condensing a lot of animated discussion and argument):

The background 'juggernaut' phenomenon that is playing out in India is urbanization and rural migration. This has historically happened in all countries, and we too can expect a 80-20 mix soon, from the current 35-65. So all development and government action must be taken in the context of this phenomenon. It could be as extreme as cutting out a lot of the aid and investment that goes to villages and instead spending that on facilitating the smooth absorption of the migrant workers in the city and the planning and implementation of cities to be sustainable equitable places to live and work.

This is a hugely subversive statement (for people like me, and many many others) who have taken as obvious that "India lives in her villages" - kind of thing, and that huge amount of money and effort can and should go into the development of villages. But the basic argument above seems quite sound on the face of it.

Something to try to absorb and verify.

Vishwanath is a very nice guy. His background is rainwater harvesting, here are some of his stuff:

http://www.rainwaterclub.org
http://rainwaterharvesting.wordpress.com

Finally ..

Here are some 'teasers' of my talk.

Here is a short video
The video was taken with a phone camera and the resolution is really low, so needs to be seen at very small size. The audio on it is mostly impossible to make out. The video clip uses some funny 3gp file format, but it runs with QuickTime for me (would be good to know if someone tries it and has a problem).

More to come hopefully, unless I hear screams of protest from people after watching the video :-)

Timbaktu Organic is seeking investment

Timbaktu Organic is one of the projects of Timbaktu and notable because it is aimed at financial sustainability instead of working on philanthrophy. Ashis, who I talked about earlier, and Dinesh, the snake man, (among many other things), both work on Timbaktu Organic.
Timbaktu Organic wants to raise some of the money it needs in the form of loans from investors who believe in this kind of work. The loans will pay 5% interest. They did an earlier round of loan financing when they started working, and raised about 6 Lakhs then. Since then a lot of work has gone in and several successes demonstrated. They now are trying to raise 24Lakhs more through the loan route. The formal proposal with all the info is at the website www.timbaktu.org, see under the "Whats New" section. I hope someone is interested. I am planning to put in a little.

PS: Ahem, if you wanted to do something about my Mutyalappa post and just didn't get around to doing it, I'm still waiting ...

First few days at work

First few days at work at Arghyam have been good.
On the portal launch we made a bunch of progress and have a kind of working plan for the next month. However this has only made clear that we are woefully short of time :-). As I was prepared for, I stepped into a tough situation, but one of the reasons I signed up for the job was for the simulation of the adrenaline rush of a software company, so bring it on !
Things are already heating up a lot and I've not been able to tie about other loose ends (like blogging about my talk at Bijapur!) like I'd hoped.

There is almost 1 talk/meeting a day at Arghyam with an outside person, so it promises to be very stimulating. Already I ran into someone I knew a long while back. His name is Anand Krishnaswamy and I knew him through my cousin Naini, from Chennai. He is now with L-RAMP an entrepreneurship mentoring program based in Chennai. He visited Arghyam to explore partnership possibilities. We had lunch together after his visit to catch up. Yesterday we had an interesting person called Anand Jalakam who has a long background of field work in the area of water, including 14 something years implementing rural drinking water solutions as an employee of the goverment of Andhra Pradesh. That discussion was somewhat contentious with several disagreements, and I came away confused, which is not bad -- I have some more way to go to get a handle on the issues.
Today someone from a well-known NGO called Development Alternatives is going to be coming.

Updates from here and there

--Another milestone, though somewhat dubious -- according to Google, I have crossed 10,000 'page impressions' on the blogs (combined) yesterday. I'm not sure how they define a 'page impression', and the ClustrMap at the bottom of this page shows a much lower number. Nevertheless, it is some metric and it passed a milestone !

--I leave on Monday for a 10 day trip to Vizag. The primary purpose is to coach my nephew for taking the engineering entrances. Really. Although its been many years back since I studied the stuff, I do remember some of it and I have a sense of how to approach things. So I feel that I should try to contribute something. When his elder brother was taking the exams I was at my old job and didn't have the time to do anything much and felt bad about it. So feels very good to do this now. I coached him earlier when I was in Vizag in July and he says he benefited from it. The other thing I plan to do while at Vizag is meet a social worker called P D Kameswara Rao near Vizianagaram. Balaji, who has been keeping an benevolent avuncular eye on me during my sabbatical in case I do something stupid, has always been keen that I meet this person.
And might try to meet one or more Timpany friends there. And trying to squeeze some other stuff too. Lets see.
Oh, and it would be great if I could give my placement talk to some colleges while at Vizag. If someone knows somebody at an engineering or other college in Vizag, who can set this up for me -- I owe you a big treat.

The Gol Gumbaz and Ibrahim Roza, Bijapur

I did a little sightseeing in Bijapur, specifically the Gol Gumbaz and the Ibrahim Roza.

Bijapur is quite a nice little town, with a whole bunch of ruined or semi-ruined monuments scattered throughout the city. The past is definitely woven into the city, and its somewhat unique that way. The two most notable monuments are the ones mentioned above. The Gol Gumbaz is stated by Lonely Planet to be a 'massive ill-proportioned' building, but I didn't see anything ill-proportioned about it. BTW, the ICSE history book (Kundera!) had a photo and mention of it, and I remember it from there. Good old ICSE history, I actually learnt a fair amount from it, and it created in me a hankering to see all the ancient monuments that are mentioned there, which I've only been able to satisfy of late. Anyway. The notable thing about the Gumbaz is that the dome is the second largest in the world after St. Peter's Cathedral at the Vatican. Ho-hum. But its still a really nice building.
Muslim architecture in India seems to get enthu about acoustics. The Golconda fort outside Hyderabad has this amazing stuff, where somebody at the bottom of the hill can clap and someone standing only at a specific spot near the peak of the hill, can hear the clap. Somehow they engineered the acoustics to do that. I would guess it would work as a useful security measure in an emergency. The Gol Gumbaz has another acoustic trick. There is a gallery running around the dome where you can enter. Any sound in this area echoes around 10 times, very clearly. Also if you sit at diametrically opposite ends of the gallery, you can hear very low noises (like the clattering of a keychain) from one side to the other. This particular trick I've seen elsewhere, notably at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. But that doesn't take away from the overall effect of the "Whispering Gallery" which is quite an awe-inspiring place, though can get bloody noisy with screaming kids. We went in the morning so had the place to ourselves for a while.

I did a Yahoo photo album out of the Gol Gumbaz photos. They were taken by a budding photo enthusiast, Bapu, a very sweet chap and a lecturer at the college where I gave my talk. The photos are pretty good especially for someone who is just starting off. Better than most of mine :-(

The Ibrahim Roza below is another graceful monument, but not particularly much to say about it, and I didn't take many photos

Its official

After a very quick round of conversations, I agreed to join Arghyam, for a temporary period (through Jan) at the end of which we would discuss if it mutually works to make it more long-term.

It was a very sudden thing, and I'm glad I made up my mind quickly as I'm usually very slow about these kinds of things. Arghyam is a organization that does a few things in the broad area of 'water', its mission being 'safe sustainable water for all':
-- It funds innovative projects that are in line with the mission
-- It organizes conferences and other fora for discussioins to propagate the mission
-- It lobbies with government
-- It is setting up a 'water portal' as a clearninghouse of information about water in India.

I'm personally being hired (its a paid job) as a product manager for the last item. They have the v1.0 launch of the water portal coming up and they are stressed for people to help do the launch. Don't tell anybody but the PM might be officially launching the portal.


Why did I take this up ?
-- the job description sounded really juicy, including stuff like 'liasoning with international agencies in the area of water'. The offical job description is 'senior product manager' which is a nice title, and should I want to go back to tech world, it will actually be very good experience to have. I expect that I will get to meet and interact with a whole bunch of more people and that may open new doors and new directions. Water is a very key area in India and the rest of the world. There are various dire predictions by very mainstream organizations, how the world is getting shorter and shorter of water and there will be more and more disputes and even wars over water going forward.
-- I was getting a little concerned as I knew the deadline for getting a 'real job' or atleast to start making livelihood money was March 07. This gives me a little headstart on that, while doing stuff that is entirely in line with the objective of the sabbatical. So if this gig turns out to be short term, I will have bought myself some more time after that if needed.
-- Arghyam is a high profile NGO because is funded by an endowment by Rohini Nilenkani, wife of Nandan Nilenkani (google him if you don't know). BTW - the endowment is of the size of 100 crores so that gives you an idea of the kind of money Rohini and Nandan have. I met Rohini briefly on Saturday. Nice person, but would not be appropriate to dissect her more ! Because of its high profile it gets attention from lots of places for eg. Sam Pitroda of the National Knowledge Commission is very keen on the water portal, Saifuddin Soz, Union Minister visited Arghyam a while back, Jeff Sachs gave a public talk under their auspices, and Bunker Roy was also there.

Sajini -- surprise for you, Arghyam's CEO is Alli. She had posted on the Coromandel mailing list with the job description and that's what got me to start talking to her. For the others, the CEO is an old friend from the Vizag Coromandel days, with whom I've worked in a company in the US, WebMD.

Hampi dreams (and nightmares)

Things are in a sudden state of flux. I am considering a job offer with a tech-centric NGO here in Bangalore, which I would want to take up as a short-term thing, though paid and full-time. At the same time I have just come off this gig in Bijapur, which went very well and am wondering how to take that forward. The biodiesel thing is hanging in the background, I had earlier given an in-principle 'yes' to the people who had invited me to join. There are a couple of projects at Timbaktu that I took on that need to be worked on. And I am off in a week to Vizag to tutor my nephew. And lots of other smaller things to take care of. When I had come back from the trip I had written up a long list of to-dos and suddenly its all pushed to a side by this new opportunity, for which I need to decide quite quickly. Definitely a feeling of being swamped.

Lots of photos and videos from Bijapur and Hampi but uploading them is a real chore as they take such a long time and too often Blogspot or Flickr fails halfway through and I have to start yet again. Perhaps I will start with just some writeup and get to the photos later.

Hampi first. Hampi is a very unique place and hard to convey. Its amazing but is difficult to absorb and got to be frustrating. The very brief story is that it was a a huge urban area (a metropolis of its time) with perhaps a half million people living in it. It was the capital of the Vijaynagar empire of which Krishnadevaraya was the most successful king and Hakka and Bukku (whom you might remember from history textbooks) were the founders. After a decisive battle which it lost, the city was savaged by the winners to such an extent that it never recovered after that, and today is just ruins. But the ruins are so striking (so .... ruinous, one might say) that I was constantly left trying to imagine what the city might have been like in its heyday.
Well, there is a huge amount more that I learnt regarding the full story of Hampi, but I am not feeling enthused about making a history lesson of the blog. The facts are remarkable though, and for now I'll leave you with just an exhortation to learn more about it, I'm sure a google will yield more than enough information.
All the guidebooks say that you have to stay for atleast 2 days at Hampi to really soak in the atmosphere. I reached on Monday afternoon, and intensively toured the place for a day and a half and at that point got some kind of overdose, and left although I had planned to stay an extra half day. There is sooo much of stuff at Hampi and the sculpture is so elaborate, and the ruins are so striking that beyond a point it gets too much to absorb. Perhaps the right way to do it is at a very relaxed pace seeing a little each day. I squeezed in a lot during my a day and a half there, and there were atleast 2 or 3 more striking things that I particularly wanted to see but didn't get to do, not to mention like 30 other things that were mentioned in the guidemaps as worth seeing.


I was reflecting on the Hampi experience today, and got the feeling (which I have got before but not quite so strongly or definitively) that I should stop visiting Indian temples. The level of effort and ability that has gone into the architecture and sculpture is so absurdly high that it simply cannot be absorbed. Any one temple out of hundreds of th best ones would boggle your mind. So keeping on seeing these temples just isn't working beyond a point, the mind stops reacting. At the same time, all this stuff is out there, so what's an appropriate way to react or deal with it ? I think the right thing is to get engaged with this stuff in a more serious way than just gaping at it. For eg. I was just thinking that it would be *fantastic* to be part of an archeological expedition working on some ruins. Just a (far fetched) way of getting involved with the stuff more concretely. Or (again farfetched) since sculpture and carving is such a intimate part of the Indian ethos and dates back to so long, learning this art as a hobby would be a way to be in sync with Indian heritage.

Whatever -- my next holiday is going to be to go hiking somewhere in nature, far away from temples !



I uploaded about 12 of the photos to Flickr. Here is the link, the photos are all tagged with 'Hampi'

http://www.flickr.com/photos/despoki/tags/hampi/

They are well worth a full-size look. Also at the link above you should get a link to all photos on Flickr tagged with 'Hampi', so if you are interested you can click on that and get everybody's Hampi pics, not just mine. There's also a post at the Written Word.

More to come

AID petition

I'm back, but before I head off trying to exhaustively empty my mind of the just-concluded trip, here's a petition forwarded by Ashis Panda who I wrote about earlier. His wife Madhulika is currently working with the Bheels talked about in the petition. The pdf page with the background on the petition is quite a sad read.
AID is the Association For India's Development

A fellowship for Mr. Mutyalappa ? (long post!)

Quite a while back I had talked about one of the more capable people who worked at Timbaktu. The post is here and I'm pasting a snippet here:

The guy I mentioned above is quite a remarkable chap and 'discovering' him was something of a high point of the trip. He stands out quite quickly in a crowd due to his abilities and drive. Earlier he was involved with several things including the People's War Group and politics (he was close to Paritala Ravi for those familiar with Andhra politics), but finally found a niche for himself at Timbaktu.

I have been wanting to do an update on him and make the proposal that I am making below, and finally getting around to doing it.

So Mutyalappa (the guy I talked about above) is quite a remarkable chap as I said above. He's a natural leader with a very strong personality (and something of a drinker too and hotheaded, someone who can't suffer fools gladly). He is a completely local person with very little outside exposure, nevertheless he's very smart. You get the sense that he is going to go places. Even before I was asked to work with him formally on a couple of the projects, he instinctively gravitated towards me and spent some time getting to know me etc, though not in a 'suck=up' way. I think it was like an instinctive curiousity about how the outside world is, what do people do how do they progress etc. He wheedled an answer from me about how much I had been making at my previous job, stuff that I don't like to talk about at Timbaktu. People like him are rarely in social work as they gravitate towards other more, shall we say .. coercive .. methods of getting things done and making money. However, in his case, somehow, perhaps due to early influences from good people, he comes across as genuinely keen to solve some social problems even if there is no personal benefit involved. His approach probably would be rather less consensus-driven than I would prefer, but that's all right.

He did a whole bunch of roles at Timbaktu and did well at all of them and at the time I started going there, I was wondering if the organization would manage to keep him interested and focussed. As if on cue, he impulsively decided to run for 'sarpanch'-ship of his village. This is quite remarkable from a couple of reasons: 1 - he comes from a caste (boyya -- goatherds I believe) that has traditionally been backwards and under the thumb of one or the other of the more powerful castes. 2 - sarpanch elections have become pretty corrupt, politicised and money-laden in Anantapur. Usually only the powerful with lots of money stand and throw a lot of money around (liquor, lots of goat and chicken) and buy their way to the post, and then try to misappropriate money alloted for work in the village. Basically a microcosm of the national political scene though more distressing that even at the most micro level the rot has gone deep. So it was quite astonishing that he decided to stand for election, kind of the way it would be for someone we know to stand for election as an MLA or MP. People at Timbaktu were quite surprised that he did it. There was some background there, people asked his brother to stand for election, but he had more than 2 kids and the rules in AP prohibit people with more than 2 kids from standing for sarpanch (! that sounds unconstitutional to me), so he decided to go ahead and do it. Having decided, he is not one for half measures so he went ahead and spent a fair amount of money on said booze and non-veg (another interesting expenditure is to pay for the travel costs of people who have migrated from the village to Bangalore or wherever, to come to the village on election day and vote!). But I believe he managed to keep his campaign basically clean in that he didn't get indebted to anyone or seek help from people who would later come back and ask him to do favours for me. He won the election.

So now he is in a position to do something really good for his village. And its very very rare to have an opportunity like this where a smart, educated strong competent person with integrity intact and a background in social work is elected. Its possible he could do a fantastic job and then go on to become a leader at a higher level (the sarpanch term is for 3 or perhaps more years, which is enough time to do something substantial). However he is now quite deeply in debt and the position comes with a paltry honorarium of 2500/- or so a month. So to me this is like a very 'unfolding in real time' situation. This guy could go either way I feel, with his huge debt on one side and his drive to do something good on the other.

So we come to the final point: I think an intervention to help him out at this point might be crucial. If he gets some help to tide him through financially, that may be what keeps him on the 'right' side of the fence. I seriously wanted to send this mail a long time back, but it got lost in bunch of things, including my own diffidence to try this kind of intervention. But recently in talking to Mary, she said that she was trying to organize a fellowship for him, for pretty much the same reasons, though she did not put it in quite the stark either-or way that I did above. So with that confluence of ideas I thought I should really write up this post.

So my proposal is: are there people reading this who would be interested in contributing money towards a fellowship for him for a year. There are lots of details (like we would expect some specific output for the fellowship) but they can be worked out. The size of the amount -- my guess is 3000 to 5000 per month is a decent amount. If a few people put together fairly small amounts (esp. if the small amounts are in dollars!) it should be possible to cobble this together.

If you are interested please mail me directly or add a comment on the website whichever you feel appropriate.

Going to Bijapur

I'm off today (Thu) evening to Bijapur to do my stuff there. Both excited and scared. Its a really nice opportunity and I enjoy interacting with young fresher types. But its something that I've never done before and I'm having a hard time coming to grips with what exactly would be useful to talk to them about. Some organizing glitches that are not helping either.
There are a couple of historical monuments at Bijapur that I hope to take in while I'm there. I'm planning to stop for atleast a day at .. Hampi. This I am really looking forward to. Hampi is a world heritage site that I've been wanting to see for a long long time now.

Okay, so have to see how it all goes :-(

Pan-IIT 2006

Shall I go ?!
The IIT Alumni Global Conference is an annual (I think) schmoozefest of IIT alumni. This year its to be in Mumbai from 23rd to 25th December. The focus is (supposedly) on development issues. There is a valedictory by Manmohan Singh. What a great feather-in-the-cap for celebrity spotting !

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PS: Added the missing photo to a previous post

Nemeli trip

Priya and her parents



We drove down to Priya's home village and spent a couple of days there and drove back. Drive time was about 6.5 hours, first to Chittoor by national highway and then by a secondary road to Tiruttani. Tiring driving -- I don't enjoy driving as much as I used to, age showing.

The drive from Chittoor to Tiruttani was gorgeous, but didn't take photos. India in the monsoons is such a pleasure, particularly rural India. Especially in the drier areas the contrast with other times of the year is remarkable.

On the way from Chittoor to Tiruttani we were waylaid by a police group checking documents. I had forgotten to bring my insurance papers and so gave them 100 Rs instead to let me off. For a guy who hates bribes, I end up doing it remarkably often ...

Priya's family house in the village is a lovely place. Its quite rundown due to lack of maintanance but still has a lot of charm. It was built a long time ago in a traditional style which I like. The house is also quite large. It has a series of doors (6!) that are all in a perfect straight line : the main door to the house, then the entrance to the main living room, then the entrance to the kitchen, then the cemented backyard, then the walled-in garden, and finally the open garden. The full plot area of the house is therefore huge.

We brought Priya's parents back with us and they are here right now. Her dad leaves in a day or two and her mom will be here for some more time. Both have recovered quite well from their chikungunya.



In their backyard

Bijapur trip

A very interesting trip is coming up. I came to know of a small enterprising group of people who after doing various stuff ended up running a placement cell kind-of place for their alma mater, an engineering college in Bijapur. They invited me down to come and talk to the students about corporate world, interviewing, getting a job, stuff like that. Generally students from small-town engineering colleges don't get enough exposure to the life in companies in tech centers like Bangalore, so I think these kind of talks could potentially benefit them a lot. Also the area of training exiting students so that they can be absorbed into industry is something that I've been interested in for a while now. During all the recruitment at Juniper it was clear that the level of most freshers leaves a lot to be desired and there seemed to be a real business (and social) opportunity there. McKinsey did a study where they say that some large percent (75 if I remember right) of all engineering grads coming out of India are 'unemployable' (I don't know what exactly they were using as their benchmark for employability).
So these people have agreed to pay my expenses (a 12 hour bus ride!) and give me a small honorarium which makes the whole thing work very well for me. And if this thing works out well and there is scope to expand and do the same or similar thing on a larger scale it would be very cool.

I am very interested in comments of people in a position to know what I am talking about, regarding what I could usefully talk to them about.