Mutyalappa : In memoriam

Mutyalappa is my friend and Sarpanch of Mushtikovela village whom Asha for Education (www.ashanet.org) supports on a fellowship for which I am co-steward. On 4th April night/ early hours of 5th, Mutyalappa passed away after a road accident in which he suffered severe head injuries.

He was brought to Bangalore from Anantapur as the medical facilities there were not good. I met them here. He was on a ventilator so he had a pulse but the doctors at multiple hospitals said that he was beyond resuscitation due to damage to the brain. We then took him off the ventilator and his body was taken back for post-mortem and funeral.

His pillion rider on the mobike also suffered injuries but is recovering.

If you can contribute some money for to help his family piece their life together ; as well as cover the medical expenses for him and his co-rider, it would be very useful.

Below is something I wrote for the Asha website:

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It is with shock and sadness that ASHA notes the death of N. Mutyalappa, ASHA fellow. He passed away on the night of 4th April/early hours of 5th. He was 33 years old. He had a road accident and suffered severe head injuries while driving his motorcycle on the Bangalore/Hyderabad National Highway near his residence in Chennekothapalle village of Anantapur district.

Mutyalappa was nominated as a ASHA fellow in mid-2007 to support his work as a Sarpanch of Mushtikovela panchayat in Anantapur district of Andhra Pradesh. The details of his work can be seen on the Asha page tracking the fellowship here: https://www.ashanet.org/projects/project-view.php?p=854 His extensive previous work with the NGO Timbaktu Collective laid a solid grounding for him to undertake village development work as Sarpanch. He made Mushtikovela panchayat an outstanding example of NREGA implementation, with more than 1 crore rupees in cumulative disbursements to labourers. His most recent project which was just reaching completion at the time of his demise was the optimal utilization of Mushtikovela's tank through a process of consensus and dialoguing, so that a crop of paddy could be taken even in a drought year, creating significant income for the village.

Mutyalappa was a highly dynamic individual who understood the system and decided to work within it, by entering the political arena at the village level. Despite tremendous pressure and continuing difficulties he worked for proper implemention of government schemes for the benefit of the village. In interactions with him, his tremendous capacity to mobilize people, put pressure on the goverment to make the will of the people prevail came through clearly. He had an amazing talent in negotiating the delicate terrain of caste, political, personal and other divides in a village to get people together to achieve something of value. It is tragic that a person like him met an untimely demise while he had much more to contribute. The circumstances of his death were also unfortunate as he was shuttled between hospitals and places in a desperate attempt to find appropriate emergency treatment.

He is survived by his wife, a young son and an elder brother. ASHA volunteers would like to convey their profound condolences to his relatives in this time of grief.

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Some videos and posts about his work:

A previous post on this blog about his work:

Video on tank irrigation

Video on NREGA work

Older film

Bio, project visit reports as part of Asha's fellowship

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The Times of India

I recently began subscribing to the Times of India. The reason was a bit stupid and the kind of ass-backwards decision-making that I sometimes indulge in -- I find the Hindu so compelling to read that in the morning, I get absorbed in it, so that it both makes me late and distracts my mind. A bad way to start a work day. So finally I decided not to subscribe anymore. But my wife still wanted to subscribe to a newspaper so that she could keep in touch with what was going on outside Vibhat-world ; so we subscribed to the Times of India instead. It seems to be working out; I am definitely not absorbed in the newspaper in the mornings nowadays.

Subscribing gives me an opportunity to take a closer look than when I would just pick up occasionally at the office or elsewhere. My observations backs up that of many others, that The Times is a breathtaking newspaper and I feel compelled to add my notes to the reams that have already been written about it. This is hopefully just a beginning.

The first thing to say I think, is that a simple switch of context makes all the difference when thinking about the Times. Its as follows:

The Times of India is a business: then it becomes a predictable, sensibly run, run-of-the-mill, moderately interesting entity which is not very special compared to all the other zillions of businesses in India.
The Times of India is a newspaper: It becomes a jaw-droppingly amazing, completely crazy, death-of-satire, evil-empire, laughing stock, end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it, death-knell-of-Indian-civilization entity.

Again:
business -- nothing special
newspaper -- what the **&&^&#(@*@*!&&!!* is going on?!
Moving on:

the paper design seems really bad. Actually I have not been really looking at the paper with a critical eye, I've been just reading it, so to say, since we started subscribing, so this post will be more off-the-cuff comments. Having said that, the paper is just a mess. The pages are a loud clash of colours from all the ads and the colors used in the articlespace too. I haven't yet figured out the logic of the newspaper in terms of what kind of articles go where or on what page, because the cues towards this are not there or not strong enough. The mixing up of editorial and advert makes the jaw drop lower each day.

Today's front page had a truly stupid artistic illustration of a big-boobed woman being flagged at airport security, because of some news that the new airport security detectors are set off by silicone implants. I mean... really, this is too idiotic.

More often than not, upto 30% of the front page is taken up up by a single ad which completely distracts the attention. Today its about 25% distributed between several ads. A couple of days back there was some absurd article of less than 12 column-lines on one of the pages, and all the rest were ads. Today the first "City" page has about 5% of articles and 95% of ads.

On the plus side: generally they seem to have a lot of coverage of water issues, and not competely superficial which I can vouch for, since I keep an eye out for this. So they do have some news going. For a couple of days now they've had a lot of coverage of the naxal issue, ("Deep Focus"), though I haven't had the enthu to read in detail.

Today's "Global" page, had an "Around the World" section (probably a standard feature. It had a.) a picture of an unknown (but stunning) South Korean actress, b) "Teri Hatcher looking for love" c.) "Postmen boycott UK house because of cat".

Swaminathan Aiyar, one of their usual columnists had a stupid article on irrigation, something about using piped or drip irrigation instead of canals. Not a single figure about how economically viable this might be.

They've expanded their "Speaking Tree" column into a full Sunday supplement and are running a slick, nicely designed, but, to me, predictable ad about it in the main paper for a while ("Visit yourself, once a week", "If you listen, you hear", "Somewhere between our head and heart (Ed- our neck?) lies a land we rarely go to")

Enough of Times bashing for now.

Bringing up baby

I haven't been writing about the baby on the blog, taking the shortcut of posting videos instead. Writing takes some 'quiet' time which is hard to come by nowadays.

Lets give it a shot here.

Vibhat is now 8.5 months old. And according to the latest doctor report that's the typical weight of a 13 month old. So that's taken care of immediately, we continue to be far ahead of the curve on weight ! Don't dare make fun of him! He's very nicely proportioned and just darlingly chubby nothing more. Maybe he's taller too and that's how he manages it.

Due to work commitments on my side, we postponed the first hair-cutting that is traditionally done as an event, so that his hair is now far too long and unruly. I'm sure he finds it irritating, poor bebe. The ceremony is on 2nd May at our village in Chittoor district and you all are cordially invited to join!

Priya is completely sucked into the baby's world as the major portion of the work falls on her. Her mother left yesterday so right now she doesn't have any real help as I don't count. We are planning to get a maid or use a pre-school soon. He is also very strongly attached to her which makes life difficult as most of the time he wants her attention. We hope he will come off this in stages.

The first gleanings of a personality that I can make out for Vibhat, is 'strong' ! He is not a mild or meek baby. He jets around the house with great enthusiasm now that he is crawling. He gets angry, as opposed to just being upset, and can scream *pretty* loudly if he feels like it. He doesn't cry a lot though, which is really nice for us. He is physically strong and likes to bang on tables, beat/scratch whoever is carrying him and so on. We have to figure out a way of communicating to him what's acceptable and what's not.

As with all babies I think, the experience and emotions of being a new parent can be quite strong. I resent (when I get the time to think about it!) the constant emotional seesaw from the joy of the baby to the demands it puts on you.

Well, there you have it for a quick summup. Hope I get to write more.

PS: The amazing photo is from Siddhu who managed to catch me looking presentable and smiling a natural smile, and also get a fantastic smile out of Vibhat. Click to enlarge