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Meher Baba Amartithi Update
- Tim from Asheville has to feel the energy of a shampoo bottle before he uses it. I guess some conditioners just don't vibe.
- A girl from Mexico City was bamboozled with sneezing powder by Indian gypsies last night. She wasn't carrying a wallet so they couldn't steal anything.
- An Indian man had a heart attack and died in the infirmary around 3:00am.
- A thief was caught and handed over to the police.
- Overheard: "Three people I know got Hepatitus A from drinking that sugarcane juice last year."
- I saw the brightest, most amazing rainbow yesterday. It was jaw-dropping, honest-to-God beautiful.
- Part of my day was spent volunteering at the tomb/shrine. There are about 15,000 people here now, so we had to move them through very quickly. It was uncomfortable at first. My favorite duty was handing out prasad. When the pilgrims are leaving the shrine, you pick up a handful of candy and drop it into their cupped hands. My second favorite duty was washing the threshold of the tomb/shrine. Pilgrims sometimes bend down to kiss or rub the wooden floorboards, and afterwards I had to quickly wipe it dry.
- It rained yesterday and all night. Akshay heard that it hasn't rained during Amartithi since the 1950's.
- With the rain and the mud and the tarps, Josh remarked how this place really looks like a refugee camp.
Went to the Ellora Caves on an overnight trip yesterday.
Things are getting out of hand here at the Meherabad commune. The modern day Christ figure that people worship here - Meher Baba - dropped his body on January 31st, 1969. Every year on that date, followers come to his tomb/shrine and worship together. People say that it is a lot of singing and dancing and generally a good time. It is starting to get crowded.
The day that we arrived (a week ago), there were two or three dozen other pilgrims. I'm just a culture-vulturing tourist, so I shouldn't complain. I will make a guestimate that, at morning prayers today, there were at least a thousand people. We have all been moved to a new huge dormitory that resembles a two-storey castle in the middle of Indian farmland. Most of the new arrivals thus far are Indian people from nearby towns and villages.
I saw somebody playing a tabla - Both drums of the tabla have an inner circle on the head composed of sandalwood or a tar like substance called 'tuning paste' this morning. I was hypnotized for a solid hour staring and these Indian men and women pass the drum around and sing their praise songs of worship. I can best describe playing a tabla drum as dribbling a basketball sideways while rattling your fingers like a tamborine.
Mosquitoes are still a big problem at night. I will get a bus into town, find an ATM and then purchase a mosquito net.
At the suggestion of my friend Akshay, I have been spending the last few days at a compound in the middle of India named Meherabad. It is the permanent encampment for followers of Meher Baba. The friendship and the community here is lots of fun. If you can imagine what a religious commune in India primarily populated by Westerners would be like, then you probably have a good idea of how my days go. Waking up at 5:30am, prayers and songs over sunrise, etc. The defining difference in my attack can be summarized in that fact that I read from The Toyota Way instead of God-Brother or A Love So Amazing during reading hours.
Pete Townshend (ding) spent a lot of time here - there are some funny home movies from that era.
An Apology: To the Girl in the Parking Garage
An Apology: To the Girl in the Parking Garage Girls probably have no idea how many times guys get into situations EXACTLY like this.
Picasa2 (free download) automatically made that picture pile from a bunch of portraits I took this morning at a spiritual retreat that Akshay introduced me to. Here they all are.
Books I Read
Books I Read Trying out y.a.w.b.a. I really respect 37Signals for what they've done with Basecamp. I hope they can auto-link these book titles to Amazon for me.Update Sept 5th 2005 -- Here is my list, in case you don't want to click through to tadalist.
- Sam Walton, Made in America -- STILL READING
- Jack, Straight From the Gut -- GREAT BOOK
- Iacocca, An Autobiography
- The Motorcycle Diaries -- STILL READING
- Yoga For People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It -- BIG LOSER
- Richard Branson, The Autobiography
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance -- STILL READING
- Empire, A Tale of Obsession, Betrayal, and the Battle for an American Icon
- The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night -- GREAT BOOK
- The Toyota Way -- STILL READING, AWESOME
- A Place So Foreign And Eight More
- Eastern Standard Tribe -- GREAT BOOK
- Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
- Ugly Americans, The True Story of the Ivy League Cowboys Who Raided the Asian Markets for Millions -- TERRIBLE, WASTE OF PAPER
- The Story of Craig McCaw, the Visionary Who Invented the Cell Phone Industry, and His Next Billion Dollar Idea
- On Our Own Devices, The Past and Future of Body Technology -- DON'T REMEMBER, NEED TO RE-SKIM
- Rules for Revolutionaries, The Capitalist Manifesto for Creating and Marketing New Products and Services
- The Wisdom of Crowds
- Running Money -- GREAT BOOK, BEST I HAVE READ IN A YEAR
I will try to tell you about some things you would notice as a first-time visitor to India.
Fires 
People make fires along the sides of roads, in their yards and even on golf courses. On a good day, I will see a dozen different fires. These are created for different purposes:
- Heating. The temperature last night was about six degrees Celcius. There are usually about four or five men warming their hands around these types of fires.
- Garbage Disposal. Garbage includes leaves and small sticks. I think that it is usually organic matter, but I cannot confirm this. These fires are often left unattended. To see unattended fires burning along the side of a roadway and in neighborhoods is initially shocking.
- For Fun. One day I saw two little homeless boys - they could not have been more than three years old - lighting sheets of newspaper on fire and running around. They seemed to be having a very good time and had the situation under control - I do not think it was dangerous because the street kids are very smart.
Small ISVs:? You need Developers, not Programmers
"You can't eliminate problems, but you can make trades to get problems that you prefer over the ones you have now."
Eric's Axiom of Software Management, via
Deal Flow: Venture Capital Blog at BusinessWeek Online
Deal Flow - : Venture Capital Blog at BusinessWeek Online good business readsRelax, Everything Is Deeply Intertwingled: Weblications
Adam Rifkin rules! Two good short essays - Weblications - With web-based software, most users won't have to think about anything except the applications they use. and metAmazon - What if Amazon makes available the pieces of infrastructure they have built (to run Amazon), to any merchant who wants to use them.Delicious Library
Delicious Library works out of a coffee shop - Wired article. Neato. I guess I need to buy an iBook next year.He ni zai yi qi (2002)
heartwarming Chinese movie He ni zai yi qi (2002) English title - Together. A violin prodigy and his father travel to Beijing, where the father seeks the means to his son's success while the son struggles to accept the path laid before himBoing Boing: Interesting Indian delicacy: paan
Outsourcing my travel writing - Interesting Indian delicacy: paan.
Kaushal got me to try paan a few times. It's really a head trip for me, because there are so many different tastes in my mouth at one time. I end up chewing, spitting, and slurping all at once - then usually spitting it out after a few minutes, because there's nothing left but the betel leaf.
Light Reading - Networking the Telecom Industry
Cisco's Secret Software Strategy-Sources say Cisco Systems Inc. has launched a long-term software initiative that could bring the company closer to IBM Corp.'s model of offering full consulting services. I put my money on dashboardsChatting up two Israeli soul-seekers at a nightclub with Akshay and Sid. I ask them to tell me what they are doing here and what their swami has been teaching of their last month. I'm not aggressive about it, but when they give me vague answers, I keep asking. They are still not forthcoming, and I am trying to be understanding. We are in a Friday night bar, after all, and zen is much more personal than introductions.
Or is it? I'm not giving up now. It's honest interest, so I keep pushing them to talk about their Search. I request a concise, layman's explanation to what their instructor instructs as she sits in a center of Buddhist students for a few hours each day. The Israeli girl - she's draping a nice red frock around her shoulders - starts to open up a little. "Some people study zen for ten or twenty years of meditation - and still they don't have anything. Our darsham says that might be the wrong approach. Well, not necessarily the wrong approach. She just offers to teach us a shortcut."
A shortcut to what? The girl and her male friend hem and haw. Do you stop wanting, do you lose your desire for material objects? More hemming and more hawing. More pushing from me.
"Here, like this. You work in front of a computer all day, you bag groceries, maybe you do construction work. We're learning how to do anything, and to not care about it, to be able to do it for one hundred hours and be..." There's a pause. These kids speak with a lot of pauses, I just haven't been documenting them. It's like they want to say Be Happy, or end it with another obvious, but they are holding back.
"Our darshan explains it and says that once you Understand, if you wanted to lay in bed all day and never leave your bedroom, you could be a perfectly happy tomato."
I mull this over in my head. Depending on what sort of mood I am in, I will remember this as either the dumbest thing I have heard all week - or the most spiritual.
The Mythical Man-Month - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Mythical Man-Month - a classic book on software project management written by Fred Brooks. Check out the invaluable insights. via Bram Cohen's ljSamsung Introduces 3D Motion Interface on Phone (Phone Scoop)
neat, Samsung Introduces SCH-S310 cell phone for Korea included accelerometer allows you to "shake" out numbers, ringtonesJust finished watching If I Were Rich (France). The movie we saw before was Sky Hook (Yugoslavia).
I know what you are thinking. "An international film festival after a weekend of paragliding? In India? You could do that in Atlanta, Chicago or New York! That's not India! That's not third-world experience!"
The theater was full. Throngs of Indian college students packed two to a seat and filled up all the aisles and even the stairs. A neat thing about this cinema complex was that for an extra five rupees, you could get your lunch packed into a parcel and eat it in the theater. I had Chinese okra, which was like seasame chicken, but with okra. Really good.
And everybody wanted to be where we were. Everybody is moving up.
Helmets? Not needed in Pune, says expert- The Times of India
Helmets? Not needed in Pune, says expert great thinkin', buddy!
SecurityFocus HOME News: Hacker penetrates T-Mobile systems
Hacker penetrates T-Mobile systems and steals Paris Hilton cell phone pictures! You can't make this stuff up. Amazing. via slashdotWireless.3Yen.com - Wireless in Japan - Japanese Mobile Phones
Wireless.3Yen.com - Wireless in Japan - Japanese Mobile Phones Some of the phones pictured on that site are pretty unreal. As of November 15, 2004, DoCoMo registered 7.3 million FOMA subscribers.Google Groups : mi.jobs
cool history Well-capitalized Seattle start-up seeks Unix developers Jeff Bezos, looking for early programmers to build Amazon.com in 1994 via blogdexConcrete Nation: Science News Online, Jan. 1, 2005
Concrete Nation - The Romans invented cement-based concrete more than 2,000 years ago and used the material to build architectural masterpieces such as the Pantheon. Bright future for ancient material via BoingBoingBetaNews | Justin Frankel Reveals Life After Winamp
Justin Frankel Reveals Life After Winamp some PR for Jesusonic, which will impress every musician EVERWildBlue Communications | About WildBlue | How it Works | How it Works Demo
About WildBlue - How it Works neat
By the way, mad ups to Kaushal, who is on fire right now with a new job in the pipeline.
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Carpe Visum ? What is DivX?
DivX is about the democratization of media. Nick Gray has a huge BUY on these guys. What a cool company. DivX DVD players in Wal-Mart!T-shirts are big business. This site promises to be a cute "What's Hot" aggregator via BoingBoing.
I still think it would be a really great idea to work hard and make an Amazon.com of t-shirts. Zach told me a few months ago that AllPosters was trying it, but I think they were going to keep the physical inventory. I'm suggesting an affiliate-driven t-shirt aggregator, where you pass around the XML order information and keep your hands off of billing and fulfillment.
Jakob thinks that sites like this already exist, but I haven't heard of one. The important thing would be to invest all profits over the first few years to market the site as "The Amazon.com of cool t-shirts." E-mail me if you have some links or comments on this.
It figures that as soon as I was ready to tremble in fear at the prospect of India rising to dominate the globalized world of intellectual capital, something totally backward was bound to happen.
Last night I was ready to party. New Year's Eve is a time to party! So with the wonderful help of the lovely Swati Ayer who recently accepted a nice position at Cartoon Network India, congratulations, my friend Akshay and I found ourselves welcoming the new year in the company of many beautiful Indian women (and their yuppie husbands, but that's another story). No countdowns, no balloons - just fast active dance music until midnight, and then the power was cut for a long minute, and everybody knew it was 2005. Except for me, because I just assumed it was another power outage. In hindsight, this method of New Year announcement was simplistically beautiful, because you're left with a pitch-black and otherwise-silent room of screaming humans.
Our after-partying was cut a short around 1:00am - and here is the backwards part - by demonstrators for a big political party in India. These bhen chuths shut down all of the popular discos around Pune under threat of violence, and they were protesting and yelling outside of our very club! This group is famous for their anti-Western celebrations on nights like this. In February, I'm told, their henchmen smash storefront windows of businesses with Valentines Day heart and rose decorations. So the police had to come up to our little peacful club and nicely say that unless the music was turned off, the large crowd downstairs was going to get violent. Oh, and please do not take any alcohol bottles outdoors, or else you will get lynched.
I think that everybody celebrating Western-style took it in good stride, and there probably wasn't any real danger - just some unhappy people showing off their political muscle. The club had a great buffet upstairs, so most people simply stopped dancing and started eating.
43 Folders: A Year of Getting Things Done: Part 1, The Good Stuff
an article called A Year of Getting Things Done Part 1, The Good Stuff and Part 2, The Stuff I Wish I Were Better At