Blogging from Bengaluru ...

International Airport.

I am flying out of here on the second full day of operation.

-- Drive to airport was smooth, on Sunday early morning
-- Airport looks pretty good ! They have a nice shade between blue and green (don't know the name) as their signature color, which is pretty good.
-- Don't plan on peeing at BIA. The bathrooms are tiny considering the kind of usage they are going to get. On Sunday morning they felt crowded.
-- On Sunday morning the departure lounge feels crowded. This is a *SMALL* airport, for the kind of usage its going to have, and nowhere as large as even a small city airport in the US.
-- There are tiny sparrows inside the building and flying around the ceiling and chirping. The effect of the chirping is incredible, feels so good. I hope they keep them.
-- I passed a bus (or rather my taxi was passed by the bus), one of the special services to the airport. Looked pretty smooth and comfortable, travelling in it.
-- The logo looks a little raw/unfinished. Yes ?

If you have any interest in Sharada Prasads K2K trip:

http://www.indiawaterportal.org/k2k

and you live in India, then you must sign up for SMS updates from him. Its working really well and its a lot of fun and educative to hear his daily one-liner reports. For past reports see here:
http://www.twitter.com/sharadaprasad
(you can follow the same updates at this URL on the web if you don't want or can't get sms updates.

You can sign up by sending an sms : "JOIN k2k08" to 567673434 . There are 28 subscribers currently (compare to 15012 subscribers to a group called DFLIPL :-) ) .

We went to a new restaurant in Frazer Town, "Cafe Chinois" a couple of times. I'm a sucker for anything to do with french, even wildly out of context as in this case, this billing itself as a contemporary asian food place.

Dinner was good, brunch was decent but fattening. They had pancakes, eggs, chicken sausages and chicken salami. The chef says he worked at various places abroad ("Four Seasons , Vegas") and returned home to "play golf" but it didn't work out so he started a restaurant instead.

Across the street is Beijing Bites, a nice Chinese place, but two times we went there we saw rats in the restaurant ..

I didn't intend the impressionistic effects, it must have been the low light

Priya and I went to Chennai (for a marriage) and thence to Thiruvannamalai, with my parents. Thiruvannamalai has one of the gigantic temples typical of Tamil Nadu and also the ashram where Ramana Maharshi lived.

Something about him at : http://www.arunachala-ramana.org/ and the inimitable Saarlo's Guru rating service gives him three stars : http://www.globalserve.net/~sarlo/RatingsA.htm#ramana
I've read about him a little -- quite an interesting life.

There is a holy hill at this place, and its a practice to circumambulate the hill ('girivallam' in the local argot) for brownie points. Its a 14 km walk. Self, mom and spouse did it, starting at 4 in the morning and ending around 10. Its supposed to be done barefoot, but my mother and I didn't dare, Priya did and is much to be congratulated. My mom is also much to be congratulated for finishing the walk at her age.

There are plans for a scary midsummer trip to Shirdi Sai Baba's place in Maharashtra with my wife's sister's family. I'm hoping to either cop out, or branch off and go to Ellora and Ajanta instead.

Work n' stuff

Several things have been going on and haven't had much opportunity to write about them. There are lot of things that come to mind to write about, especially for the other blog, but just don't get around to doing it. I wish I could figure out podcasting.

Life at work has become sort of surreal blur of events. Work has become an infinte number of threads and its all blurring together (mostly in a nice way). Sharada Prasad, renaissance man and my colleague on the Water Portal is taking off for a 19000km 75 day bike ride across the country with the theme of water. I came up with a snappy title -- "In Search of Water" -- the allusion being to the long distances people (usually women) need to go to fetch water. Anyway, a lot of media has gotten all interested in the trip, the high point being a likely BBC radio interview for the program "The World Today". A lot of NGOs have also shown interest in hosting him on the trip and its been nice.

Check out http://www.indiawaterportal.org/k2k for more on the trip. If you're in India, you can be part of an interesting experiment we're trying, using SMS. You can sign up for SMS updates from him on what's going on, on the trip. I don't remember the instructions to sign up, will post them later.

The N man came in for one of his occasional reviews and feedback of Arghyam's work. As always an interesting experience. The last time I blogged about him he picked it up on his google alerts and I was quite mortified. Lets see if he catches this one.

Another interesting but more water-specific post on the Portal blog here:

http://www.indiawaterportal.org/blog/index.php/2008/02/09/on-the-hidden-cost-of-free-water/

My trip report after a visit to Mutyalappa is here:
http://www.ashanet.org/projects-new/documents/854/5_6april08.doc

At Gubbi

The weekend before we went to Coorg, I went to a rural area near Gubbi, Karnataka to meet Chitra Krishnan, a batch mate at IIT who is doing organic agriculture there with a couple of friends. Chitra is a cool person, a PhD from IIT Delhi who worked on irrigation systems (traditional tanks I think) for her thesis. I went with Balaji a common friend and batchmate. It was quite a humbling experience. They want to do farming as simply and authentically as possible so they do pretty much all the work manually. The land is quite infertile, and they are slowly regenerating it using natural fertilizers. We spent some time harvesting toor dal and pumping water. It was disturbing seeing how austerely they have chosen to live.

I've been doing short trips on consecutive weekends. Before Gubbi I was in Chennai to look at some land to purchase (!!!!!!), and during the week a day trip to Mysore for the wedding of a colleague.

PS: A hi to Siddharth who posted a comment recently. How's doing. I'm still up for a group lunch. Was at Juniper to catch up recently but couldn't find you.

A little more on Coorg: The cluster of tiled roof buildings photo below particularly struck me and it came out well. This was part of a fort. Its currently a prison.

Can you see two different animals in the sculpture (frieze?) above ?

The other picture is of our hosts at the homestay, Mr and Mrs Pran Ponappa, very friendly and pleasant.


We were at the Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Bylakuppe at the time when a large hall of monks were doing chanting. It was pretty cool. I got a video showing the monks, but without audio. The monastery had all these monks quite happy and well-fed looking, who spend their lives, from our limited half hour worth of understanding, chanting, studying the scriptures, meditating and so on. I don't think they earn a living, looked like they get their funds from outside. It doesn't seem quite right..not what the Buddha intended ? On the other hand if people paid you to spend your time understanding the true nature of reality, well that's a good thing. I s'pose.

Everything about Coorg is nice.
The people are very friendly -- we stayed at a homestay, with a very pleasant family who made us feel very much at home.
The weather is very bracing (though not during the rainy season apparently) and the main town of Madikere is small unspoilt, untouristy and un-trafficky.
The coorgis (actually called coorgs, or kodavas) are a people with lots of personality and character and its fun to read about them and see the artifacts of their existence.
There are plantations with peaceful quiet atmosphere and long walks, although we didn't get to do much of that on this trip.
There's a lot of interesting stuff around: beekeeping, the origin of the Cauvery, other Cauvery stuff, and a Tibetan monastery , to name a few.

Go to Coorg. I'm glad we did.
If you want to pool together and buy a holiday home there, add a comment.