The Water Portal in Kannada launch

.. was a big success. Things went smoothly and there was a *lot* of press coverage.

See for example:

http://www.business-standard.com/common/news_article.php?leftnm=3&autono=314694

Yup that's indeed my semi-bald pate in the middle. Most of the papers covered it, though I did not grace most of them with my presence

The Kannada Portal URL is http://www.indiawaterportal.org/kannada

The dominant feeling I get from the US primaries is the waste and pointlessness. People with reasonably similiar points of view struggle to find distinction, endless debates rehashing and trying to find weaknesses. What a mess. It ought to be much shorter.

I have also been thinking about how the modern forms of democracy are limited in several ways:
-- the biggest tragedy is that it encourages confrontation and competition rather than co-operation. In India, its sickening to see opposition parties constantly carp and criticise and disrupt parliment for every issue, slowing down goveranance or bringing it to a standstill.
-- in many countries, the prominent recent example being Kenya, it seems that Western style democracy is not appropriate. It (again like above) pits tribes or subgroups against each other, and doesn't seem to work. We have to evolve more authentic and creative forms of democracy. Nobody seems to be doing much about this unfortunately.

Some books from the Economist

Recommended crime reads from the Jan19th issue of the Economist:
"Who is Conrad Hirst" by Kevin Wignall , part of a series

"Dead Men" by Stephen Leather, about british and ira stuff

"Red Mandarin Dress" by Qiu Xiaolong. A Shanghai police story. Should be interesting as a human perspective of China's growth

"Pretty Dead Things" by Barbara Nadel -- a missing nymphomaniac in Istanbul (whoa). Another police story

========

I saw "Motorcycle Diaries" and "Babel" yesterday and the day before. The kind of movies that are hard to get in India and which I miss much about the US.
Motorcycle Diaries -- gorgeously beautiful and moving but a little pat. I'm glad to learn a little about Che finally. Apparently, the iconic image of Che that you can see on T-shirts is possibly the most reproduced photograph in the world.
"Babel" -- disappointing. We saw it on VCD without subtitles, so most of the movie we had to try to understand just through the action. It didn't hang together very well I thought.

Updates (like you care)

At work we're releasing the Kannada version of India Water Portal:

http://www.indiawaterportal.org/kannada
We're organising an event at Bangalore to release this, this Friday. Chief guest and all. I suck at organising events. I wish I didn't have to do it.

I have been spending time trying to figure out how to do language water portals in a sustainable way. Some of my thoughts:
-- its close to impossible to create sites in 'n' different Indian languages. And then try to manage and maintain any uniformity or quality control !
-- so it should be done like some sort of a wiki with maximum particapation and less control. But how exactly !!?
-- Indian states probably have comparable populations to European countries. So looked at that way, there is potential for a thriving local language internet in all Indian languages. Somehow I need to capitalize on that.

We also just started a flickr account, with user submitted photos:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/21623815@N03/
Check for example this gorgeous photo of a 'talaab', traditional water storage tank in Rajasthan, taken by Farhad Contractor, a really cool chap that Arghyam supports.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/21623815@N03/2246590994/in/set-72157603859592968/
There are also some photos of flooding in Bihar last year. The photos are beautiful, though the flooding is a terrible event.
If you have good water-related photos, send them to us and we'll add it to the collection.