Bangalore roads

There seems to be a major inefficiency with Bangalore road repairs. Potholes are never fixed. But every now and then major roads get a big overhauling, but they get into bad shape very soon. I read in the newspaper once that contractors don't like to do pothole fixing ; they prefer to do the major overhauling (which seems pretty obvious, less painstaking, more expenses and more profits). But keeping contractors happy is hardly the city's first priority. And from the above it would seem the major resurfacing also is substandard.

Given the huge amount of money in road construction, it seems there are huge inefficiencies in this. I would love to see contractors reined in and forced to do a lot of pothole repairing. Certainly an area of civic engagement. I wonder if some people have already looked into this.



On a different note, the above is a bad quality video of a BMTC bus (the articulated type, which is almost double the length of the standard one) reversing on a narrow section of Indiranagar 100 feet road because a section of the road got suddenly shut off due to metro construction. Someone should be fired for the driver not being informed that the route was no longer available (alternatively the driver should be fired if he was illegally using that route which was anyway in pretty bad shape due to the construction). One of my background ideas is that some white collar jobs like bus and train driving should be paid a lot. Not only is this appropriate, because the drivers have peoples lives in their hands, but it also creates some nice churn in the traditional ideas of what occupations are cool to do and what are not. Remember how when we were kids we wanted to bus and train drivers and suchlike. It would be nice if these remained respectable career options on growing up.

(Click for larger image)


On the way home I came across this cow. S/he had fallen somehow, and her legs were on the road divider, higher up from the rest of the body, which prevented her from getting up. Had no clue what was to be done, but stopped anyway, and two other people came over and grabbed hold of her and turned her through 180 degrees so that she could then get up.

Twittering is continuing apace: http://www.twitter.com/ahminotep . Join !

As reported on 1st Nov. 2008 (delay in reporting to the blog in accordance with the sentiments of the would-be mother) :

========

"SINGLE LIVE INTRAUTERINE FETUS 6 WEEKS 4 DAYS EDD BY THIS SCAN 23-06-2009"
CRL = .65 CMS
Fetal heart motion evident
.....
=======

and so it begins.

Scan image Removed in accordance with the sentiment of the would-be paternal grandparents. My life is dictated by stupid-ass sentiments.

Photos from Bhuj, Kutch

Lots of photos without captions ; comment if anything interests you and you want to learn more

Bhuj-Personal

http://www.twitter.com

I've starting tweeting: http://www.twitter.com/ahminotep
I think this is going to be a good thing ..

Jimmy Wales and Sue Gardner ..

of Wikipedia and Wikimedia Foundation fame were in the Arghyam office today for a bunch of presentations from various organisations that Rohini's associated with..

photos :

http://www.flickr.com/photos/charmermrk/sets/72157611140868917/

Mark Charmer tweets about the meeting here -- http://twitter.com/charmermark , you might have to do some detective work to find it. If you see this post after 14th Dec don't bother, it would be lost in his outpouring of tweets.

And here's a little something:
http://movementbureau.blogs.com/projects/2008/12/indian-traffic-is-there-a-subtle-system.html

iPod Shuffle

I got a new iPod Shuffle today (supposedly for Priya). Such coolness

Unrelated -- interesting pic from Flickr


I think I'm pretty terrible at management but observed something I found curious and useful so here it is:

We recently went through a monster workload at the Portal when we launched the Sanitation Portal (www.indiasanitationportal.org) and the Hindi Water Portal (hindi.indiawaterportal.org) in Delhi, during the same week.

As things got pretty hairy, I noticed that at different points different ways of looking at the problem became important and then vanished pretty quickly. Here are some of them. Most of these are in the nature of responses to a feeling of uneasiness that things were getting out of control:

-- earlier on it was just working on particular subitems with no particular order or structure
-- as the event came closer things became more panicky and a project management structure with task lists and time lines became necessary. Even this happened in different ways, during one week, I was just tracking things in an impressionistic way, keeping percentage completion targets and getting a sense of how much along the way I was.
-- at one point the relevant thing to do was to have a long conversation with the people involved with the project and impress on them that they would be held responsible for getting certain things done and so on.

Notes: at various points I wrote out detailed spreadsheets that tracked the relevant items for that phase, which were used only for a very short time and didn't feel relevant a few days later. An important part of the usefulness of the exercise seems to be in going through all the issues in the course of creating the tracking structure for that phase rather than having the same structure work throughout the entire course of the project. The process of seeing what the useful thing to do at a particular time came without a structure and arose internally in the mind on its own and creates a confidence of its own that its the right thing, since there is no thinking that created it.
There was a painful night before one of the launches when the feeling was of sheer terror. I guess that also counts as one of the phases, when you don't find a way of managing the situation.

=====

Couple of self-help links I came across:
http://litemind.com/overcoming-procrastination-self-talk/ A nice analysis of procrastination

A personal development website:
http://www.stevepavlina.com/

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I started a new blog for students of English :
http://englishfaculty.blogspot.com

My brother-in-law works in film production, and I chanced upon a notebook that gives a little bit of idea of the mechanics of how films are made. Its mildly interesting and educative, check out the video below :

A heartbreaking work of staggering genius

Well not quite, but I wanted to talk about my neice's drawings. See the above. It's of a giraffes (big giraffe and small giraffe, as she told me), in case you didn't get it. I'm really struck with how she managed to capture the essential giraffe-ness without paying attention to exact replication. Watching her sketch is amazing -- she draws fluently and confidently without hesitation, quite extraordinary I feel, for someone her age (5 or 6). And she likes to tell stories that she makes up which again I find really amazing. The stories are (as yet) quite lame, but she is so absorbed in telling them that it is clear that there is something non-trivial going on and she has a real talent for it. Presumably with time the stories will get better. Sometimes she combines the two, telling a story of what she is sketching which is a real pleasure.

Getting back to her style of drawing, it is reminscent of a couple of Picasso's painting that I like -- the Flowers one:



and the Don Quixote one:

A very Indian thing -- 5 cars parked in a row with no space between or beside, at the apt. complex where my wife's sister stays in Chennai. Does it give the US-ites among you'll nightmares ?

PIX: Unrelated, from the Sun Temple at Konarak


A bunch of new stuff from a short visit to Chennai -- will try to post things over the next few days.

First off, thoughts triggered by the railway journey:

1.) Why is it that land and sea based transport is nowhere as fast as air transport. There must be some physics principle that is at the the heart of this question. Can you identify it ?

2.) In the earlier days of rail transport there used to be pieces of rail track, 30 or 40 feet long, and bolted together (it used to be cited in physics text books as an example of expansion and contraction, that there had to be a small space here to accomadate the expansion). Yesterday in some stretches I couldn't see these boltings and the track looked to be a seamless piece. Probably there was some small welding that was not visible from the running train. I remember reading about this sometime earlier.

3.) Poll: How many of you have taken the time to figure out the mechanism that allows tracks to join up and separate. I mean the junction kind of things, where two rail tracks intersect and go on, and an incoming train on one of the tracks can switch to the other one. I confess that I only did this recently. Its quite a clever system. I wish things like this were explored early on in school, it would make the education more practical and relevant.

Diwali (contd)

In most Indian cities Diwali has become a festival of noise and street pollution, rather than a festival of lights. I remember 3 or 4 years back we lived near Ulsoor lake and the Diwali there was horrendous. There were a group of young people bursting extremely loud crackers late into the night. It was just obscenely loud and it seemed that their parents also did not see either the pointlessness of the exercise or the insensitivity to the neighbours. (The neighbours should have protested, why that doesn't happen in India is a muse for a separate day, and why I personally don't protest, for yet another day).They have these grotesque electric crackers taken to the extreme that go on for ever (5, 10, 15 minutes and more). Nowadays its not so bad as they don't allow lighting crackers inside the apartment complex we live in, so we're shielded from the worst. Today I saw an amazing sight -- on a busy main road near my house near a messy traffic intersection, with 2 cops directing traffic, some IDIOT decided that he must prove his ownership of the road by lighting one of the 5 minute wallahs on the road. The traffic stopped for 5 minutes and the traffic cops did not feel it necessary to chastise the culprit. C'est la vie (en l'Indee).

Specific problem above apart, we need to reinvent our rituals and practices to be genuinely in tune and authentic to today's life. How does one practice Diwali or any other festival in the city in a way that makes sense ?
IIT Kharagpur used to have a contest between hostels for who does the best lighting up of the hostel with diyas for Diwali. That seems like a nice practice, encouraging beauty and creativity instead of sound.
The legends behind Diwali are pretty confusing to me atleast, they seem to be multiple stories and ideas. How does one relate to any of those in a modern rationalist world ? Can we find some essence of the festival and place it in a modern context ?

Another unrelated thought is how incredibly alive and vital some of our Indian festivals are, particularly Holi and Diwali. I can't recall such spectacular exhibitions of light (sound), and colour in any other country's celebrations.

Some self-indulgent photos below, as we played with a camera and diyas on Diwali

Happ Diwali

We win a award !!

Check out :
http://www.indiawaterportal.org/blog/2008/10/21/water-portal-wins-a-manthan-award/

Tried to pick up random images from the web. Do they make or break my point ?

Clothes

Some thoughts on clothes, particularly good clothes.

When we all dress up formally to go for a 'function' or a party, what is the sociological background of the thing. When a whole bunch of people congregate for a marriage, all very well-dressed, I find it looks somewhat absurd, like a charade or a show. Whom are we dressing up for ? What is being achieved by it, especially looking at it a society, what is the usefulness for society ?
Sometimes, there is a background or implicit contest among the women about whose most well-dress or costliest-dressed, but I don't think that's a healthy thing.

Probing a little deeper the question is about the difference between normal dressing and fine dressing by the same people. What is normal dressing (like what we wear when we are in the house, when we go out to do some work, or when we go to work). What happens if we dress 'normally' to a party. What is lost ? A first level answer which seems valid is the straightforward one -- we do some things every day and we do some things rarely. So we may dress more elaborately for those rare and important occasions. But that doesn't seem to be all. When you take the collective of a bunch of people all dressed up, it seems somewhat absurd. But the alternative would be that some people dress up and some people don't and that doesn't sound very sensible either. There would be a jarring lack of consistency.
Perhaps the problem is overdressing which one sees in India nowadays. Clothing that is dramatic and eye-catching is becoming common and its in such a scenario that things look overdone. Would a room of tasteful discreetly well-dressed people gell better ?

One bird, two eggs, two little children, two sisters, many colds and one lazy husband

The last four days saw our normally quiet house in quite a ruckus. My sister-in-law visited along with her two kids and a pigeon (again) started a nest and laid eggs on our balcony. Starting with one of the kids, then myself, Priya and her sister Himabindu all got various minor flu-like symptoms. The kids amazed us with their energy and occasionally irritated us with their contrariness. I didn't show a lot of enthusiam for helping out with the chores.

Hee Hee.. from the Economist

A funny snippet:

"Holidays in the BlackBerry era can be divided into two categories: "soft" (where the vacationer stays in radar contact and continues to exercise his thumbs) and "hard" (when he staves off divorce by switching everything off)

Albert Camus' "The Stranger"

Read this book again recently, and felt it worth typing out the ending:

========

Then, I don't know why, but something inside me snapped. I started yelling at the top of my lungs, and I insulted him and told him not to waste his prayers on me. I grabbed him by the collar of his cassock. I was pouring out on him everything that was in my heart, cries of anger and cries of joy. He seemed so certain about everything, didn't he ? And yet none of his certainities were worth one hair of a woman's head. He wasn't even sure he was alive, because he was living like a dead man. Whereas it looked as if I was the one who'd come up emptyhanded. But I was sure about me, about everything, surer than he could ever be, sure of my life and sure of the death I had waiting for me. Yes, that was all I had. But at least I had as much of a hold on it as it had on me. I had been right, I was still right, I was always right. I had lived my life one way and I could just as well have lived it another. I had done this and I hadn't done that. I hadn't done this thing but I had done another. And so? It was as if I had waited all this time for this moment and for the first light of this dawn to be vindicated. Nothing, nothing mattered and I knew that. So did he. Throughout the whole absurd life I'd lived, a dark wind had been rising towards me from somewhere deep in my future, across years that were still to come, and as it passed, this wind levelled whatever was offered to me at that time in years no more real than the ones I was living. What did other people's deaths or a mother's love matter to me; what did his God or the lives people choose or the fate they think they elect matter to me when we're all elected by the same fate, me and billions of privileged people like him who also call themselves my brothers? Couldn't he see, couldn't he see that? Everybody was privileged. There were only privileged people. The others would all be condemned one day. He would be condemned, too. What would it matter if he were accused of murder and then executed because he didn't cry at his mother's funeral. Salamano's dog was worth just as much as his wife. The little robot woman was just as guilty as the Parisian woman Masson married, or as Marie, who had wanted me to marry her. What did it matter that Raymond was as much my friend as Celeste, who was worth a lot more than him? What did it matter that Marie now offered her lips to a new Meursault? Couldn't he, couldn't this condemned man see..And that from somewhere deep in my future...All the shouting had me gasping for air. But they were already tearing the chaplain from my grip and the guards were threatening me. He calmed them, though, and then looked at me for a moment without saying anything. His eyes were full of tears. Then he turned and disappeared.
With him gone, I was able to calm down again. I was exhausted and threw myself on my bunk. I must have fallen asleep because I woke up with the stars on my face. Sounds of the countryside were drifting in. Smells of night, earth and salt air were cooling my temples. The wondrous peace of that sleeping summer flowed through me like a tide. Then, in the dark hour before dawn, the sirens blasted. They were announcing departures for a world that now and forever meant nothing to me. For the first time in a long time I thought about Maman. I felt as if I understood why at the end of her life she had taken a "fiance", why she had played at beginning again. Even there, in that home where lives were fading out, evening was a kind of wistful respite. So close to death, Maman must have felt free then, and ready to live it all again. Nobody, nobody had the right to cry over her. And I felt ready to live it all again too. As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself -- like a brother, really -- I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate.

=======

Perhaps it doesn't make much sense to people who didn't read the book. A lot of it did not make sense to me, but I feel the power of it.

PS: I dropped by my old website, interesting to see some of the old stuff (occasionally cringe-inducing).
http://www.geocities.com/ahminotep/Writings/index.htm -- Some of my own writing
http://www.geocities.com/ahminotep/FriendsWork/index.htm -- Poems, paintings, more, mostly from the usual suspects

PPS: Palls, can you take a photograph of the painting I gave you sometime back (do you still have it ?!) and scan it. It was called "Staying Home Tonight". Suddenly remembered it.

LHC rap

Not particularly ahead of the curve on this, but for those who haven't seen it yet:

"Voices from the Waters"

The Second International Film Festival on Water.

Website: http://www.voicesfromthewaters.com

A tonne of films with a water theme -- probably the most extensive collection in the world of this sort. if anything the problem is finding what films you want to see in the bewildering range of films on offer. My suggestion: just pick a day and go.


There hasn't been enough publicity on this so please forward to more people.

Details at www.voicesfromthewaters.com

Yosemite Falls

Violating intellectual copyright, but here's something from our alumni group at IIT Madras:

==
Just returned from Yosemite . Couple of nights camping there and it was
good as always.

Some updates for those who have been there. In light of visitor demographics, Nevada Falls has been renamed Bezwada Falls . Vernal Falls is now Warangal Falls . El Capitan is simply known as 'Guru'. They have hung a wire across the Vernal Falls bridge on which I think I saw a striped pyjama drying. It was like being back in Jamuna Hostel.

===

It was followed by discussion how Tuolomne Meadows (Telangana Meadows) feels discriminated against and wants its own national park ..

Irresistable spam

What kind of spam would you open even knowing its spam ?

Recently I got a message with subject "Matrimonial response" . Couldn't resist opening it :-). But was disappointed (of course) - it was a link to the site itself not a specific response to a matrimonial.

The Frito Lay project

I got a couple of good photos for my Frito-Lay project during the Orissa trip:


At the Peace Pagoda near Bhubaneswar


A dustbin too far : at the Udaygiri/Khandagiri Caves, Bhubaneswar.

More : http://www.flickr.com/photos/despoki/sets/72157604189816349/

I think this project has scope, please take such photos and forward them to me for upload (with due credit), or start your own set which I can link to.

Upcoming new animator's demo reel

Priya's second demo reel. This is mainly around lipsyncing. Her course is over and now she is seriously into the job search.






She also did this gif for the Water Portal homepage :



Should I pay for it?

Priya Patel

Sunrise at the beach

Trip photos - Orissa and Kolkata

We took many splendiferous photos of the Konarak temple. Also of the erotic sculptures -- write to me if you want them !!



Buddhist cave dwellings at Udayagiri and Khandagiri, Bhubaneswar



I gave gyan about the Portal to the students of Xavier Institute of Management, Bhubaneswar. The insitute's main specialization is Rural Management, which is pretty cool.





Buddhist remains near Konarak. The bricks in the closeup are from the original construction.







Horses at the Kolkata Maidan. Looking the other way, the Victoria Memorial.




The "Peace Pagoda", Bhubaneswar






The Bhubaneswar airport was decorated with the traditional local craftwork. It worked so well. While all airports strive for modern clean sophisticated looks, this work adds such an original attractive touch, and at so little cost.