And in other updates

Today I met Sanjay Kadaveru, a senior from IITM Jamuna. He has been invovled with a lot of interesting groups -- TIE (a entrepreneur network), the Pan IIT group (rediff has a lot of articles on the meet). More recently he has gotten involved with a group that's trying to use Indian diaspora (mainly N.American) to strengthen engineering education in India. The last is of some interest to me as there may be a possibility to do a consulting gig of the sort that I'm doing now at Arghyam.

The next month and further out is a little busier than usual on the social front. For new years' there's a party that is held at the apartment complex (Most big apartment complexes do this). I *never* really have fun at New Years but well, ets give it one more shot. There's a dinner with my IITM branchies to meet up with a visiting branchie from the US. There's a marriage of Shankar's (another branchie) brother in late Jan. In Feb we have my cousin's family in town. My parents plan to visit in April/May.

I have a very strange cough currently. I don't feel very sick or unenergitic, but when I have a coughing fit, it feels like I'm coughing my heart out and I have a scary feeling like I can't breathe. I got some medication from a doc but it doesn't seem to be helping.

I get some funny comments on the blog occasionally. Check out this one, third one in the list, on the post "Coaching Rohit". Sometime back I got a pretty nasty but funny one which I deleted. It was on the other blog on this post, which I guess was a kinda vulnerable post. You'll have to read the post to understand the comment which was "Sure. Here's one. Shut yer yap". (Well, screw you, you anonymous pommie lout, go out a beat up a rival football fan now ! )

The fun never stops at Arghyam ..

We fixed a date for the launch of the portal at the PMs residence in Delhi for 12th January. TERI (mentioned in a previous post) will be launching an energy portal at the same time. I helped a little bit in drafting notes for the PM's speech and a mail to Sam Pitroda to check out the website :-))))). I won't be going to Delhi for the launch :-(. It was a very intense last week but now things have lightened up and the portal seems to be in shape. You can have a preview of it at www.indiawaterportal.org. Note that everything is not yet done (Latin text signifies placeholders!) but would be happy to get feedback and bug notes.

Last weekend we met with two people from the Gates Foundation who were visiting. We had a good discussion and I learnt something about how the Gates Foundation functions. Very interesting. Myself and Priya also went to a party at my manager Sunita's place. Met a bunch of older friends, nice catching up. Today we had someone senior from Nestle come in to work to talk about their corporate social responsibility program but I skipped that.

The 2nd Annual Arghyam conference (invitation only!) is scheduled for late Feb. The focus will slowly shift away from the portal as it stabilizes, and things will get focussed on the conference. I don't know how much I will get invovled with the conference.

I'm enjoying this gig. Its the most fun I've had and the most productive I've felt for such a short span of time. It's kindof a dream job for someone with my inclinations and aptitudes. My rolodex has expanded *a lot*, besides Arghyam people, I've met bunch of people visiting Arghyam, and people at eGovernments.org and apparatusmedialab.com, Arghyam's technology partners.

Coaching Rohit

Pix: With Siddhu, my sister Rajini and her husband Naresh
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I have only one comment on my major 'vision' post !
I'm quite surprised. Even the regular commenters gave it a miss. If you think the vision is flawed, say so. I can take it !

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As I mentioned, the major reason for going to Vizag was to spend some time with my nephew helping him with his preparation for the engineering entrances. We mainly concentrated on Organic Chemistry and Permutations and Combinations and Probability, as he had missed these chapters at school due to illness. Most of the time we spent on Organic but nevertheless progress was quite slow, we only covered Alkanes, Alkenes and Alkynes. It was quite fun for me to get re-aquainted with a lot of the old stuff. Does anyone remember the Corey House alkane synthesis, Markovnikov (and anti-markovnikov) addition across a double bond and triple bond, IUPAC nomenclature ( 2,3 dimethyl buteane), benzene resonance structures.... It reminded me that (atleast part) of fashioning a new career for myself could involve working with high school and engineering stuff, as I enjoy the material. One of the things that I have on my agenda which I haven't done is meeting Sridhar Subramaniam from our Coromandel colony in Vizag who runs a engineering coaching center in Bangalore and is setting up a school too.
Getting back to topic, some of the material was quite difficult for me, the level of the coaching seems to have gone up and people do a lot of reaction mechanisms and stuff. Also Chemistry is a lot of mugging up and my nephew kept asking me 'why is this so?' and I felt bad to say: 'forget about that, just mug it'.
I could see that part of Rohit's problem was being able to plan and manage time, and being able to estimate realistically so that you don't get disappointed when you can't carry out what you estimated. I would've been as bad as he at that age and its only much later that I learnt a little (and a lot more to learn). I think there's a lot of inefficient studying happening among the high-school students and they would gain a lot from training in time manangement and planning.
Its not all fun being a coacher I found. You have to try to understand and adjust to your coachees level and aptitude/temperment. Occasionally you may get frustrated and show it which might actually get you results or might just discourage the person.

Siddhu, my other nephew (here and here) was also there, so I hung out with him a little. He enjoys shopping and is good at at, so I went shopping with him and bought me a cargo pants and a Lotto brand flip-flop.

Sajini -- to answer your comment, yes Rohit is quite thin due to two bouts of illnesses. But generally seems quite healthy and not sickly. He's grown tall, taller than Siddhu now.

I had my trusty New Balances stolen when I left them outside my parents' apartment ! These of Honolulu Marathon fame. Oh well, one mustn't get sentimental and attached. Someone is is hopefully gaining some value from them.

I had an interesting talk session with Mr. Vishweswara Rao who was a colleague of my dad at Coromandel. He now runs a small chemical plant. He's a very smart and energitic person. They had a lot of trouble selling what they made (diammomium phosphate, a fertilizer) because the market had fallen out of the business. They were in pretty bad shape but the man was able to change tracks midway to start making something else (calcium phospate derivate if I remember right) which is used in the material that is fed to domestic animals for which there is a much better market. He also branched out into engineering consultancy and has some patents to his name and is setting up a plant for somebody in Egypt (!). He felt that biodiesel was a risky area, and that another related area (generating power by burning or processing biomass) was much more interesting and that several commercially viable technologies were coming online. He also has a (rare) ability to view things at a high conceptual level and was commenting on the folly of a civilization that uses a 100 tonne car to transport a 100 Kg man, the energy cycle (does the total energy that go into making a solar cell exceed the energy output of the cell over its working life ?), stuff like that. He has travelled a bit and recommended the Dead Sea as a particularly striking place. I came away from the discussion with my head buzzing :-). Next time I go to Vizag I plan to visit their plant.

The other highlight of the trip was spending two days at Cheepurapalli near Vizianagaram, about 3 hours by bus from Vizag, with a social worker, P.D. Kameswara Rao. Hope to cover that in another post

Major Celebrity Sighting

Amartya Sen, R.K. Pachauri and Nandan Nilenkani at one go.

I had mentioned that I had got an opportunity to go to a talk by Amartya Sen through Arghyam. This was at a conference being organized by TERI in Bangalore. I went for it today. I didn't find Sen's talk too stimulating, but I kinda expected that from reading his books which are pretty dense, and which I find I am unable to absorb very well. However his warmth and sense of humour showed and I was quite happy to have the opportunity to hear him talk.
R.K.Pachauri is the head of The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), which is a very hi-profile org in the NGO sector. The chap is also very hi-profile, and was named to an India Today list of most powerful people in India. However I got a sense from someone whose judgement I respect, that TERI has become 'too successful' kind of thing -- it now hobnobs a lot with the government, does all this policy and conference stuff and perhaps is not as passionate or honest as it might have been.
Nandan Nilekani (the CEO of Infosys) was at the talk with his wife Rohini. He looks exactly as he does in his photos. He didn't talk, was in the audience.
At a panel discussion that I squeezed into prior to Sen's talk, there was 'Kentaro Toyama', 'Group leader for Technologies for Emerging Markets, Microsoft India'. Quite intriguing to see a Japanese in a MSFT India role and at a development conference. I missed the earlier part of the discussion, but he talked briefly towards the end. Kinda exactly the personality I would expect from a Microsoftie, with both good and bad points. Lot of energy and drive and freshness and well turned out. However not much substance. Not that I think MSFTies have no substance, but I would expect that at a development conference they would not have anything of value to say, and that's what I found :-)
I went to the conference with some scepticism, as I've developed a degree of cynicism about business-as-usual development work. By which I mean the NGO scene is so huge in India and the funding is so vast that it has become a sector by itself, not requiring any special commitment, but more like a career option. And there is an immorality in all the 5-star conferences and flying around by development workers. Anyway, the conference didn't make a strong impression either way. The people there (from the very superficial observation) did not strike me as particularly interesting or serious people, but I didn't see anything particularly bad either.

Didn't take a camera so didn't get pics, but anyway was quite difficult to get good pics.

At work ..

Yesterday we had Rajesh Shah of Oakland CA of Blue Planet Run and Peer Water Exchange come in to the office. Today Eklavya Prasad came in to talk about Megh Pyn Abhiyan, a low profile but very brave project implementing rain water harvesting in some of the poorest and dangerous areas of Bihar. This coming weekend Rohini is going to get us tickets to go to a talk by Amartya Sen. As you can see this job is fantastic exposure. Now if I can actually get some work done, and we can get this portal launched ...

Happy Birthday

Happy Birthday to you
Happy Birthday to you
Happy Birthday dear Sajini and Nandita
Happy Birthday to youuuu....

A vision for myself

Much to my surprise :-), my thoughts about long-term work are converging. The below is what might work for me. Since I have the tendency to change my mind 5 times a day, this may not go anywhere, but I think it will.

I would like to work as an outside consultant or on contractual basis for short term assignments. This fits my 'short attention span' kind of personality. I also am energized by working on clear and meaningful deliverables in short timespans (though I also get stressed out due to the same). Consulting kind of work seems to fit my personality in other ways. I have usually felt underqualified, overqualified and frustrated (all at the same time) at most of the jobs I have done :-). I think this kind of work will keep me happy rather than a corporate job. I will get to meet lot of different people and different work environments, which stimulates me.

I have several things that I can do in this kind of a consulting role. One is 'project management'. The job I am doing at Arghyam is a perfect example of that. They have a very clear deliverable (putting up the water portal), very clear deadline and timeframe (the PM is scheduled to be launching it in January). They have done a lot of work already but they needed a central person to pull it together and keep the project on track and keep people on the same page. This kind of thing seems to fire me up and get me going. I also helped Timbaktu to put together their Annual Report (read it!) and enjoyed that. I would love to be able to do this for more organizations. There is an organization called the Project Management Institute and I can join them and get some qualifications to make myself sound more impressive.
One thing that I found on the sabbatical is that 'ordinary people' (ie. non IT, non big city people) are tremendously appreciative if someone of that background tries to contribute something to them. It feels very good. I would love to work some of the time in those kind of environments instead of always following the money to the big cities and IT companies.
Another is the kind of thing I did at Bijapur. I would love to travel to different colleges and interact with the students and raise their awareness and capabilities. On the Vizag trip I interacted very briefly with a Physics teacher at Timpany school. She was really happy that I took the time to talk to her, and I have been interested in curriculum development and teacher development kind of things. So if I can do some stuff like that too, it would be great.

Like Arghyam and Timbaktu I can continue to work with social work organizations. This is criticall important to the vision. I can multiplex working for corporates and working for non-profits in a ratio that works for me and keep me really happy and fulfilled. Of course working for non-profits would be much less renumerative, and I might do things for free too.

Doing consulting means that after x months I can take a break, theoritically for as long as I want. This is *great* and something that I critically seem to need.

I would love to continue writing when I get the time, either through blogging or some other avenue. If I can get paid for it too, it would be really fulfilling and fit in perfectly with the overall picture. In the ideal dream picture I would have multiple income streams coming from doing multiple things that I like and at any given time I could be concentrating on any one of them.
I also want to spend a decent amount of time on personal development kind of things. I did a Landmark refresher course recently by the way but it didn't do much for me unfortunately. I want to take a Vipassana course and do more such things.
To complete the picture: I have to see how this fits with family life (in principal looks okay). Also would like to give more attention to keeping physically healthy.

Drawbacks:
There would have to be a degree of marketing involved which I am not so hot at. However I think I can manage as I have a decent network and as the job market is hot and I would need just a few projects a year to keep me occupied. Also in many roles, companies would love to have a consultant come in if they don't think there is a long term role, and since I want to do things short-term too, it would be an excellent match. I think I won't make a lot of money given my laid back style, but something I have learnt during the sabbatical is how much I am willing to sacrifice on the money side to keep the current lifestyle going :-)

I think while doing odd projects for social work groups is very nice, it might get frustrating after a while. One cannot see real impact of ones work in this way. So I might have to get more serious about social work at some next stage (or give it up altogether, rather than do it in a half-half way).

I am very kicked by how much the tech industry is achieving in India. Every day there are new reports of new chips or softwares coming out of India. I do wish I could be a part of a core team that can deliver on a complex, useful product. The above vision can't make this happen.

This vision does not fulfil occasional strong longings to do entrepreneurial stuff like biodiesel. That is something I should live with. I'm basically not very entrepreneurial and going that way would in any case come with a good possibility of failure. I also don't have any money to invest myself so that makes things harder.

I also desperately want to travel, and that may not work that great in this scheme of things. I think it will give me the chance to travel to places (esp. smaller places in India), but not much scope to travel abroad. However if I make some money, I can travel on my own, since my time is in my control. (I have a vague plan to do a long trip to the US and park in all the friends' places in turn :-) ).

So ???!!!!
Whatcha think. Give me your feedback.

I'm back

.. from Vizag and to start with, two off-topic posts over there


Cheers

Pix: Cutting a cake on my sister's wedding anniversary which happened while I was in Vizag