Blogging from Chennai airport ...

My wife's sisters' kids (does that make them my niece and nephew ?)


Automatic Massage Chair


Very cool. Chennai airport is wireless enabled with free internet connectivity. So that even a person like me who has endless computer trouble can turn on the wireless on my laptop, pick the wireless option (there are multiple networks!) and bingo, I'm on. Now if I I hadn't been stupid enough to pack the power cord in my main luggage I'd be a happy man...

We did a quick weekend trip to Chennai. It had a lot of small bloggable bits.
-- Here are two of the latest Chennai innovations. There were billboards for Sarees with a built-in pocket. For putting cellphones, wallets etc. Quite strange-looking but hey, what do I know about sarees.

{{Continuing blogging from Bangalore}}

--The other interesting thing I saw at my sister-in-laws place. It was a new type of electric mosquito swatter. It is shaped like a small tennis racquet or a badminton racquet. The strings of the racquet are made of metal and are electrified, running off batteries. There are a couple of layers of strings, presumably to make it more safe, but you can get a shock from touching the strings. Anyway, if you swat a mosquito with this thing, the mosquito's body seems to create a short circuit and its gets electrocuted with a sharp cracking noise. It seems to work better than a mechanical flyswatter, its easier to swat a mosquito using this thing. Perhaps there is some 'sucking' effect that sweeps the mosquito into the net or something. Its quite a cool thing to see in action.

--We went and returned to Chennai by Air Deccan. There's a lot that can be written (and no doubt has already been written) about Air Deccan and the Indian aviation industry. Here's just a few tidbits. On the way out the flight was delayed by 5 hours and on the way back by 2.5 hours. Air Deccan has set up a reasonably working system of SMSing delays to you so you know how late the flight is and can plan accordingly (Air Deccan has become so legendary with delays and cancellations that its a question of how late the flight is, not if the flight is late).
On the way out, the ticket cost was quoted as Rs 2/- , with taxes, and all kinds of surcharges bringing the total flight cost up to 1300/- odd. Still a pretty good deal. On the way out the airplane was pretty bizarre. The seats could not recline at all. On the seat handles, on some seats the plastic covers on top of the metal were coming off *and they had actually been stuck back on with sticking tape*. It was an absolutely bizarre sight. Air Deccan is indeed the bus of the skies. Nevertheless I think its a really cool airline for what its managed to achieve and how it takes a, shall we say, pragmatic approach to customer service, and gets away with it. The only question is whether they are taking a similar 'sticking tape' approach to safety. I have been expecting for a while to hear bad news on that front, but other than a very rough landing in which people were actually quite badly hurt, there have not been any tragedies. So perhaps they are being good about safety.
-- At Chennai airport there was of course the WiFi that I talked about earlier. And at one place there was a mechanical massager chair service at 50/- for 5 minutes. Quite a strange sight.
-- I normally don't enjoy Chennai but this time I had a pretty good experience. The weather was cool and breezy and after chilly Bangalore, a nice change. The city seems to have spruced up a bit, it was generally quite clean and some places, especially on the road to the airport were positively fancy. The auto drivers did not seem as rude and uncouth as usual. We happened to walk through some of the residential areas, and a couple of them were gorgeous. Quiet, wide clean roads, and nice houses. Would love to live there. Some of the older homes from British days were still there in some areas and I love that architecture. Even the modern apartments and buildings were occasionally not the usual eyesores. The police headquarters building on the beach is pretty cool.

Dark days

I went for a movie exhibition at the Max Mueller Bhavan, and came out feeling devastated. The movies (see the listing at the link for the 18th) were just too direct and in-your-face about some of the terrible things going on that we aren't usually exposed to. One of the movie showed farmers spraying their cotton with more and more pesticides in an attempt to save their crop. The farmer would come back from a spraying session nauseated and with his tongue numb from the effect of the pesticide. There is not enough water to wash away the pesticide on his body properly so you imagine it slowly seeping through. The doctor at the local hospital talks about farmers being brought in sick either from the effects of the pesticide use or by directly ingesting it in despair to commit suicide. Other scenes showed raw industrial effluents being poured out directly into the water where it poisons the water we drink and the soil. Contamination building up and spreading, building up and spreading, building up and spreading... until ?
One of the film-makers used the language of insanity to describe what we are doing. One can disagree with such an extreme judgement but after watching that film you still are affected by the blackness of the picture painted.

The difficulty of watching such films is that you confront suffering that you normally are not exposed to. You are forced to try to comprehend the extent of the total bad stuff going on in the world, without any filters and without a balancing picture of the good stuff. For me, the question it raises is: how serious is my commitment to 'doing good' or social work in the face of probably complete futility of what you do in the big picture. Like, I would think, everybody else, I do what I do in the hope that there will be a significant/measurable impact. Or other motivations like its fascinating and stimulating and you feel like its a problem worth trying to solve. If only for a moment, all the rationalization and hope/belief are torn away and a picture of utter bleakness is offered -- of the incomprehensible amount of suffering in the world and the complete insignificance of what you might be able to do about it. (And as someone said in a previous conversation, all the efforts of the greatest souls in history Jesus, the Buddha, Gandhi whoever, has not saved us from the current mess, so the probable impact of such remarkable mortals as you and me can be guessed). So I am forced to look at my less-than-perfect motivations and see if there's anything deep enough that will keep me going in the face of it. Its a double-bind -- even if I say okay I wont do social work any more, the option of going back to a mainstream life is even less inviting -- it feels verily like fiddling while Rome burns, which is why one tried to get out in the first place.

Enough of the train of thought. Having put it down on paper it sounds exaggerated, like a mental game rather than serious existential crisis. The light of morning shall dispel all such frightening glimpses and I can go back to my familiar patterns.

==
PS: We had Prof. Jagdish Bhagwati, the eminent economist from Columbia come in at work today. I was looking forward to it, but unfortunately it turned out to be us telling him about our work rather than a general discussion about globalization (about which he's written a book) or other interesting stuff.

And some more...

I feel really very, very .. fulfilled after the Delhi trip. Everybody has their particular things that mean a lot to them and satisfies them particularly. And one of things that I've discovered in the sabbatical is that if you can get that directly by doing other stuff then money becomes much less important (really ;-)). I don't know why I'm so particularly kicked by the exposure from this trip but it really did something for me. I don't have a permanent hankering for being around power and fame. But like many of the things on the sabbatical I feel like having had this opportunity, I feel really good, and I've gotten this out of my system and I can move on to other stuff. I've spent a bunch of time over the last couple of days thinking about what to do next (various left field stuff that isn't necessarily very practical) -- a result of the energy freed up after the Delhi trip.

More about the trip

Delhi (the central institutional area of New Delhi) is a very cool place. The roads are wide and well maintained all the buildings are cool and fancy. There is a particular whitewashed villa style of architecture that dates back to the Raj that is particularly distinctive and nice. We visited the Center for Policy Research (which houses the National Knowledge Commission) and the building was gorgeous. We also visited two government buildings Krishi Bhavan and Nirman Bhavan, considerably less gorgeous. At Krishi Bhavan we met Raghuvansh Prasad Singh, Union Minister for Rural development and architect of the NREGA. Again very cool to meet in a small group (< 10 people) with a cabinet minister ! He has honourable mention earlier in this blog as part of the NREGA padayatra at Anantapur. We held a workshop at the India International Center, which is this cool classy culture-vulturish club in New Delhi where all the intelligensia hang out. And we stayed at the Hotel Jukaso Inn in Connaught Place, a funny but comfortable hotel done in faux European style complete with narrow winding staircases. We also visited Khan market, a upmarketish shopping and eating area, again nicely European in feel. All very interesting experiences.

Hindu coverage of the event at the PM's residence:

http://www.hindu.com/2007/01/13/stories/2007011306761200.htm

Big success

The Delhi trip was so cool. It was all I was hoping it to be and more.

I surprise myself by how kicked I get with brushes with fame and power.

Anyway. The highlight of the trip of course was the launch of the portal at the PM's residence (7 Racecourse Road, for the ignorant). It wasn't actually at the residence residence, Racecourse Road is a big complex with a number of buildings. Anyway the cool thing was that I got to spend a signficant amount of time inside ostensibly setting up the Water Portal part of the presentation (which was actually just a html page sitting on the desktop that the PM clicked on to bring up the homepage). I was there on Thursday for a couple of hours and then again on Friday early to do some work there and then for the actual launch. By the end of it, I felt quite at home as some people were commenting, and wandering around the place on my own and unescorted. It was great fun and the high lasted for quite a while.
At the launch were, among others, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Sam Pitroda (of course, since he's the chairman of the National Knowledge Commission. The 'of course' is because the actual reason for the event was the submission of the NKC's report to the nation for 2006 and the launch of the water and energy portals was an adjunct. The NKC had asked Arghyam and TERI to do the portals so that was the initial raison d'etre of the Water Portal), Rahul Gandhi (!), Kapil Sibal (Law minister), and assorted lesser mortals.

Well, that's the initial writeup. Lots more that is blogworthy (at least by the standards of this blog!) and I'll perhaps blog some more about the trip. I've noticed though that I'm getting less enthusiastic about spewing out everything on my mind onto the blog.

BTW -- no photograpsh at all from the PMs residence for the simple reason that they don't allow you to take mobile phones and cameras (and pen drives!) into the residence.

Oh, and yeah :-) Manmohan Singh was quite nice. He looked exactly as he looks in photographps :-). He seemed very mild-mannered and delivered a not very strong speech.

Dilli

I'm off to New Delhi today and back early Saturday. Wish me luck. Its going to be a fun, scary, learning trip.

My birthday...

is January 6th. I share it with Kapil Dev (a fact I knew from being a childhood cricket fan), and with Joey Lauren Adams, Rowan Atkinson, Syd Barrett, the Reverend Dr Moon (ugh!), Kahlil Gibran, and Joan of Arc (which I found out here)

Well, here's how you can give me a happy birthday -- click on some of the links to the fine advertisers on this and that website. There's a new post over there by the way.

Umm, a small note. I think its not out of the question that I'll go to Delhi for the portal launch. Its not out of the question that I won't go either. Lets leave it at that for now.