Tonight I leave for California. For the next three weeks, I will once again call the San Francisco Bay Area home. Blogging will resume from there in the next couple of days. In the meanwhile, do check out the archives if the mood strikes you. I especially suggest the September 2005 archives.
Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.
Some news just give me the warm and fuzzies. Like this one about Google philanthropy as reported by the NYTimes. It is starting off with a billion dollars and (like the winner of a beauty pageant), aims to tackle poverty, disease, and global warming. Continue reading “Google.org is Brilliant”
I attempted to access the site http://www.hinduunity.org/ and could not do so from India. I then used a proxy script found here http://techbytes.co.in/experimental/bypass.php and could access the site.
Land of the freedom of speech, eh? Land of secularism? Now, we cannot have Hindus uniting, can we? We owe our allegiance to the Pope, thank you very much.
Tell me a good story and I will listen with wide-eyed childlike wonder. Tell me a good tale and I will learn the lessons that humanity has accumulated over the ages. Spin me a yarn and I will consider you my teacher. There is no more effective way to make me understand what the truth is about the world.
The stories we tell each other reaffirm to us our shared humanity. The best ones are the ones which have been told over millennia, have evolved organically, have encapsulated the wisdom of thousands of tellers of tales.
Continue reading “Tell Me a Story”
“Where were you on Sept 11th?” is always going to be an easy question to answer for me, and I guess for a few hundred million others. Not only the day but the exact set of events that led up to the shock of learning that something extraordinary was happening would be forever remembered and often recalled.
Continue reading “September 11th, 2006”
My stay in Sydney ends tonight. I will be on the road and off the web. This is my final post from Sydney.
I leave you with a few quotes from Henry David Thoreau: Continue reading “On the Road Again”
Steve “Crocodile Hunter” Irwin died in a freak accident.
Australian naturalist and television personality Steve Irwin has been killed by a stingray during a diving expedition off the Australian coast.
Mr Irwin, 44, died after being struck in the chest by the stingray’s barb while he was filming a documentary in Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef.
. . . The stingray is a flat, triangular-shaped fish, commonly found in tropical waters.
It gets its name from the razor-sharp barb at the end of its tail, coated in toxic venom, which the animal uses to defend itself with when it feels threatened.
Attacks on humans are a rarity – only one other person is known to have died in Australia from a stingray attack, at St Kilda, Melbourne in 1945.
I enjoyed watching his show on TV and admired his commitment to the preservation of wildlife and his opposition to any kind of hunting.
It is one of those things that I am going to remember for a long while. My month long stay in Sydney is almost over. I had just finished dinner and switched on the TV and the channel that the TV was tuned on to was just getting started with the news headlines. I could hardly believe it. Life is a random draw and you never know when your number is up.
Steve will remain a great Australian hero.
Following up on the post “The False Bottom of the Pyramid” thanks to Raja Sekhar Malapati once again for the responses of Prahalad and Hammond to Karnani’s critique of the Bottom of the Pyramid propostion.
Thanks to Ameet Deshpande, I was introduced to Ted Talks. TED is “Technology, Entertainment, Design.”
Since then, I have delighted in listening to many of the talks. Here is Sir Ken Robinson (mp3 audio ~18 minutes): “Sir Ken Robinson is author of Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative, and a leading expert on innovation and human resources. (Recorded February, 2006 in Monterey, CA.)” He is entertaining and instructive.
Then listen to Richard Baraniuk (mp3 audio, duration: 19:18.) “He is a Rice University professor with a giant vision: to create a free, global online education system. (Recorded February 2006 in Monterey, CA.)”
And to round up about one hour of absolutely enjoyable listening, listen to Jimmy Wales (mp3 audio, duration ~21 minutes.) “He is founder of Wikipedia, the self-organizing, self-correcting, ever-expanding, and thoroughly addictive encyclopedia of the future (Recorded July 2005 in Oxford, UK. )”
Apparently, to be a successful “public intellectual” one of the requirements is that one must invent a catchy tag line. The tag line must have emotional appeal through a reference to some deeply held belief or social conditioning. An example of one such is the title of the book by Thomas Friedman “The World is Flat” which attempts to upset your view of the world that it is round. Another example is “the fortune at the bottom of the pyramid” which the obvious connection to the phrase “the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.”
Continue reading “The False Bottom of the Pyramid”
Atanu Dey : Life is a Random Draw 