Author: Pradeep

  • Hello World!

    The last revision of this blog was lost to an episode of hacking. Poor security and lack of backups mean that I pretty much lost all my blog posts in the interim period other than their existence on Google’s cache. So, this continues from my previous blog here.

    Just to bring you upto speed on my offline events. I quit my job in Bharuch and moved back to Mumbai. I work in a bank here.

    I spend most of my time working online and offline on Wikipedia related stuff. I am the GLAM SIG for the Wikimedia India Chapter.

  • I’ve Moved!

    I’ve moved to my own domain. You can find it here.

  • Book Review: The Demons of Chitrakut

    I tarried a little before I wrote this review because of several reasons. I roamed around a bit and was otherwise occupied reading the next version of this book.

    I found two things about this book very disconcerting. One was the time jumps that this book took. The second was that the story seems to be slowing down. The time jumps were rather disconcerting because it happened in single paragraphs. I would have tarried a little more and filled a few words in to let the reader take some time to sink in the passage of time. Given, that the author was not trying to fit the Ramayana in a single book, I think he could have done so.

    Also, the narrative seems to be slowing down in this edition of this book. Given the speed of the narrative in the previous few books, it almost seems as if the author suddenly realised that if he maintained the same narrative speed he would not have 6 books to write that he promised the publisher. Suddenly, the slowing down of the narrative means that I enjoyed the book a little less taking time to understand the change in the pace of the narrative.

    Overall, while I am still enjoying reading the series, I wish he would maintain the narrative speed. I am looking forward reading the next book in this series and hope that the narrative speed returns in the next book in the series.

    Review: 3/5

  • Book Review: The Master As I Saw Him

    I wanted to finish this book early because it diverged from one of the ideas I have been recently considering with respect to books that I read. I want to read the books of authors who are still living. I am happy that I did so.

    The book is in the form of several jottings of Sister Nivedita on the various aspects and teachings of Swami Vivekananda. The number of personal insights are few and far between and then too is clouded by the admiration that the Sister holds her Master in. It’s a nice summary study of the teachings of Vivekananda and can be used as one, in my opinion.

    Rating: 3/5

  • Book Review: Who Let the Dork Out? (Dork Trilogy #3)

    November 19, 2012
    11:26 pm

    Dear diary,

    Today I finished that book that was written by that dude Sidin who thinks of himself as if he is representing all Malayalees. What gives him that right, I ask? He is no representative of Malayalee culture living all that distance away in bleddy London and all.

    I brought this book from the Kitab Khana bookstore in Mumbai when I had gone there on Diwali vacation. Srinivas uncle was waiting outside for some time so I had to leave quickly. I had told him I had spent two and half hours in that bookstore. Coming out with nothing in hand makes sense to bookworm like me but not to him who do not understand the economics of spending time at a bookstore instead of bleddy buying and reading the book. Being in Bharuch also means that I can download nothing but email over the Internet. So, I brought this book.

    Srinivas uncle eyed me suspiciously when he saw the book that I had purchased but I diverted his attention by asking him about idli sambhar at that udipi joint opposite Bombay House.

    Anyway, I am writing here to tell you about the book.

    It was good in some places. It was bad in other places. It was okay in all places. He was just showing off writing Malayalam words in English all over the place. Ente Devame.

    He is just publishing someone’s diary just like that. Now I am really afraid if he publishes my diary like this also. And I have password protected my computer and you also diary. But what if Sidin is hacker or something or Anonyomous. Who knows? And then making money.

    But I identify with his humour in some places and I like it. Sometime Malayalam words only are the best way to express ones truest feelings. First time I read acknowledgements section in the book also and liked it. He is totally funny.

    In some places he exaggerates a bit and that makes me slightly mad only. Too much it is. Would I recommend this book to others – yes. So, that they can also suffer and we can all laugh about it over a can of beer. I will, ofcourse, be having a can of Coca-Cola.

    Hmm. Must work on that book I was writing. How about if I publish you diary saying it was written by somebody else? No? Okay.

    Rating: 4/5

  • Toilets

    Toilets, especially public toilets in India have been a subject of discussion recently. Bill Gates’ and his foundation want to work on sanitation in India. Office toilets in India have moved to western commodes with people having no idea whatsoever on how to use it – especially the men (I cannot speak for the women, as I have no anecdotal or direct evidence :) ). I prefer the Indian toilet although have very rare access to one. The New York Times’ carried an article today on a campaign called Right to Pee, urging government officials to let women pee for free. This led me to want to write this blog post.

    I cannot speak for the women, but the men’s room of most public toilets I take a look at in Mumbai are horrible. I wonder why we pay the INR 2/3 that we do for the use of the facility. It would be interesting to collect data on how much a public toilet facility earns on average. I have not searched for such data, if it were available. But, I understand from the above article that activists are first trying to figure out how many toilets do exist. Similar efforts are on in Mumbai too, it would seem. So, I am extrapolating that the above required data is absent.

    A public toilet provides the following facilities – water supply, lighting and exhaust fan (generally one – generally not working, but let’s assume it’s working) as well as a mug in an Indian toilet. There usually is no flush facility. The usual cleaning process involves cleaning the floors with a mop with phenol locally sourced. The toilets are then flushed several times with water aping the flushing process. This is usually done just twice a day. There seems or there is no such treatment for the men’s urinal. I’ve only seen the flushing process being done once in a men’s urinal. What goes untouched in the process are the paan stains on the wall, which give the men’s room its stench other than the urinal which adds to the stench there. Broken tiles and ceramic are usual. You usually don’t get good mugs and most people seem to not know how to use the toilets.

    So, before anything else. We just need better public education or awareness on how to use a toilet (not just a public toilet), better and cheaper disinfectants and enforce the no tobacco/smoking in the public toilets rule. On the Right to Pee campaign above, I think the men’s urinal must be recognized as a part of the toilet, charged for and kept clean through water flushing and use of disinfectants and unclogged drain pipes. Once this is done, Bill Gates and others are welcome to work on improving sanitation, etc.

  • An Evening in the Temple

    The temple was a little building complex built on a clearing in the center of open fields. To one side was a lake, whose occupants were provided cover by a tree and a rocky outcrop along it. The sound of percussion instruments streamed out steadily in a rising rhythm as one headed towards it. The silence amplified the sound. The beat rose, reached a crescendo and then slowed down only to return to that crescendo.

    Girls with jasmine flowers on their heads and lamps in their hands were lighting the lamps around the central structure of the temple that housed the temple’s deity, Devi. It had been an hour past dusk and we had reached there in our car and walked a small distance to reach the temple. I had a dhoti on with nothing above the waist. Wearing a shirt was prohibited inside the temple complex. The surrounding structure housed among other things a counter where we could pay for certain prayers and rituals, a hall with a low sloping ceiling with a narrow corridor in the middle to access a central courtyard. The surrounding structure also had a room for the priest and a kitchen.

    I thought what purpose music served in the temple. I think it served a complex social and ritualistic purpose. Socially, it signaled to devotees in the village that ritual proceedings were about to begin. Ritualistically, it provided pause and entertainment for devotees already gathered in the temple complex. Perhaps it served a spiritual purpose as well – to arouse Devi from her slumber so that she may shower her devotees with blessings. These conjectures are mine. I didn’t ask.

    The girls had finished lighting the lamps that surrounded the central structure. The priest chanted inside in a mixture of Malayalam and Sanskrit. The doors were thrown open. A devotee struck a bell hard. Others crowded a central corridor to seek blessings. The music played to its crescendo again. The musicians were local. They had day jobs and were not paid for playing at the temple. They did it as an expression of their belief. Temples might have once been centers where arts and architecture once prospered. Not anymore.

    In my opinion this is what ails Hinduism. Hinduism has been about silly rituals that provide opportunities to encourage in its devotees the arts and appreciation of architecture. People went to the temple not just to fulfill their selfish needs but also to entertain themselves. They did this through ways that encouraged auditory, oral, visual participation. Now temples are only centers to fulfill people’s selfish needs. The entertainers seem more selfish than the devotees. Selfishness is leading to the death of the temple. Older temples stand out as visual treats also because they are architectural marvels. The temples built today just mock them. There is no creativity – no inspiration.

    In the hall is a rangoli that takes the form of Devi. Her breasts raise above the floor as mounds. The priests use simple every day objects to perform rituals. Music accompanies the vigorous movements of the priest in and around the drawing. The ritual also was creatively done. In the end, in an act of destruction, the whole rangoli is rubbed with coconut leaves.

    As I walk out of the temple into the silent night, my mind is silenced again. People talk to each other in whispers. After a brief interlude of participating in the ceremony, their minds returned to chores left undone at home. I make a mental note of writing these random thoughts on my blog when I return home and then allow myself to get lost in the stars that twinkle. Millions of them.

  • Lessons Learnt running a Student Space Organisation in India

    From the Wikipedia posts last month, I have been dwelling a bit in the past. This has been for two reasons, to re-establish some connections with the space community and to make sure that I have closed all the old open loops. One of the open loops that I found was sharing what I had learnt from running a space organisation in India. This post hopes to close that loop. This is also a post that my friend Srinivas Laxman has been after me to finish and publish. This is also the result of various conversations that I have had since then. Although unnamed, I’d like to thank these people for putting several things in perspective.

    I started the Indian chapter of Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS) as an information-sharing, project based and activist space organisation. While it fulfilled the objectives of information sharing, the number of projects it did or the space activism it did or does can be found lacking.

    For starters, there are quite a few people who love to stop you from running a space organisation in India. There are very few who will encourage you. I got stuff like, “You already have enough on your plate getting a mechanical engineering degree from Mumbai University, why do you want to burden that trying to run a space organisation?” or jabs that was even taken to my final semester practical exams by jealous professors in front of the external examiner. It requires thick skin, personally and the ability to laugh at yourself and have the strength to push through. You also need the wisdom to learn when to stop. When your life goes or begins to go for a toss, it is usually a good time to pause and fix your life. If you still want to start and run a space organisation, do consider some of the things I share here and make your call. Please take some time out to share what you learned, in the end so that some one else can benefit from what you learned.

    When you begin a space organisation and seek people who can become members, some of the common things you will hear is what benefit they will get out of it. This is a fair question. Only thing, just the chance to discuss with a bunch of strangers your passion for space exploration and some activities is not sufficient for them to put in money, which you need to legally register the organisation in India. You do not get help unless they are close friends, who help reluctantly. You do not see people offering to share telescopes with you so that you can put a star gazing session. You see people asking for free stuff – newsletters, t-shirts, badges and what not. Mind you, this is not just for a space organisation but any non-profit that you want to start in India. Later on, even if you get people to work with on or for various activities, you will find it difficult to find people who can help you with paperwork or administration. This is stuff you need to do – given India’s non-profit laws and structure.

    In SEDS, I used the information sharing to spark in a few peers interest in various areas – rocketry, satellite building, cansats etc. These turned out to be projects that started off, worked well into the planning and design phase but got stuck in the hardware stage. This was mainly due to the lack of Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) stuff available for space in hobby shops and other stores and limited access to workshop in engineering colleges. Even with access to workshops, very few found it worth their while to actually manufacture hardware. Very few SEDS projects reached the hardware stage.

    When faced with challenges in accessing and testing hardware in India, students found it easier to just give up on the projects rather than raise questions with officials and try to open communication lines with people in India’s space agency, ISRO or the Government. Students seemed averse to the idea of activism that would enable space activities to progress beyond the design stage. For reasons that I am not able to figure out, this activism did not come even for information sharing by ISRO prior to launches, etc. For me, this led to a frustrating phase. Coupled with frustrations in my own studies, I found it easier to leave space for a while and fix my life.

    SEDS continues to function today. I have kept away from it deliberately to encourage the students of today to take a call on what they think they should work on.

  • Wikipedia: Lessons learnt from GLAM

    This is my last note from the Wikipedia-universe. In my last days there, whilst working on the Conference idea, this was a Wikipedia project that caught my interest. GLAM is an abbreviation that stands for Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums. It was an effort from Wikipedia to open and make publicly available some of the knowledge and treasures stored in these cultural institutions.

    My first brush with GLAM was when Liam Wyatt came to India to visit cultural institutions in the country. The trip made me go to the Prince of Wales Museum (now called CSMVS) for the first time since my childhood. I was shocked at the changes that I had seen. What I had imagined as I had seen it had transformed completely. While the Museum was looking for new avenues to explore, I guess this seemed a little too radical for them. While they said they would speak to us, there was not much of a response and our preoccupation with the Conference prevented something more substantial.

    We did get many from Bombay’s cultural world for a talk on the Creative Commons (CC) license. It was a good experience and I think we got to speak to a lot of people about GLAM as a concept. Whether the cultural world embraces the CC licenses and enters a techno-cultural age is something the cultural world must debate. The event helped us understand that the debate was happening and there were multiple views on the subject and some interesting side discussions on specific areas like accessibility as well.

    Something I learned from the space world, was that not all things that you borrow can be directly used in any context. You have to understand local conditions before you adapt a concept for a geographic location. While I was more familiar with the landscape among space enthusiasts, this was not the case with the cultural scene. I had not visited a gallery, archive or museum, ever or in my memorable past. I did visit libraries but I did not engage them in the concepts of openness. I went there mostly as a customer. This made the underlying working layer of these institutions and their quirks invisible to me.

    Once these layers become visible, there are different approaches to each institution – at the level of educating the need for openness and contributing to Wikipedia, helping them enter the technical age, help them participate in techno-cultural debates, engage with various communities and ensure that the cultural institutions become vibrant institutions.

    While Wikipedians seem eager to engage with cultural institutions, sometimes they need to don the role of people opening the cultural sector. They also need to understand the mindset of the cultural institution. There are still spaces that view digitization as the death of the government agency if not reduction in manpower. The original cultural relic does not reduce in importance with its digitization, it becomes more valuable. This needs to be communicated to the cultural institutions. In addition, the importance of preserving the original cultural relic and ensuring an accessible web presence for the cultural institution cannot be stressed enough.

    With these thoughts, I am quite happy to close the doors on the Wikipedia phase of my life :) . Have a great day.

  • WikiConference India 2011 – More Personal Thoughts

    After a long time, User:AroundTheGlobe and I managed to put out the report on WikiConference India 2011. Here’s the announcement on the mailing lists.

    The making of the Report could become a report in itself. Here, I wanted to share a few things that I wanted to say but could not on the Wikipedia Report page since it is a co-authored work. Now, let me contradict myself. Some of the Report does contain accusations and events that User:AroundTheGlobe wanted to put out but I was not comfortable putting out. This made us want to fork the report in two, a private Report and a public one. Further thinking made me feel that this created a potential for a leak and could become a source of more controversy. I, therefore, pushed for a single Report. In exchange, I had to be comfortable against some of these accusations, although I was not completely confident about said accusations. I can only say that there are some undercurrents running through this Report that it could have well done without. The Report, towards the end, was also done a little hastily than I would have.

    I am not sure if it’s totally great to say what’s above along with the Report. I have been debating about it with myself. When I spoke to User:AroundTheGlobe today, he said that he wanted to say the things stated in the Report publicly. It is this conversation that makes me want to put my point of view out in the open. It is, for me, a way to close a chapter – The Wikipedian phase of my life.

    There is a concern that the Report does not provide much for the future organisers of the Conference. I would like to rebut this point to say that that is our main point. Any future Conference must necessarily come out of a request for such a Conference from the Wikimedia Community in India and then be legally led by the Chapter. Until we reach that phase, the Community will not feel ownership of the Conference and will not be able to help the Organizers with 100%. Sengupta had suggested that the Conference be run like a BarCamp, in the run up to the 2011 Conference. I do not think any other conference can be run in a more BarCamp like manner than a Wikipedia conference truly supported by the Community. As I said, we’ve provided all the guidelines we could provide.

    There has been a lot of politicking around this Conference. While it has attracted fresh blood into the Movement, as you pass through certain channels, you become aware of the politics amongst Wikipedians. Many seasoned Wikipedians have experienced this, I believe. It is not all pervasive on Wikipedia. You find it more on the mailing lists and off-list conversations. I have felt this is a bad thing but it is not yet affecting the Movement as such. People have tried to draw me towards these politics and I have fought hard to stay away. I do not know if I have succeded or failed. This is one of the reasons that I quit Wikipedia. It has affected the fun I had when I edit, thinking about some of the fellow editors words. It reduces trust, somehow.

    One of the things that deeply affected me during the Conference in 2011, was the off list conversations and the intrigue. I despised it at a fundamental level but enjoyed it since I was not involved in anything at this scale before. Some of it was forced us on by restrictions on time and some because we felt that it was the only practical way of moving ahead. In the end though, it made me really tired and made me ask myself many questions.

    In the end, things did get enough out of hand, that the only means of escape seemed to me to let Wikipedia go. There are many people who’ve expressed to me, an interest in knowing this politics deeply. I have evaded these questions telling them that I’d write about it someday. Really, I am still not sure of all the connections and anything written with half-knowledge is sometimes more dangerous than anything written with full understanding of the facts.

    Quitting Wikipedia has helped me immensely. People are no longer interested in me and leave me alone. I’ve cancelled my membership. I maintain contact with a few Wikipedians who became friends and hopefully, will remain friends. It has removed negativity, freed up time to work out in a gym and go out to movies and have more fun. More time is now free. I miss some of the things I learned because I edited something on Wikipedia, but it is a small price to pay for my mental well-being.