A rare day when I find myself early to pick up the Mrs. from her office. Only to find that she is in the parlor nearby and will be out in “5 minutes”. As I continue to wait for another 15 minutes in a relatively isolated lane of Bangalore, sitting in my car, I notice the old watchman across the road.

Seated on a white plastic chair, he wore blue on his body, rubber slippers and a tired look on his face. It seemed as though he viewed everything around him with a slow pace of grasping and comprehension. His stillness was suddenly disturbed by a seemingly enlarged white Toyota Corolla that stopped at the watchman’s gate and obscured my view.

An elderly lady got off the car, gave her driver some instructions and patted the Toyota away. She then turned to the watchman and handed her a small packet of unopened biscuits. The watchman slowly stood up, accepted the packet, and slowly sat back. Probably he suffered from joint pains, I thought to myself.

He opened the packet, again with a slowness that was now his trademark, and ate one of the biscuits. After this, he slowly shifted his body on the chair, looked diagonally behind and called out to the watchman opposite the street. This watchman, who stood just ahead of my car, was another old man and he wore a Khadi coloured uniform. With an ambling gait, he walked up to his seated friend, who by now had his hand outstretched with the packet in the palms.

“No, you have it. I don’t want it”, the Khadi clad old man said.

“No, no. I have had already. Take it”

The Khadi clad man took the packet from him, opened it further, took two biscuits from it, gave one to the man seated and had one himself. There were hints of an untold friendship that went beyond that particular serene moment of sharing. They both chatted, again slowly, and hung around, waiting for nothing in particular.

Just about half an hour prior to this, in my office, there was a heated altercation that the evening snacks were not being served within time and that it did not cater well to everyone’s tastes. There were people willing to send mails to the CEO to complain that the evening snacks were not of the best quality.

And here I was seeing two people, who were probably living a life beyond the race of aspirations, sharing a couple of biscuits between themselves.

The Mrs. got back, we drove right into the traffic and our lives engulfed us back again. The evening lingered a little longer that day.

Foreign Policy and Prospect have come up with a list of Top 100 Public Intellectuals. (Link obtained via Cosmic Variance).

The list includes the following people from India:

Ramachandra Guha – Historian
Ashis Nandy – Political Psychologist
Sunita Narain – Environmentalist
V.S. Ramachandran – Neuroscientist (Richard Dawkins calls him the “Marco Polo of neuroscience”)
Amartya Sen – Development Economist

Also, you can vote for your top 5 public intellectuals out of this list to decide who should get the top honours.
The criteria of selection has been to consider those who have had the maximum impact on public discussions related to various matters of public importance.

From one of the graphs depicted on the site, it was interesting to see that a majority of the top 100 are political scientists. And in the minority are Environmentalists.
I suppose this confirms the trend of minimal environmental concern that the public has as compared to its focus on politics and economics? The US Presidential Elections vs. Global Warming campaigns is a good analogy eh?

Last time I was in Delhi, the best part of the hectic one-day trip was the cab drive from airport to my office and back. In true Dhi Only One tradition, I struck up a conversation with the cabbie that left a lasting impression on me.

Once settled comfortably in the rear seat of the car, and making the necessary phone calls to all those who insist I do, I decided to pick the most mundane but sure-shot way of starting a camaraderie – the weather! Fortunately it was extremely pleasant that day for Delhi. Then we moved to the next most (ab)used topic – infrastructure issues. Nothing gets a person more charged up than someone suggesting that the infrastructure in their city looks pretty good. He will cite all the proof that he can think of to refute this claim. However, after hearing about Bangalore’s condition, he did concede that Delhi seems to be way better.

Now I thought it was time to move to more interesting topics. I told him that I have been to Delhi on very short trips, and do not know much about the city and its attractions. He immediately warmed to the subject. With a lot of animation, he said, “Madam, a day is not enough to see this city. You need at least a week. There are so many places to see here. Of course there’s the India Gate and other monuments which are beautiful. But have you been to the Buddha Gardens? The kind of flowers you see there you won’t see anywhere. It is so vast and varied that you can spend hours in there amidst nature and not get bored. I wish I could spend a lot of time there.”

I told him that I had seen the Lotus Temple from the flight and it looked stunning. He was startled. “How can you see from the plane? Is it open?” I laughed and explained about the windows. He nodded and said, “Oh, so you can see outside. But I think I would feel afraid to look down from that height!”

When I asked him whether he was from Delhi, he got nostalgic and replied, “No, my village is about 40 kms from here. It’s a small place where we grow a lot of sugarcane. Have you ever had sugarcane? It tastes great when you have it hot with rotis. I will take you to my village madam. You will really like it.”

By then my office arrived and it was time to say good-bye. But when I was leaving he said he could wait downstairs to drop me back if I wanted. We also decided that we would explore some of Delhi before heading to the airport if I had time. However that was not to be, as I got delayed in office. There was just enough time to make it back for the flight.

On the return journey, we spoke about more serious topics related to family and life. I learnt that his wife and kid are in the village, and he sleeps in a shed here. He reasoned, “What is the point of renting a place to sleep? I don’t get much of that anyway. By the time I finish duty it’s mostly midnight, and I have to be up again by 5.”

When I asked him about his kids, he replied with fondness. ”They are going to school in the village”, he said. “I wish I could afford an English school for them. But there aren’t any in the village. You know, I was a teacher before I took up this job. I taught Maths and Hindi at the local government school.”

I was amazed. “Then why did you quit teaching? Isn’t it a much more respectable job? And don’t you feel proud when students you teach go out into the world and do well?” I asked him.

“Yes there is a lot of Respect in that, Madam. And I feel very happy when I see students that I teach doing extremely well. This one year, I took extra classes for two students, and they both topped the exams. I really enjoyed my work and was a very good teacher. But that is not enough these days. I would work all day long and then also take tuitions after school hours to make ends meet, and at the end of the day not be able to earn more than Rs.2000-2500. For the same kind of hard work I can earn twice as much here. I am not afraid of hard work, Madam. I can work anywhere and under any conditions. So I might as well earn more for my family. Thinking this, I came to Delhi and learnt how to drive in this past year.”

This made me think about my work hours and how much I earn from them. I felt ashamed about all the times that I had cribbed. I asked him, “Are you happy?”

He smiled, “That is a tough question to answer. If I think about it, I was managing pretty well with my teacher’s salary as well. I saved almost nothing with that and it remains the same now. I think we learn to live with however much we have.”

“This is a tough job but I’m earning more. The problem is I don’t get to see my family as often. I try to go every weekend. But my life still seems better than yours. With all the travelling you do, I suppose you don’t get to spend much time with your family. It must be difficult when both you and your husband are working.”

I was touched. Here was a person who barely got time with his family, who worked long back-breaking hours and scraped just enough to support his family, and he was concerned about someone who earns enough to afford luxuries he doesn’t even know about!

He then asked me about Bangalore and whether he could get a job here. I asked him what he would like to do. He said, “I can do anything madam. I can learn anything very quickly. As long as I can support my family. If possible, I can bring them with me as well.” I promised to look up something for him. He smiled sadly, “I know you’ll forget about me the minute you board your flight. Suddenly you’ll realize you’ve lost Raja Sharma’s number.”

So here’s my request. If any of you guys have a need for a hard-working, honest and decent human being who can learn quickly and teach you a lot about life, do let me know. I would like to call Raja Sharma and tell him I still have his number and have kept my promise.

Do you believe that there is an author somewhere inside you? Do you think you can make it to any best-sellers list if only you could get a book published? Do you think you are just words away from the next Pulitzer or the Man Booker?

However, the problem we all encounter is how do we get a book published and marketed? Enter self-publishing.

Many companies are now offering budding authors the option of getting their books self-published. No more editors who will reject your content because they don’t believe in it, no more dead-ends. All you need to do is get your manuscript ready. Then, visit any of the self-publishing websites and get your books ordered instantly.

Here is one such company: Depot

The website gives you a range of options to choose from, including the size of your book, number of pages, binding etc. Based on this, it gives you the final price for a minimum of 25 copies. Additionally, if Depot likes your book, they will even stock it in all their retail outlets across India (Depot is a part of the future group, which owns many retail stores in India).

In short, your path to fame has now been made extremely easy. Enjoy.

Nancy Y. Kiang writes at the Scientific American Magazine that on other worlds, plants could be red, blue, even black. This is an interesting insight, considering that we are now embarking on journeys to explore life beyond our blue-green planet.

The article goes on to explain that our plants are green due to the kind of star that our Sun is. If the Sun was a different kind of star with a different spectrum, then plants would have adapted themselves to absorb energy from different wavelengths of light (the wavelength which would be more abundant). Excerpt:

Plants are adapted to this spectrum, which is determined largely by oxygen—yet plants are what put the oxygen into the atmosphere to begin with. When early photosynthetic organisms first appeared on Earth, the atmosphere lacked oxygen, so they must have used different pigments from chlorophyll. Only over time, as photosynthesis altered the atmospheric composition, did chlorophyll emerge as optimal.

On our search for ET life:

Our understanding of photosynthesis will be key to designing these missions and interpreting their data. Such questions drive a synthesis of the sciences in a way that is only beginning. Our very ability to search for life elsewhere in the universe ultimately requires our deepest understanding of life here on Earth.

Read the complete article here.

As is evident, I have been working on improving the look and features of this blog for a while now. I experimented with inserting Google ads at annoying locations , providing huge search bars and disrupting the entire template, and all that stuff.

I have finally come to a conclusion that this template will be fine for now. Yes, I have got your feedback on the advertisements not being relevant on the right panel. I am working on that and over the next few weeks you should see an improvement there as well.

Meanwhile, I have changed the e-mail subscription for this blog to another provider. Those who do not intend to come to this blog frequently (and thereby deprive me of potential advertisement revenue), are most welcome to do so. You can, instead, just enter your e-mail address on the left panel and have it all delivered in your mailbox. Those who had subscribed earlier to this blog, I would request you to re-do the act of typing your e-mail address to ensure that you get content delivered in a reliable and better format.

Weekend had an extra noise of IPL and all that. I am a big fan of test cricket, and some months ago had ridiculed the prospect of T20. But I watched the first T20 world cup quite ardently and secretly acknowledged that I liked this format too.

However, something just seems amiss with this IPL fanfare. There are Bollywood heroes and heroines, American cheerleaders, glitzy fireworks and a lot of music all around. Great. There are television ads asking you to go mad about your team. Great. There are television channels with international commentators trying to sell you this great idea of cricket, now bottled and to be consumed within six months of manufacture.

All this makes for a great event, a great marketing plan and an even better execution plan. But what is missing is a fervor that sweeps inside me when the national team plays against Australia on a Perth pitch. Where all players, on either sides, breathe their respective national anthems and a fight is more for pride than providing a window for cheerleaders to strut their stuff. I am unable to watch IPL with this zeal of enthusiasm or passion, simply because it asks me to go mad when a Mumbai player thrashes a Bangalore bowler. It doesn’t affect me at all, I don’t care whether Mumbai wins or Kolkata or for that matter Jaipur. It’s India after all and I am unable to stir up an emotional rivalry with any of these cities.

Some of the commentators, on looking at Ponting sharing moments of celebration with an Indian player, have stated that the IPL is going to increase camaraderie between rival players. That future test matches are going to be played with a different spirit, with more respect to each other and to the game. I think there is another side to it as well. Imagine Dravid crying hoarse over a bad decision given to him when Sachin seemingly traps him in front of the wicket. Would this create intra-team rivalry? Would Dravid nurture a bad feeling and let it manifest when these two greats of Indian cricket share the dressing room during a Test match? Of course, these two people mentioned are just examples, and I have no doubt that they are mature beyond all this. But what about the younger team members? Would they see beyond their rift of a T20 and team up to kill the opposite country? I am not too sure.

For now, continue to enjoy the mayhem on the stadium. Hopefully when the real cricket gets played, I will switch on the television once again to watch Brett Lee swearing in at Sachin and neither shall let out a smile to diffuse the tension.

Many a times I have found my friends to have taken unconventional career paths and this delights me to no end.

Today, I got in touch with a former schoolmate of mine, after all the years that have passed by (thanks to the now-more-omnipresent-than-God Orkut). We used to refer to him as Pushti, for reasons that I don’t remember clearly anymore. Needless to say, he does own a decent name for himself.

Pushti has been active, since the last time I heard of him, in the field of social governance and helping out the government agencies in grappling with the increasing civic issues that most cities in India are facing. As part of this, he had earlier been a part of the Bangalore’s GIS (Geographic Information System) Project for BBMP (Bruhat Bangalore Mahanagara Palika). The GIS helps BBMP in planning, monitoring and implementing various projects such as geography surveying, collection of data of infrastructure components including roads, private and public land, drainage system and so on.

Currently he is a volunteer with The E-Governments Foundation, which is an initiative led by Nandan Nilekani. As quoted by them on their website:

We are a registered not-for-profit trust that aims to improve Governance in India through the effective use of technologies and Govt. process reengineering.
We have developed a family of software products and solutions that will enable the efficient workings of cities and towns and hence the smoother delivery of services to its citizens.

We take pride in the fact that we bring together the best talent in IT and Process Re-engineering and apply it to create effective and feasible solutions to city local governments. To a large extent, we are a volunteer driven organization with volunteers contributing from around the globe. We thrive on high energy, creative and motivated people who are goal driven.

Would you like to volunteer to assist them? They need people, preferably from IT industries, who can spend their time and effort in improving governance. If so, contact them here.
And to my friend Pushti – great to know you are on a path not taken by many.

Isn’t something wrong in this? Or maybe I am failing to see the point.

The weekend was at various places starting from Kundadri, Agumbe and Tirthahalli. We were there to attend the Tunga Mahotsava where Avi’s better half, Niv, performed.

Again, this is a photo post.
One of the roads on our way to the trekking places:

A spider in the forest (couldn’t be more descriptive):

The Tunga Mahotsav was on the banks of the river. The following is a shot of the decorations on the opposite bank:

A shot of the temple at the top of a hill close to Niv’s home:

Inside the temple:

An antique mirror in Niv’s home. The home is beautiful and filled with traditional objects and furniture:

Another shot of the home:

That’s about it for now, ladies and gentlemen.