Boyhood heroes

This sunday I was at the Eloor Library @ Chennai. As I was wandering through the rows of shelves I came across a book “Around the world in 80 Trades” by Conor Woodman and picked it up. It was one of my best random picks ever.

Was Conor Woodman a boyhood hero of mine? No. But he would have fit the bill – being a modern day Marco Polo.

My first boyhood hero who I desperately wanted to emulate was Amundsen. We had a english rapid reader lesson on how he dreamed of being the first man to go to the North Pole. When he was beaten to the North Pole he decided to go South instead. However this chapter was on how he trained himself as a boy to be tolerant to low temperatures – he kept his window open during winters when he slept. Try as I might – I could never simulate that wintery condition back home in Mumbai.

My next hero was Thor Heyerdahl – the author of The Kon Tiki Expedition and a few others after that. Thor is there high up in my list of mad cap adventurors. Unfortunately I have just read one of his journey’s and am dying to read about his other two expeditions. And in that light KonTiki is important. It was his first such expedition. He had a theory that the Polynesian/South Pacific Islands were populated by a race that was driven out of Peru by the Incas. Nobody bought this theory. However, it was his conviction that allowed him to sell this idea to 5 other swede/norwegian adventurors and the 6 of them braved the mighty Pacific Ocean in a 30′ X 30′ Balsa raft. While I don’t know how long this journey did take – reading his notes about this journey drove home one point – one cannot be a squemish eater if one has to undertake such journeys. I am vegetarian – well an experimentative one but still I am not sure I would have managed to survive 4 months or so in a all sea environment living on fish alone.

And to this list of people I am now adding Conor Woodman.

What is common to them? A conviction that they are onto something and the courage to see this task that is so much larger than them to its logical conclusion.

Do you have any childhood heroes? Do suggest a name and a memoir that I could read about their efforts and I will surely mention them in future posts.

Myth = Mithya

Dr Devdutt Pattanaik wrote a lovely book titled Myth=Mithya An anthology of Hindu mythology. It was a simple book that took the myth and peeled of layers below the story to share insight with the reader.

There were a couple of themes that ran through the book.

– Nature v/s culture
– Destiny v/s desire

The key forms of God – Brahma – the creator; Vishnu – the preserver; Shiva – the destroyer and the feminine form Shakti.

Shakti represents nature – raw, unbridled energy. The masculine forms represents external order imposed on nature – domesticating it.

In the beginning, Brahma emerged seated on a lotus from Vishnu’s navel and floated on the sea of consciousness. He opens his eyes – sees nature all around him, interacts with it and begins the creative process.
Thus we are the sum of our interactions with the world around us. We can either choose to effect some change in the world or react to the changes in the world around us. Thus either our desires effect change or we submit to what we could loosely call our destiny.

I also liked this book as it helped me understand my unhappiness with some aspects of my life. I was not fighting for what I desired and nor was I accepting what could be called my destiny and hence plagued by a simmering frustration with myself. Reading the book was partly therapeutic and brings me to a inflection point – what am I going to do?

I have not decided and hopefully when I do – I will blog about it.

A $60M gift or bonus?

In this current business environment where bonuses are a bad word – this is a wonderful story.

Leonard Abess, CEO of Miami based City National Bank sold a minority stake in his bank and shared 60M of the proceeds with employees from City National. In total this $60M was distributed among 399 current employees and 72 past employees. That is one hell of a gesture. I would have doffed my proverbial hat right here but then Leonard, in an interview on ABC News references this event and says “I prefer to live in a world where this is ordinary.” WOW!

I have been left speechless.

This is the link to an interview given by Leonard Abess to Knowledge@Wharton. Please read it if this article caught your fancy too.

I wish employers in India read about Leonard and evaluate how their attitudes towards existing employees.

Ciao.

Low tech Engg – III – the $6 solution to reducing green house gas emissions

The Kyoto box just won a prize worth $75000 for the most innovative solution to reduce green house gas emissions.

It is a solar powered cooker that can cook rice, boil water and so on and it costs only $6 or less to make.

It uses 2 cardboard boxes – one inside the other. The insides of the inner box are painted black to absorb solar radiation better. The space between the two boxes is filled with shredded paper / saw dust or similar insulating agent.
The lapels (for lack of a better word) of the outer box are covered with silver foil and the inner box is covered with a transperant acrylic lid which keeps the insides warm and manages to raise the temperature within this cooking box to upto 80 deg.

Thank you Jon Bohmer for this innovative device that is affordable and hence more likely to replace firewood for cooking.

In truly Rehmanesque fashion – Jai Ho!

The biggest show on Earth – Elections 2009

The national elections are on us. The schedule has been declared and the political parties have begun their jousting. This is a good time to get share statistics and other nuggets of information.

The process is simple – The Lok Sabha or the lower house of parliament has 543 seats. The President of India invites the leader of the party that has the single largest majority to form the government. If that party has a simple majority of 272 seats the process is simple – otherwise you see the unseemly sport of horse-trading where backroom deals are cut, money exchanged and ministerial portfolios traded to cobble together a alliance or a coalition.

But for the last two governments – coalitions have had a sordid parliamentary history. However the NDA & the UPA have changed that … and we are gearing up to expect one more coalition. Whic will be the party around which this coalition will be made? This will unfold as the elections progress. While we observe & study the process I shall try to put together facts that would usually not be found in one place. Keep watching this space.

I love making come-backs

So here I am making a comeback  – writing my first words for the year 2009.

I am going to make this a simple effort and list out some of the interesting links I have come against in the last few weeks.

a) Codechef.com – a programming challenge website for indian school-kids. This definitely seems to be an interesting site as I know have problems to solve while learning a new langauge for the heck of it. My next long term project will be to indentify a programming language and start doing some coding in it

b) Praja.org – it is a new take on local self government. I like it and I am eager to see the full functioning website. The real reason I like it – it gives us a service based approach to taking up problems with the municipality.

c) dlightdesign.com – a social enterprise with a vision to end the use of kerosene lamps in remote parts of the world and driven by the same profit motive that governs most corporates with a less flattering vision.

d) socialedge.org – a place where these people who want to do-good hang out and share their ideas / thoughts.

Check these out – in the meantime I will work on one or both of these two things -

– find new links that I want to share with you

– find more details about these links

Ciao,
-A

Ganesh Chaturthi

Yesterday was Ganesh Chaturthi – a hindu festival worshipping Ganesh – the elephant headed god.

Ganesh, Ganapati, Vinayaka or Vigneshwara is a very important deity. Why? He is the deity you pray to whenever you start something seeking his blessings so as not to experience obstacles in this new endevaour.

This blog post is my prayer to the Lord Ganesha to bless me with a vision to see topics in every day life that I can blog about and thus help me keep this blog going on and on.

While I am talking about the Lord Ganesha – I wanted to talk about my best part of this festival. Amma (my mother) would cook a big meal with all of Ganesha’s favourite eats. We would complete puja, offer these eats as naivedyam (offering) and then eat. Now as we were full of all that yummy home cooked goodness – Nana (my dad) would read us the story of the moon and Lord Ganesha.

Lord Ganesha was happy. He had feasted and he wanted to share his pleasure with the world. He started to dance. The moon saw him, a elephant headed boy with a big belly – dancing and started to laugh. Ganesha was stung by that laughter and cursed the moon – whoever sees you this day onwards shall have be cursed for life. The moon was immediately penitent and begged for Ganesha’s forgiveness. All the other gods and goddesses accompanied the moon and pleaded on his behalf. Finally Ganesha relented and said since I have cursed you – I cannot take the curse back but can make the terms of the curse to be more favourable to the moon. Whoso ever sees the moon on Ganesh Chaturthi will suffer unexplained bad-luck.

Cut to a later date. The lord Krishna was milking his cows at sun-down on a Ganesh Chaturthi day. He happened to see the reflection of the moon in the milk but he did not give it much thought. The next day he went to see another Yadava King Satrajit of a neighbouring kingdom. This king had a wonderful jewel called the Samantaka Mani which he got as a gift from his Ista devta – Surya the Sun-god. This jewel would give forth 9 maunds of gold every day and Krishna wished for Satrajit to give this jewel as a gift to Ugrasen the most powerful of all Yadava kings but Satrajit refused to part with his treasure.

Satrajit gave this jewel to his brother, Prasenjit. On that day he wore this jewel and went hunting. While hunting he was so engrossed by the thrill of the hunt he did not notice he was separated from the rest of his kinsmen and wandered off deep into the forest. There he was attacked and killed by a hungry lion. This lion was attracted by that shining jewel and took it with him.

Krishna did not know anything about this when he went to visit this king. The king heard the news of his brother and the jewel going missing and declared that Krishna was a thief and murderer.

Krishna was bewildered by this charge but sought permission from the king to go and search the forest for this wondrous jewel – the samantaka jewel. He wandered deep into the forest and found the body of the king’s brother but did not find any jewel out there but he did find the gold this jewel produced. He followed the trail left in gold and found himself wandering deeper and deeper into the jungle.

At long last, he came upon a cave. There was a gold coin someway inside the cave and Krishna knew the jewel was taken inside the cave. He studied the ground next to the coin and found that it was highly disturbed as if a mighty struggle had taken place here. He went inside the cave and found the carcass of the lion but there was no jewel.

As krishna’s eyes adjusted to the darkness he found that he was in the cave of an ancient bear called Jambavanta (from the Ramayana fame). Long story short – he fights Jambavanta. This epic fight lasts for 21days but finally Krishna overcomes Jambavanta and takes the jewel from him. During the fight jambavanta understands that he is fighting none other than another avataar of Rama just as he had wished for – to fight Rama one on one to find out who is stronger.

Jambavanta gives the jewel (the samantaka mani) and his daughter Jambavanti, in marriage, to Krishna.

Krishna returned the Samantaka mani to its rightful owner – Satrajit. Satrajit is repentent for having called Krishna a thief and a murderer and to show his good faith gives his sister Satyabhama in marriage to Krishna.

Krishna knew that while he had not taken heed of seeing the reflection of the moon in the milk he had to undergo the extreme humiliation of being called a thief and a murderer. He decreed that all mortals who heard his story on Ganesh Chaturthi day and understood that seeing the moon on this day would lead to grave misfortune would be spared of this misfortune even if they saw the moon inadvertently.

Nana would read this story out loud with all of us kids and mom settled comfortably around him. After hearing this story I would then take a nap and dream about a heavy dinner.

Unfortunately this Ganesh Chaturthi was not usual as I was alone in Chennai while the rest of the family was at home. However, I got to eat modaks at my landlord’s home and mmmmmm boy they were good.

While I know I would like to be home with family for the next Ganesh Chaturthi – i am now focussed on the next big festivals that are lined up – Dusshera and Diwali.

Ciao
-A

Oct 28, 2008 -This article on Wikipedia has helped me finish this post by allowing me to get the right names … (the king becomes Satrajit, brother becomes Prasenjit). Thank you Wikipedia.

Low tech engg-II

The last time I wrote about engineering and how it was not about technology but solving problems.

I found this really cool device – thanks to BNET. It is a really cool, ultra-small (credit card size), foldable, tripod for your digital camera. Nopes you did not read it wrong – I said TRIPOD and it is pretty inexpensive at $8 and change (excluding shipping).

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you – the fozi tripod. This is truly low-tech but seriously innovative and waaay to coooool (I really should curb my enthusiasm and stick to english spelling).

Take a look at it and do leave comments.

Low tech engineering

Engineering is not all about high technology. With the rapid strides being taken in information technology, material sciences, electronics and other branches of modern engineering - I had forgotten – engineering is a science of creating practical solutions for problems – both mundane and exotic. This article in the Hindu reminded me what Engineering is about – it is about solving a problem and not necessarily about using a particular device, theory or branch of science to do so.

This article details how the MIT M-labs (short for Mobility Labs) has worked on creating better wheel chairs and other mobility implements for people suffering from disabilities in 3rd world countries.  Read about their efforts here – http://www.hindu.com/2008/06/15/stories/2008061559351000.htm

Cheers!

6 words per slide

I was reading Seth Godin’s – ebook on making memorable presentations and was struck by his first do (or do not) …. depending upon how you would word the next sentence.

Have not more than six words on a slide.

What can you convey with 6 words? What will the audience take away with those 6 words?

Where do you put all those fancy bullets? Or is this is a silver bullet for super presentations? Ok – I will give you this – it was a lousy pun.

In that ebook he also says – avoid giving your slides to your audience as a keepsake or to take to the boss. The slides go when you do. In which case if I ever come to the gold standard of slide making – I will never be able to display it on the web as that shining example of an excellent presentation.  Drat!

In any case I am atleast 50 words over the gold standard today and god willing I shall see a day when my presentations too are 6 words or less per slide.