Back to our regularly scheduled programming

I think my attempt to get Priya to read the blog was a big success. Not only did it get her to read the blog a few times over the past weekend, last night she was in serious gales of laughter over the whole thing especially Palls' toilet comments. I caught some nice photos of her laughing but she insisted that I don't put them on the blog. (As a substitute here is my photo with my beloved composting pots). And there was a nice flurry of activity and readership around the blog. All to de good. However, I know that the effort will peter out if I try to keep it going long-term so with this I prematurely suspend my successful demonstration that my blog can be as interesting and fun a blog for her as any other. Mission accomplished !




Yesterday I came across one of those things that count as a true Web curiosity. It was a Google ad for blog.mahindrausa.com. Its the blog of a farmer in Kentucky who uses Mahindra tractors. I checked out the site briefly as also www.mahindrausa.com.
Several things struck me:
-Just the concept of seeing Indian tractors being sold in the US is so strange. I remember driving through Texas one night and seeing a billboard for Mahindra or some other tractor company and it was so strange.
-The name mahindrausa.com. Normally most sites are based in the US or elsewhere and you have India as an addendum to get the Indian site as in 'www.ibm.com/in'. Nice to see the reverse in this case.
-The farm blog itself is pretty neat. And a smart idea by Mahindra to use that as a marketing tool
-The homepage of the site says: "J.Deere AG President concedes: Mahindra could surpass Deere in global unit sales"
One of those silent success stories of Indian business.

Here's an article from Business Week that talks about the broader global phenomenon

Guest Post - Arvind

Top Movies of 2006



1. Pans Labyrinth: By far, and by a distance, the best movie of 2006. Viva Guillermo Del Toro. A little girl's imaginative world of magic, fears and innocence in a world of brutality. With such a perfect set up, the movie delivers a haunting unforgettable experience. To reveal more is to take away. Makes my top 20 list of all time. The scene I will remember the most is toward the end, where I can still see Ophelia's eyes as she shakes her head in defiance.



2. The lives of others: About spying on intellectual freedoms in the DDR. The whole theatre was in rapt attention as the plot unveiled and it got to be more and more thrilling. The story comes to a logical, natural yet unexpected end. The movie ends a bit later, with one of the most beautiful lines ever "Nicht, Est is fur mich." Meaning "No, it is for me." Magnificent. There is an excellent dialogue about mid way during the movie that's very memorable as well. The girlfriend of this playwright is against her wishes having an affair with a powerful politician and the playwright is begging her not to go. She says something to the effect that they control what we have and what we can get to be, that is why she is going. And she asks him "is that not why you are in bed with them." (The playwright at that stage gets along with these politicians.)



3. Letters from Iwo Jima: Clint Eastwood rapidly is becoming God. Fantastic movie about horrors of war. Tells the Japanese side of the story of the Iwo Jima invasion by American troops. The Japanese army was out numbered and was essentially waiting for death. There is a beautiful scene where a private in the Japanese army is sent out to throw away the refuse and as he gets out of the cave, he sees in the entire dark gray horizon full of American ships ready to attack. The darkness and spine chilling effect of the composition of this scene is alone worth the price of admission.



4. Volver: As dark as the mascara on Penelope and as bright and beautiful as her eyes. Her performance is the best by an actress this year – I liked it over Dench and Mirren. Tom Cruise left her for Katie? Tom Cruise should be given an honorary oscar for the most dumb decision in real life.



5. Notes on a Scandal: Kate Blanchett is terrific. A grudging well done to Judi Dench. She is too full of herself and I always thought here is "Judi Dench on the screen" not here is the character. I am in love with Kate Blanchet after this movie. Her portrayal of vulnerability, guilt and deceit is memorable.



Top 10 of all time. In no particular order



Seven Samurai. After seeing the sweeping greatness of this movie, I was stunned by how much ahead of his time Kurosawa was. IMDB.com has some excellent appreciations of this movie. Amongst his many masterpieces it is tough to choose between this and Roshomon, but the simplicity of the plot here makes it more attractive.

This movie lanunched many others of its kind. Magnificient Seven and Sholay are some of them. After seeing Kurosawa's masterpiece, I simultaneously wanted to beat the living crap out of the nincompoop dimwitted Neanderthals who made and acted in Sholay and beat the living daylights out of the semiliterate nincompoops who love Sholay.



Blue: In the tri color trilogy, this is my favorite. The idea of liberty as triumphing over oneself was fantastic. Your colleague's blog (Alice in wanderland) has something to say about a liberated woman and what it means. I think she is on the right track but is scratching the surface there; this movie is much deeper on that idea. It is beautiful in texture and in acting.

Pans labyrinth. See earlier review Ed - 'Pan' just jumped from top 20 to top 10 ?

Vertigo. The heart break part of the movie Nivens character slowly killing Novaks character by asking her to dress and act as some one else. This is one of the poignant aspects of this thriller. (Ebert discusses this in his review. Check out roger ebert.com and search for vertigo.) And beautiful San Fran all around.

Million Dollar Baby. I have a soft spot for gritty women of deep resolve. That's why I can live with my stubborn wife.

The Mask: I think there is only one form of genuine comedy – physical. This intellectual wit stuff is vain bullshit. Jim Carey is God in my books. Just watching Careys many expressions makes this movie worthwhile.

Pulp Fiction. This is like watching a mad genius gone berserk. Best line in the move – "Lucky for you, you caught me in a transitional state." Or something to that effect.

To kill a mocking bird. Does any body read the book any more?

The terrorist. Santosh Sivan's terrific cinematography and direction in this minimalist movie are fantastic. And according to Ebert "one of the best plot twists" ever. To create life or to destroy it – what a choice Ayesha Dharkars character has to make. Notable in this movie is the lack of any scenes of violence – and Santosh sivan says that he did not want to show violence because showing violence glorifies it.
And that annoying Mani Ratnam started with this movie and ended with Dil Se. Where's a gun when you need one?

Sagara Sangamam. Kamal is a true genius of our times. His performance here is marginally better than in Nayakan – although both are at extraordinarily high levels. One of the greatest actors of all time in a movie with one of the best melodies of all time – Mouna Mela Noi.


The world would be a better place if the following movies were not made or if the following actors were not given a chance to act

Anjali by Mani Ratnam. I am temped to add Dil Se but the song Chayya Chayya is one of the best musical videos ever. The over acting by the child actress when Anjali dies, made me want to give up my anti capital punishment stance and condemn Mani Ratnam to death by lethal injection or preferably death by making him watch his own movie.
Sholay by assorted idiots
Amitabh Bachchan. When is this overrated actor going to pay back the city of Bangalore for the miss world/miss universe that he hosted there?
Mrs Doubtfire: Robin Williams sentimental weeping counts as one of the most annoying things of all time.
Nargis. This idiotic woman passed a bill or wanted to pass an act in the parliament censuring Ray for making movies about poverty!! Yet another person in the category of high outreach to intellect ratio.

"Private" post - Priya

So for various reasons I find it very difficult occasionally to communicate with Priya on mundane things (chiefly because they are mundane things I suppose), and as we were having a minor argument about it yesterday, I realized that the perfect solution was to communicate through the blog :-). She's not very happy about the solution, but I'm hoping I have a captive audience with her on this.

So there may be an occasional 'private' post, which does not mean that it shouldn't be read by others, but that it will likely not make sense to others. If it piques your curiosity, ask, and you will (probably) be enlightened.

So Priya, the Ajit house thing -- They had signed up for a house with Adarsh builders but that layout didn't get BDA approval for a long time and the builder didn't start building because of that, so they got frustrated at the delay and started looking around and then bought the Purva Parkridge place instead (apparently they were the first to buy at Purva Parkridge). And 7 days later the BDA approval came through on the Adarsh place also. They still have that one too, they did not sell it. That's what happened.

More questions about anything at all ? I'm here to answer !!

User feedback time

Okay, in response to the response to the previous post I am interested to see who enjoyed which post best of the 190-odd posts (250+ if you count writtenword) on this blog. Of course you don't have to wade through all the posts again but if you remember something that you liked, it will be most interesting for me to see

A few interesting things:

Yesterday I was in Harihar a smallish town north of Bangalore, on the NH4 past Chitradurga and Davangere (I like all these names!) . I was demonstrating the Fluoride course from the website (go to indiawaterportal.org, go to Tools and Techniques and look on the right sidebar) at a training session for headmasters and some other folks. The demo went okay, we found a bunch of issues with the course but there seems to be a felt need for it so that motivates me to fix it and go back into the field with it. I saw absolutely zilch of the town besides the railway station, the hotel room and the place where I did the demo. I always wanted to do a lot of travelling and while I enjoyed going to this place to do the trip, I guess now I know why frequent travellers (on work) are not so hot on travelling.

Then a few of us from work (the usual suspects) went one day to the Google office in India to twist their arm to help us with doing internet marketing of the portal. They were nice and were very willing to help (atleast that's what they said). The office has a cool thing going at the reception which I've read about before. Its a projection on the wall that scrolls search text picked randomly from among the presumably billions of searches that are done on google everyday. A very nice effect.

We also started talking to a community radio group for the possibility of working together. They are called Voices, and they run a community radio station called Namma Dhwani, links here and here. Check out their signature jingle here, its pretty cool. Its an interesting experiment and there's recent legislation that should help community radion to take off in India, but I've also heard some scepticism about the potential.

Okay I have a challenge in front of me: Priya has never shown much interest in my blog. And today she was gushing about the blog that someone mentioned in a previous comment -- (the one that has a photo of Japanese Rajni fans). So now I have taken on the task on writing stuff on this blog that will attract her to the blog. I need help ! What are the kind of sites that would attract her. Readers of my blog -- help !!

Okay here goes

here are a couple of events from the day:

In thinking about some problem at work I came up with this profundity:

Don't confuse perfection with excellence. They are very different and (if you didn't realize it!), its excellence you should strive for, not perfection.

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An ex-colleague has a very good blog, with a particularly funny posting about dealing with Japanese customers:

http://alice-in-wanderland.blogspot.com/2006/05/americans-are-from-mars-japanese-are.html

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PS: Palls, the block is not so much from not having material to write about, as not having the time, mindspace and also the enthu to blog.

Bloggers block

I haven't been finding much to write about lately. Mind is quite active but going in unproductive circles. This is a great time for someone to do some guest posts.



The image is one from Chennai that I was saving for a photoblog post, but using it now out of desperation :-). Its of a housewares shop in Chennai. Kind of captures Chennai's spirit I think.

My mind is buzzing ...

Its 2:30am and my mind is hyper so you will excuse this post if its not making a lot of sense.

As I said earlier, I've been trying to wrap my mind around the 'portal dissemination' problem. There's lots of background stuff that is important but let me jump to what got me excited just now. I was thinking about it in circles just now and Nandita's suggestions added something, and here's where I am:

I can/should actually start thinking about this like a business manager. I have a (ill-defined) problem: disseminate the portal. I realized recently that I actually have a budget for it that is more or less in my control and it could get quite large. I don't have many resources at the moment, but I can hire 1 and I could probably contract a lot of work (but it won't be easy to find the right kind of people). I can break the dissemination up into some chunks -- audience for the multimedia courses and dissemination methods for the multimedia courses, ditto for the Met. Data tool, and Organisational database tool, and how to use the Discussion forums. All of these subtopics have a whole host of ramifications and sub-sub tasks and things to think through. There is a whole separate line of work in improving the portal's visibility on the web -- Google search rank basically. Then we want to do a 'portal on a cd' for posting out cold to people and seeing the response. We are getting a very decent number of hits on the portal but we are not seeing any user feedback at all which we badly need, so we need to better the feedback mechanism mainly (or maybe it is that users don't stay too long on the site which is bad news). There is also this idea of village kiosks (with a computer) that many organizations are implmenting, and there is a lot of interest in getting our content on those kiosks. I'm also tasked with improving the portal itself (like V1.1 onwards of the portal) which is a huge other task in itself. And the list of stuff goes on and on. I feel like I could really spend sometime and setup the framework to think about all this and come up with the strategy and action items, but I wish I had a whole host of people I could delegate off to and just sit back and analyse and control the whole machine :-). I just came up with the name of a good techie friend who could be the perfect person to research some techie tasks of the internet marketing side of the portal, so that's got me all excited. If I could get more people sucked in and make all this stuff start ticking .... I've been feeling occasional pangs that I didn't do an MBA when I should have, but this feels like it could be an MBA education in the real world.


In the middle of all of this, I'm trying to do work for Timbaktu, and the small matter of figuring out what I'm going to do with my life post April, and oh yes the baby thang ...

Good night :-)
Vijay

Things at work continue to be quite exciting. We are now faced with what we are calling the 'portal dissemination' task, which is how to spread the word about the portal and get it to places where it can be used seriously. I have a fair amount of freedom and resources to decide and implement a strategy, so that's pretty cool for me.
Arghyam is also getting an opportunity to influence policy at a high level in the government, and though I am not directly invovled with that, I'm close enough that its fascinating and very exciting.
There are several details involved with working out the dissemination and some conceptual/philosophical type issues. Its also is a difficult thing for me to do, to keep trying to market or push something. However the hope is that that portal is valuable enough that it will sell itself. There is also a funny situation where we are spending all this money without a clear target goal, or an expectation of monetary return.

At any rate we definitely would like to see lots of traffic on the portal, so why don't you visit it . We're also very keen on feedback, so feel free to write to us from there.

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I spent a couple of days in internal turmoil as I tried to come to grip with the baby question. No resolution ensued. In a major mood swing, after that episode I've been feeling amazingly happy and balanced, as if all the parts of my life are balanced and working.

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What I've been doing ...

I've been doing a few useful things:

Learning about "Google Analytics" a sophisticated tool to find out about what's going on, on your website. We are using it to track IndiaWaterPortal. There's a whole science to track web traffic out there, going by the extent of detail there is on Google Analytics. Just one example -- they give you 'bounce off' figures that show at which page people left your website and went elsewhere, which I suppose is to give you an idea of what pages are putting people off for whatever reason. I hope the Water Portal gets a lot of hits.

I downloaded an automatic link checker software. This is something that can go through your complete website and test all the links to see if there are any broken links. Its very useful for a site like ours. There are several tools out there which you can find with a google search, I downloaded one called Xenu which worked quite well for my simple requirements.

I and another person at work resolved a very frustrating problem we were having with our internet connectivity. This was a real achievement in terms of the effect on the productivity of the office. That in itself earned my salary for atleast a couple of weeks, I would say.

I am putting a job posting on Monster.com for another person to work on the Portal.

I went to Tumkur, a couple of hours from Bangalore to meet a NGO that we work with, though the trip wasn't very fruitful.

I had lunch with Krishna Rupangunta, at eGov who do the technical stuff for the Water Portal website. Dear anonymous -- Krishna is your batchmate at IIM Calcutta, I think his nickname was Madde or something then.

I went to Cat's brother's wedding in Bangalore (Cat is a classmate from IITM). It was good. May was there, Cat's wife, and we met his parents and so on. They (parents and Cat) had come to my wedding which was very nice of them.

I went to Vinod John's marriage today, a classmate from IITM. I have a nice photo of the happy couple which I hesitate to upload as a possible invasion of privacy.

I have been working on formal fellowship applications probably to be given to Asha for Mutyalappa (yes the same one I talked about earlier) and Sireesha, another interesting person at Timbaktu. I will (of course!) put them on the blog when I'm done with them. Its quite a time consuming task but its interesting and somewhat creative work, and if the fellowships come through it will be a tremendous satisfaction for having been able to affect some peoples' lives in a potentially very valuable way.

Looking at the above, I'm a little surprised how busy it makes me look, for what has actually seemed like a frustrating and unproductive couple of weeks :-).