India outside India

I thought this would interest some friends at least!
Please read and comment.

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Face of the Future

The item is self explanatory!
This may be true for tomorrow!

There hangs the man - Again

I mentioned a cartoon in one my earlier posts!
There hangs the man
Here it is and I like it so much!

"I cannot imagine how these people work sitting at the tables all the while!"

P B Srinivos - RIP

There are more than 800 entries or posts as they call them, are there in this blog.
I write about many things.
I write about people also.
Interestingly I found out something peculiar.
Whenever a famous person passes away, people search for details on the net.
Recently when such a person passed away my blog witnessed more than 1000 page hits!

I wrote about that person long back when he was hale and hearty!
I write about people because I like their works, be they artists or writers.
Goodness's sake, I write so that people know about them.
I don't intend my blog to turn an obit column.

I have written a few lines about my good friend Sri P B Srinivos a few days back.
I only have not posted the same in the blog.
I am sure I also wrote why I am thinking about this man all of a sudden!
I think Srinivos wanted me to write about him!
Alas! It appears he is no more!

My blog now is sure an obit column!
I don't mind it for this great man's sake!

Read what I have written.

"Turn around and have a look at the life. Experiences and memories would bring the past before you," goes a Telugu film song. I remember the song is rendered by none other than Sri P B Srinivos. Yes, that is how he spells his name.

People used to call him Srinivoice! He had a title kind of thing which would roughly mean one who lives in his voice!

We were walking on the side of the road. I mean I was walking along this great man P B Srinivos. Some youngsters crossed us went forward. In a couple of moments they almost shrieked and turned back. One of them said “It is Srinivas!” loudly. They greeted him and I could see the sense of awe in their eyes. I was walking along that giant of a man! Even physically he is a well built and burly man! Srinivas used to visit our office frequently whenever he was in Hyderabad, that is. And he would make it a point to spend a lot of time with me during those visits.

Not many know that P B Srinivas was very fluent with Urdu and was a poet of class in that language. His pen name or Takhallus as it is known was Shabaz Kokonadi. He hails from Kakinada after all! That is Kokonada and he is a Kokonadi! I used to be the audience for his latest poems in Urdu. I knew a smattering of the language and would understand the poems though not with the intricacies. That is the one reason I was his chosen friend.

Srinivos would come with his almost dirty fur cap and a bundle of notebooks. He would read and sing from those books. Somehow he never believed in using a bag for the mini library he carries. He would precariously balance all of them with one hand and gesticulates while talking. Srinivos’s sister Smt Mani was living somewhere around Barkatpura. So, the gentleman makes a proposal of walking home instead of taking an auto or a bus. It was always fun walking on the roads with a celebrity.

PB was a scholar of sorts. He knew many languages. I still remember the new meter in Telugu poetry that he proposed and composed a poem in it. He would be ready to sing any composition even in Sanskrit with right breaks and intonations. It was a pleasure discussing poetry either of Urdu or other languages with him.

I remember his really thick glasses through which his eyeballs appear grotesque. Srinivos talks animatedly making his persona really interesting. I was lucky to spend a lot of time with this genius.

He grew old and even senile. When last met, he looked fit physically. He did not recognize me. No regrets. I tried to introduce myself and remind him of our discussions. He put up a face as if he very much remembers me. But, it was very clear he lost his mental faculties or at least the memory. No regrets again.

We know many people and celebrities would be on the list. No wonder. The celebrities knowing us, is something interesting. I don’t know why all of a sudden Srinivos came on to the minds screen and smiled at me. May be he was thinking about me!

I was looking for a song to go with this post!
Now that the great man is gone, I maintain silence for a while, no songs! At least today!

Narayan Sridhar Bendre

The following write up about Sri N S Bendre was written by late Sri P R Ramachandra Rao.
Sri Rao was a versatile genius.
He was known as a art critic.
He was many more things in one.
He worked as a journalist in England and it is to him that the idea of supplements in news papers should go.
He brought out education supplements in Times of India long ago.

I draw your attention to the style of his English and expression.
His English used to be extraordinary!

His knowledge about painting, architecture and such was another asset.
I was lucky to be associated with him in many of his projects.

Read about Bendre and between lines, see Sri Rao!

N S Bendre

Narayan Sridhar Bendre has journeyed to the goal of abstract painting, in his quest for the significance of reality, after running through the gamut of acdemicism, impressionism, cubism and oriental influences, of the Indian miniatures especially. In his supreme concern for architectonic space, he explores colors for their explosive possibilities; unpremeditated build up a coherence of innate form; in the very inlaying of those strokes, of yellow, orange, blue and deep brown, is created movement, in a rhythm of protecting and receding spaces. This orchestration of colour he admittedly owes to French master, Emile Bonnard; the forms are contained by the colours themselves, in an elimination of blinding line, indeed there is an explosive quality about Bendre’s later paintings, as if the colours have burst their banks in a splash of violent movement. From his earlier precise organization of solidly constructed forms, it is a far cry to his abstract improvisations, not excluding action painting. But this is a measure of his self-renewing faculty in a restless pursuit of his aesthetic grail.

The amazing versatility of Bendre inspired a band of painting hopefuls at Baroda University where he headed with distinction the Faculty of Fine Arts; here, in a spurt of uninhibited freedom, blossomed talents of creative import among them notably, Jyothi Bhatt, Shanti Dave, G R Santosh, and Ghulam Mohammed Sheikh.

A painter of striking versatility, Bendre has passionately experimented in many styles and techniques, refusing to be standardised. He was influenced in turn by the filtered Academicism of Bomaby school, the indigenous tradition of Mughal and Rajput painting, the revivalist Bengal movement and the Post-Impressionism of Cezanne and Gaugin. His varied output is solidly entrenched in the soil of India, in his immediate environment, his pictures are vivid testaments of a very personal integral vision. He retained, through his life’s vicissitudes, a perennial wonderment and discovsry, intensely responsive to the warmth and colour of and humanity of life.

This write up is the last of the pages in one of Sri Rao's unpublished book.

Choppalli Suryanarayana Bhagavatar - Ramajogi Mandu

Father spent his student days in Gadwal.
He was a student sponsored by the royal family, I am told.
The Samsthanam was a centre of lot of cultural activity.
So, father used to recollect the details of performances he has witnessed.
Names like Yadavalli Suryanarayana, Dommeti Suryanarayana and Choppalli Suryanarayana became familiar to me.
These were all the stars of the Telugu musical dramas those days.
No wonder they sang classical music!

When Srinivasa Dixit gave some recordings converted from old discs, I was pleasantly surprised to find Choppalli Suryanarayana Bhagavatar's songs!
Father, though not a singer, used to mimic these artists.

Here I present one such song as a tribute to my father.
But for my father, my tastes in literature and classical music would have been next to naught!

Choppalli Suryanarayana Bhagavatar sings Ramajogi Mandu

They are the same wherever!

Look at man's ingenuity!
Whether it is China or India!
It is all the same!

Shangahi

Somewhere around Chennai

Friends and friendship

I used to be real social being, always surrounded by friends.

Since I am not moving around much, I am finding myself lonely.

When I am among people even now, I find myself out again!

I read this following piece somewhere and thought of sharing it with all you friends!

A friend in need is a friend indeed.

Meeting new people and cultivating friendships with others is something that we all do throughout our whole life. For some people making friends comes naturally and easily, for others it is a difficult task. Whether you are a ‘social butterfly’ or lonely, or any shade of grey in between, you will benefit from reading this article. The suggestions in the article help you maintain the friendships you already have in your life, as well as giving you a ideas on how to strengthen the ones you already have in your life.

1. Don’t Judge People: Treat everyone you meet with dignity and respect. Accept that everyone is different; we are all individuals all with different backgrounds and experiences. The people in your life don’t need to share exactly the same values, beliefs and behaviours as you do in order for you to be friends with them. Don’t be narrow-minded! That is, don’t be too picky in the beginning with the people you engage with and don’t restrict you to just one group of people. Doing so could lead you to missing out on opportunities for meeting new people and forging new friendships. It can also limit the amount of fun you experience.

Every person is important and has their story to tell and after all, it takes many different people to make the world. It would be a pretty dull world if we were all the same, we would have nothing interesting to talk about and nothing to learn. So the message is clear, if you allow yourself to mix with a variety of people and are accepting of them you open yourself up to the possibility of engaging in interesting and fulfilling conversation as well as an increased opportunity to forge many great friendships.

Another important pointer to keep in mind is, you may not like or agree with everything your friends do or the choices they have made, but don’t judge them for that! After all, you too have done things you are not proud of and have made bad choices. Think about how you would want to be treated and offer that to the people in your life. Do you want the support and understanding from the people in your life, or condemnation and criticism? In other words, if you want a friend, be a friend because you only get what you give away, or you reap what you sow.

I would also like to say that the common grounds we have with people make forming a bond with someone easier, giving you both something to talk about. And the differences we have are just as important. For, they are what makes us all unique and interesting, important and beautiful human-beings. Use the differences in others as an opportunity to learn something and to express your understanding and compassion to them. Make your goal to make others feel better and happier every time you see them, spread the joy and sunshine around from your heart. By following the above advice, you will be an invaluable friend to everyone you meet everywhere you go.

2. Be a Good Listener: If you are whiny, bitchy, negative, boastful, conceited or only talk about yourself, is it any surprise that you are without friends? Instead of being whiny, talk about the things that you are thankful for. Instead of bitching about the flaws of others, talk about what you like about them. Make your goal to uplift and brighten the lives of others with your words, not burden them by dragging them down into misery. There’s enough misery in the world without you adding to it! The world is in great need of people to make it a better place and it all starts with YOU!

If you are boastful or conceited and only talk about yourself, you deprive your friend from sharing what they want to say and what’s important to them and miss the opportunity to learn anything about them. The moral is, talk less, listen more for there is a great deal you can learn from and about the people in your life if you take the opportunity to listen to them and let them talk.

It’s important to remember that good friendship goes both ways, it is a two way street. Your friendship should be built on cooperation and mutual respect for one another. For a good friendship can’t work if one person is doing all the giving and the other doing all the receiving. Make it your goal to give unconditionally without expecting anything in return. I believe a good friendship is built on balance!

3. Show a Genuine Interest in Others: When talking to someone new, ask them questions about themselves or what they like to do and listen to what they are saying, rather than focusing on your own nervousness. Remember to smile and look them in the eye. Nod your head and say something like “un huh, I see” and ask questions about what they are saying to keep the conversation about them and to keep it going! It’s also important to support what is important to your friend. Remember significant events and dates in their lives, such as birthdays and anniversaries. Call your friend regularly and always remember to send birthday cards, this is one of the ways to show

your interest in them.

Be happy for your friend. When they do something well or share with you their achievements and things they are proud of, show your recognition in any way that suits you best.

4. Don’t Gossip: Be loyal and trustworthy – if your friend tells you something private, keep it to yourself! Unless it is an ‘unsafe’ secret (i.e. your friend is contemplating seriously hurting themselves or someone else) then you would tell someone you trust to help your friend. The question you need to ask yourself is, “If I divulge something my friend has told me in confidence, is it going to get them into trouble, or out of trouble?”

In this instance, telling to get your friend OUT OF trouble is if they are thinking about hurting themselves and telling to get them INTO trouble is idle chatter behind their back. Being loyal and trustworthy also means don’t talk about your friend behind their back, especially if it is negative! How would you feel if someone was talking about you behind your back? Good friends keep private information to themselves and only tell someone about something you said if they are genuinely concerned for you or think you are at risk of going down the wrong path. After all, being a good friend means looking out for their best interest. If someone starts gossiping about someone your friend, say something like “I’m sorry I don’t listen to gossip” and walk away because it’s a well

known fact that whoever gossips to you, gossips of you and if your friend finds out that you have betrayed their trust, your relationship with them is as good as over!

5. Be Forgiving: Nobody is perfect. You’re not perfect, I’m not perfect, and NOBODY is perfect. As imperfect human beings, we occasionally say and do things that are hurtful. Knowing this fact can help you see things from your friend’s point of view. Accept and allow your friends to make mistakes because a friend is going to hurt you every once in a while and you must be willing to forgive them for that. As Bob Marley wrote “The truth is, everyone is going to hurt you. You just got to find the ones worth suffering for.”

Although forgiveness cannot change the past, it can enlarge the future. When you let go of your hurts and resentment by forgiving, you take yourself from a victim to a victor because you have released the pain and are ready to move on. So, forgiveness is pragmatic and liberating.

6. Don’t Wallow in Self-Pity: NEVER, NEVER feel sorry for yourself or wallow in self-pity! This is a big turn-off for people! Although you know you are a strong, valuable person, by acting weak (wallowing in self-pity) people will treat you like a weak person.

Not only that, complaining about your problems all the time will drive potential friends away, and is detrimental to existing friendships in your life. No one wants to hang-out with a negative person. By complaining or talking too much about your bad experiences, how unfortunate you are, people are going to stop treating you with respect and may take advantage of you! Worst yet, it wears people down and you could lose a friend altogether by succumbing to self-pity.

My motto is: “Always laugh at yourself, don’t laugh at others! Never feel sorry for yourself, feel sorry for others.” This makes you a hero! A hero (or warrior) is someone that can move on quickly and bounce back from the bad times and take their hardships in their stride and get on with it with accountability and a positive outlook. Also, by refusing to feel sorry for yourself and by having a sense of humor (being able to laugh at yourself) is one way of winning people’s respect forever

Germs in and around us!

Our bodies and homes are covered in microbes -- some good for us, some bad for us. As we learn more about the germs and microbes who share our living spaces, TED Fellow Jessica Green asks: Can we design buildings that encourage happy, healthy microbial environments?

Jessica Green wants people to understand the important role microbes play in every facet of our lives: climate change, building ecosystems, human health, even roller derby -- using nontraditional tools like art, animation and film to help people visualize the invisible world

Everything is covered in invisible ecosystems made of tiny lifeforms: bacteria, viruses and fungi. Our desks, our computers, our pencils, our buildings all harbor resident microbial landscapes. As we design these things, we could be thinking about designing these invisible worlds, and also thinking about how they interact with our personal ecosystems.

Our bodies are home to trillions of microbes, and these creatures define who we are. The microbes in your gut can influence your weight and your moods. The microbes on your skin can help boost your immune system. The microbes in your mouth can freshen your breath,or not, and the key thing is that our personal ecosystems interact with ecosystems on everything we touch. So, for example, when you touch a pencil, microbial exchange happens.

If we can design the invisible ecosystems in our surroundings, this opens a path to influencing our health in unprecedented ways.

I get asked all of the time from people, "Is it possible to really design microbial ecosystems?" And I believe the answer is yes. I think we're doing it right now, but we're doing it unconsciously. I'm going to share data with you from one aspect of my research focused on architecture that demonstrates how, through both conscious and unconscious design, we're impacting these invisible worlds.

This is the Lillis Business Complex at the University of Oregon, and I worked with a team of architects and biologists to sample over 300 rooms in this building. We wanted to get something like a fossil record of the building, and to do this, we sampled dust. From the dust, we pulled out bacterial cells, broke them open, and compared their gene sequences.This means that people in my group were doing a lot of vacuuming during this project. This is a picture of Tim, who, right when I snapped this picture, reminded me, he said, "Jessica, the last lab group I worked in I was doing fieldwork in the Costa Rican rainforest, and things have changed dramatically for me."

So I'm going to show you now first what we found in the offices, and we're going to look at the data through a visualization tool that I've been working on in partnership with Autodesk.The way that you look at this data is, first, look around the outside of the circle. You'll see broad bacterial groups, and if you look at the shape of this pink lobe, it tells you something about the relative abundance of each group. So at 12 o'clock, you'll see that offices have a lot of alphaproteobacteria, and at one o'clock you'll see that bacilli are relatively rare.

Let's take a look at what's going on in different space types in this building. If you look inside the restrooms, they all have really similar ecosystems, and if you were to look inside the classrooms, those also have similar ecosystems. But if you look across these space types, you can see that they're fundamentally different from one another. I like to think of bathrooms like a tropical rainforest. I told Tim, "If you could just see the microbes, it's kind of like being in Costa Rica. Kind of." And I also like to think of offices as being a temperate grassland.

This perspective is a really powerful one for designers, because you can bring on principles of ecology, and a really important principle of ecology is dispersal, the way organisms move around. We know that microbes are dispersed around by people and by air. So the very first thing we wanted to do in this building was look at the air system. Mechanical engineers design air handling units to make sure that people are comfortable, that the air flow and temperature is just right. They do this using principles of physics and chemistry, but they could also be using biology. If you look at the microbes in one of the air handling units in this building, you'll see that they're all very similar to one another. And if you compare this to the microbes in a different air handling unit, you'll see that they're fundamentally different.The rooms in this building are like islands in an archipelago, and what that means is that mechanical engineers are like eco-engineers, and they have the ability to structure biomes in this building the way that they want to.

Another facet of how microbes get around is by people, and designers often cluster rooms together to facilitate interactions among people, or the sharing of ideas, like in labs and in offices. Given that microbes travel around with people, you might expect to see rooms that are close together have really similar biomes. And that is exactly what we found. If you look at classrooms right adjacent to one another, they have very similar ecosystems, but if you go to an office that is a farther walking distance away, the ecosystem is fundamentally different. And when I see the power that dispersal has on these biogeographic patterns, it makes me think that it's possible to tackle really challenging problems, like hospital-acquired infections. I believe this has got to be, in part, a building ecology problem.

All right, I'm going to tell you one more story about this building. I am collaborating with Charlie Brown. He's an architect, and Charlie is deeply concerned about global climate change. He's dedicated his life to sustainable design. When he met me and realized that it was possible for him to study in a quantitative way how his design choices impacted the ecology and biology of this building, he got really excited, because it added a new dimension to what he did. He went from thinking just about energy to also starting to think about human health. He helped design some of the air handling systems in this building and the way it was ventilated.

So what I'm first going to show you is air that we sampled outside of the building. What you're looking at is a signature of bacterial communities in the outdoor air, and how they vary over time. Next I'm going to show you what happened when we experimentally manipulated classrooms. We blocked them off at night so that they got no ventilation. A lot of buildings are operated this way, probably where you work, and companies do this to save money on their energy bill. What we found is that these rooms remained relatively stagnantuntil Saturday, when we opened the vents up again. When you walked into those rooms,they smelled really bad, and our data suggests that it had something to do with leaving behind the airborne bacterial soup from people the day before. Contrast this to rooms that were designed using a sustainable passive design strategy where air came in from the outside through louvers. In these rooms, the air tracked the outdoor air relatively well, and when Charlie saw this, he got really excited. He felt like he had made a good choice with the design process because it was both energy efficient and it washed away the building's resident microbial landscape.

The examples that I just gave you are about architecture, but they're relevant to the design of anything. Imagine designing with the kinds of microbes that we want in a plane or on a phone.

There's a new microbe, I just discovered it. It's called BLIS, and it's been shown to both ward off pathogens and give you good breath. Wouldn't it be awesome if we all had BLIS on our phones?

A conscious approach to design, I'm calling it bioinformed design, and I think it's possible.

Thank you.

(Applause)