Me, the blogging maniac

Can you read the brand name embossed on the lock ?




I started a blog for the Water Portal:

www.indiawaterportal.org/blog

Its pretty boring at the moment. But you can expect me to start spilling my guts out with all the pressure and angst of trying to make the Water Portal a success any moment now.


I also started a blog for Timbaktu, but that's not gotten anywhere yet.

Analysis

Okay I can't resist putting this out there.
Today, morning I got a call. From a relative whom I was formerly close to, but after a family fued we stopped talking for a couple of years. I got the call while I was in a meeting, and I said I would call back. I forgot to call back. He did call back in the evening and we talked and so on.
The curious thing that I am musing about is how I could have forgotten. He probably didn't believe me, and maybe thinks I am cold-shouldering him. When the breakup happened it was quite a painful thing for me. So now, on talking to him after about 2 years -- how come it slipped my mind so easily ? Its a big deal right ? Was my mind subconsciously trying to blank it out ?

Checking out

It is becoming more and more obvious that the blog(s) are not going anywhere fast, which is to be expected coz I have a fulltime job. I think I should accept the inevitable and formally close up shop here. The blog was supposed to track my sabbatical which comes to an end in late April (21st to be exact), if I use the 1 year timeframe I started with. So we are coming to a logical end anyway. A pseudo-profound taking-stock post is obviously called for, and hopefully I'll pull my thoughts together and do that.

The blog enabled me to keep in touch in a nice way with several people, I wonder if there is some way to keep that going without the heavy duty time commitment of a blog. I've heard of this tool called Twitter, does anyone know more about it ?

Self-esteem problems ?

Easy solution

Gross !

From the photoshoot. I look wussy and prissy. (So why am I being masochistic and putting these photos out here ?)






I don't think the photographer did a very good job (with me) even if the raw material was not so hot.

Its Ugadi

Priya's prayer nook at home

We observed Ugadi yesterday (monday) though there's widespread confusion about whether its on Monday or Tuesday.




A little incentive to keep the kitchen fires burning and the food appearing on our (metaphoric) dining table.
Actually its for her birthday which is at the end of the month.

Our house was briefly converted into a studio on Saturday. One of Priya's coursemates is planning to set up a photo studio and as some initial marketing for it, he said he would do a free photoshoot for Priya and the other coursemates. We did it at our place. I'll put up some photos when we get them


PS: A small milestone -- I rarely see a 'large diamond' (signifying 10 or more hits) on the ClustrMap at the bottom of the page (other than the standard ones in New York and Texas!). Recently the consistent small diamond in the southern California area graduated to a large diamond. Is that Sunil and Siva out there ?!

Sending the money !!

All -- I talked with Mary and she agrees that it would be a good idea for me to give some money right away on the fellowship applications as its getting delayed. I'll send her a check very soon. Arvind, Sajini, I'll include contributions from you'll. Any others (LS?) -- contributions will be very (very) much appreciated !

Continuing the eco-house series

Here some photos of the architecture. The most notable feature (for me) was the various levels at which the rooms are. Possibly there was a lot of abstract and philosophical reasoning behind the design, but to me it was just interesting and fun. 'something different', Priya would say.




A significant portion of the wall material is bricks made out of mud from the excavation of the site on which the house was built.



There was a particular reason for this part of the construction: they thought it would be nice for people especially kids to be able to have a view of 'what's cooking' in the kitchen



A tile decoration for the wall



From the outside you can hardly see the house. I did not like this much, it looks too jungly and unkempt.



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PS: www.compostingtoilet.org -- Everything you might want to know about disposing your poop the right way

"ICT applications for Socio-economic Change"

A C-DAC conference

I attended this conference over the last three days and its been a very interesting experience, something of a mental input overload even. Let me try to capture some of the high points :

-- the crowd was very energetic, very enthusiastic, and lots of committed people. Just very motivating. Some of the speakers showed a lot of passion towards the big goals - poverty eradication, improving the lot of the farmer etc. Rare to see. This is different from my usual guarded feelings about development professionals who are more 'professional' than 'development'
--the C-DAC (and C-DOT) crowd was just great ! A bunch of eager serious smart engineers trying very seriously to work on grassroots applications. C-DAC works on a bunch of other more techie, real-world-removed stuff, but the people at the conference were the appropriate technology kind of people. I'm very happy to see that C-DAC has managed to attract such a vibrant bunch of people. There were also representatives from a productive team at IIT Bombay, lead by a nice chap called Kirthi Ramamritham. The other interesting crowd were from a somewhat funny company (set up by the government of India) called Media Lab Asia. They have a lot of good collaborations that seem to have yielded good results.
- Here are some websites :
www.aaqua.org : The IIT Bombay guys.
http://www.esagu.in/esagu/ : By an interesting professor at IIIT Hyderabad. The idea is very elegant. They get a worker to go to each farmer who is a part of the project every week and take photographs of the conditions of the plants. The photos are then looked at by the expert (graduates and post-graduates in Agriculture) and the advice given to the farmer on what to do to deal with any problems seen. This way a lot of farm territory can be covered and the expert's time is very effectively used. They have very ambitious plans of taking this program nationwide (through Media Lab Asia), but I am sceptical -- major hubris I think, despite the coolness of what they have done so far.
-- They were a couple of *serious* open source geeks giving a tutorial on open source tools, one from Servelots/Janasthu and one chap from abroad. The servlots stuff is quite nice, they do this tool called Pantoto.
- There were a couple of monks from the Ramakrishna Mission University in Howrah, one of whom was a PhD in Computational Geometry (after B.Tech and M.Tech) from IITKanpur :-).

The current big topic in IT for development is village Information centers -- kiosks with one or more computers which can serve as a base for a variety of applications and services. There was even one service that someone is using where NRSA data is used to find where the large fish schools are and this info is given to the farmers who then use a GPS to go after them. No kidding ! The Govt. is planning to set up 100000 of these kiosks in the next few years.

Vinay Deshpande who was part of the whole Simputer deal was also there. I was very impressed by his speech but checking out the stuff on the web, there doesn't seem to be much happening lately with it.

All in all a very cool experience that set my mind abuzz as I tried to absorb it all.

Me no speak

We have a nice situation at home. Priya had a throat problem, probably brought on by shouting too much at her school students, and was asked to undergo 'complete vocal rest' for 5 days. This means complete -- no talking, no laughing, no coughing, no 'mmm' or 'uh-uh'. Guys -- visualise that this has happened to your wife/special other and tell me what you feel.

Me -- fairly predictable. Vastly amused at the predicament my chatterbox wife has been put into. A sense of divine retribution. Slightly perturbed whether she can handle it and whether the treatment will be effective.

We are doing written notes, sign language (a pain! Priya's wavelength is different from mine and we have endless confusion), and SMS.

Fellowship applications

Here are the fellowship applications that I did a while back. The versions are rough ones which I sent off to Timbaktu where they got edited into the final ones. I had not talked about Sireesha on the blog I think so her story is new here. Quite a cool person and playing a very vital role in the area where she works. Unfortunately, the progress on the ASHA end has been slow and there is still a while to go before we hear from them about whether the applications got approved. So I will try to give whatever money I have got from people directly so that it gets used immediately, without having to wait for the full fellowship process to go through. If any one else wants to contribute, this is the time to do it.

Mutyalappa: Bio, Fellowship Application
Sireesha: Bio, Fellowship Application

Brother, can I sell you a portal ?

I'm just back after a nice trip to Hyderabad. I talked to the company who developed the multimedia courses for the portal. I also met a bunch of people to talk about the portal and see if they were interested in it. I'm quite enjoying this task of marketing the portal - kind of work I've not done before. One of the groups I talked to was WASSAN, a very nice group of people. Curiously, several past connections came alive during the talk with them. They also work closely with Timbaktu.
I also visited a chap at the Administrative Staff College of India, a curious organisation housed in a very regal oldstyle building. I talked to some of Siddhu's professors at his college without a great deal of success. Siddhu has been very interested in my portal marketing efforts and gave me some good ideas :-)

Perhaps the most interesting thing I came across in Hyderabad was a book that I bought after casually browing at a bookstore: "What do I do when I want to do everything?". Its about a personality type that the author names "Scanners". These people have too many things that interest them and they are not able to focus on thing and feel guilty/frustrated etc. The book's theme is to embrace the gifts of being able to find so many things interesting and manage creatively to embrace all your interests instead of making a choice. The book struck a strong chord in me immediately. Palls -- you MUST check it out immediately. Some of the symptoms that the book mentioned are very very typical of you. A curious thing is how books are customised to different countries nowadays -- the subtitle for the book on Amazon is : "A revolutionary programme for doing all that you love", but my copy says "A Leading Life Coach's Guide to Creating a Life You'll Love"

Eco-san

An Eco-san toilet



Below the Eco-san : Collecting poop and pee separately



Since we're spontaneously going in the potty direction, some more on that front.

We are used to have flushing toilets but where water is scarce, a good question to ask is whether disposing excreta is a really necessary usage of water. Proper sewage disposal is expensive by Indian standards, so it ends up often just going into streams and gutters, thereby polluting the groundwater which we use for drinking later.

We saw a working Eco-san toilet, which is designed so you can manage bathroom waste locally (does not enter any outside tank/pipeline system) with minimum water usage. The details of how this particular solution works can be read here. (site down right now, Sun night IST, should be back by Monday afternoon)

Gross but necessary ! (Actually, I am now so steeped in water and sustainability issues, that this kind of stuff excites me rather than grossing me out)

Context

We went to Vishwanath's house today. It was one of those unique experiences that are so commonplace at Arghyam :-). His (and his wife's!) house is chock-a-bloc with every kind of ecological innovation you could think of. And its coupled with excellent aesthetic sensibility and broad awareness. Its quite overwhelming if you are attuned to these things. I'll start with one photo of what you see as you're entering the house -- a simple reuse of a discarded potty.

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I thought I would occasionally point out some of the cool things on the Water Portal. We have a talk by a chap called Anupam Mishra about traditional ways in which people dealt with water scarcity and how we have neglected our historical wisdom. It may sound dry but I urge you to check it out. The chap talks with conviction and clarity and the visuals he uses are stunning. The talk is in Hindi.
I can't point you to a direct link to the course (a serious shortcoming in the Portal at this point), but you can click here and go to the "Movies" tab and go to the first entry in the list "The wisdom that was ..."

I'm going to Hyderabad early next week.