The Mind is Slower than Nature

A thought from meditation:

The mind is slower than nature. It always plays catch-up. We use our mind to observe, analyze, understand the world around us. The way we do this is to use our reasoning abilities, which is essentially a pattern-matching exercise. Knowledge is the recognition of patterns in the world. At the same time the world is zooming by. As I type this sentence there are a billion chemical reactions going on in my body.

The mind can never keep up. Worse still, when we convince ourselves that we can understand nature, we end up going against the grain, stopping to figure this or rationalize that. We stumble and struggle trying to keep up. You miss the whole flow of life in an attempt to capture it.

I think a less stressful way is to try and tap into the flow of nature, which really means letting go of the pursuit of patterns. This is what you practice when you meditate. If you can master this, then you are riding the waves of life on a surfboard, instead of floating to shore in fits and starts.

Inverse Slumdog

Over the weekend I watched a Hindi movie called “New York”. Going in, I was warned that it was going to be a bad one. But I was not prepared for what I witnessed.

‘New York’ is the tragic story of Sameer a.k.a. Sam, a young South Asian-American going to college in NYC with all the potential in the world gone awry when he is pegged as a suspect in the 9-11 hijackings. Never mind that Sameer’s Indian, an American citizen, and has all kinds of alibis… he’s brown damnit!

As a suspected terrorist, the FBI, led by agent played by Irfan Khan, hire Sameer’s best college buddy Omar to spy on him and bring him in. Omar, reluctant to turn on a friend who he knows is innocent, later finds out that Sameer actually has become a terrorist after being falsely held in a Guantanamo-like detention facility for 9 months. After that episode, Sam decides it’s time to get payback from the country that screwed him.

Sameer is played by John Abraham, the latest Bollywood beefcake. He looks like an Indian incredible hulk. The guy is massive. Some of the movie’s best scenes were of him showing off his versatility as an actor. In one scene he demonstrates his physical prowess by beating one of his college chums in a mad dash footrace through the halls of their Hogwarts-esque college as the whole student body cheered them on. In the next scene he was sitting stoically in front of a chessboard and checkmating the school chess champion (he was Chinese). After Hulk won, he even offered to start again three moves back to give the guy a chance… how generous!

There were a number of impossibly absurd parts of this movie. First of all, since it is still a Bollywood movie, there was no way there wasn’t going to be a love story. So they cram whimsical songs and scenes of touch football in the park at college in between adrenaline-pumping action with C-4 explosives and torture scenes. What a mess. My favorite part of the movie was when Sam comes out of Guantanamo ready to become a terrorist, and goes to Brooklyn on a tip from another inmate. He goes into a bread shop with two hardcore Arab-looking guys behind the counter and asks for ‘New York’s best brown bread’. That’s the code to say he wants in on the terrorism. But the Arab guys need to test his persistence so they just pack him a loaf of the bread and charge him $3.45. But Sam won’t be denied. He goes back day after day asking for ‘New York’s best brown bread’ until they finally let him in. He had shown he was worthy to be one of them, one loaf at a time.

My second favorite scene was the very end after Sam and his wife get gunned down by the FBI on the rooftop of the building he was about to blow up. Their precocious young son, Daniel (pronounced Donny-yell), is adopted by Omar, the friend who turncoated on Sam. And Irfan Khan, the FBI agent who masterminded Sam’s framing and ultimately his bloody death, walks off into the sunset with Omar and Donny-yell , hand-in-hand to have a pasta lunch (Irfan hates pasta, but he made an exception). All’s well that ends well!

This movie was grade-A garbage. But the next day I thought about it, and realized that in fact this movie should go international and be seen by every American that watched (and loved) Slumdog Millionaire. I enjoyed Slumdog, but my Mom didn’t. She was bothered by the fact that the movie took one aspect of a vast, complex society, and amplified and glorified it to make it seem like that was what India was all about. She felt offended that India was portrayed in such a skewed way. Sure there are slums and crime and corruption, but that’s not what defines India. It’s fine to show this to people who have a deeper context of Indian society, but not to the uninitiated. I agreed with her point, but it didn’t hit home until I saw ‘New York’. This movie is the American version of Slumdog. It takes some negative aspects of post-911 America (the profiling, the torture), and blows it up to make America out as a cold-hearted police state that will turn on its best and brightest in a flash. It says that America’s terrorism problem is rooted in its own prejudice, and that it takes really good people and turns them into terrorists. All of this is probably true, but it’s by no means the whole truth. The portrayal is incredibly skewed.

I walked out of that theater wondering what the hell that crowd full of Indians had going through their heads. My reluctant conclusion was many were thinking, “Now I’ve got America figured out… I knew that’s how it works there!” Perpetuating stereotypes through propaganda made palatable through hip songs and pretty faces.

And this is why I highly recommend ‘New York’ to the world’s moviegoers. If it ever made it to the U.S. it would flop like a fat man in a pool, just like Slumdog did in India. And for the same reasons. But that’s exactly the point. Here’s to hoping that Slumdog re-releases as a 2-DVD package with ‘New York’.

It's Kinda Like a Big Deal

Welcome to the Third Installment of The Organic Indian! I am writing to you live from Delhi, where I landed the day before yesterday. My first thought when I landed was, "Shit, here we go again," thinking ahead to the generous servings of heat, hard work, and homesickness that lay ahead. But as I was driving in the prepaid taxi from the airport, another thought came to me: "Let's do this!". I felt a gust of confidence. I have been here before, and it's always been an amazing experience. I'm ready for another big serving of amazing.

One of the things I like best about spending my summers in India is writing this blog. For those who are newly visiting this corner of the blogosphere, the main thing you need to know about this blog is the intended audience: my friends, family, and occasionally my future children; and that I try to be real to what I'm feeling at the time. I don't really care about being thorough with my facts or politically correct or whatever (I proofread posts minimally). As I've said before I reserve the right to take back anything I say on the blog. Often when I sit down to write I am thinking of someone specific in the audience. Sometimes I write to my brother, or sometimes to Joachim, or sometimes to my parents and cousins and aunts/uncles. I try and give you a sense of what's going on with me, the things going through my head and heart, etc. both as a way of staying connected but also to keep a record of formative times of my life. I also try hard to entertain and be funny. That is still a work in progress.

It's fun to see the names of the people I email every year to kick off the blog. Many of the names are the same, but there are always new people in the mix. You kinda get to see the rolling group of people who come in and out of your life. This year I've sent the word out to a bunch of people from school (hi guys!). As always, feel free to pass on the link to anyone who you think would be interested in reading.

This trip to India is special because I will be here through the fall. Yes, 6 months! I have taken a temporary leave from school to stay till January. The main reason for the extra stay is for me to crank out most if not all of the work in India I need to get done before I propose, prepare, and defend my PhD thesis. I will be concentrating my time on work I began last summer in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, with an NGO called DSC. We built and piloted a system for farmers in rural Gujarat to access agricultural information through an automated phone system. One of the most interesting parts of the system is that it has a voice-based question and answer forum. Farmers call in and post questions, listen to the Q&A of other farmers, and can also answer questions of other farmers themselves. The initial response to the system by farmers was very enthusiastic, so the goal this summer is to take the project to the next level... we want to make the system available to all of rural Gujurat. More on that as we roll along.

One final story that I have to leave you with. My mom dropped me off to the airport in San Francisco. On the 2-hour drive from Sac, we got to talking about raising kids, and she told me a story from long ago that I had never heard. My mom's first job ever was working at Security Pacific Bank as a teller in Fremont, CA. My parents lived in Livermore, and there was only one car. So my dad and her would drive into the Bay together, he would drop her at a bus station, he would continue on to his office, and my mom would take the bus the rest of the way to the bank. When she started, she was a timid, shy young woman straight off the boat from India. She hardly spoke English. When she started at the bank, there were two women there that really took her under their wings. One was the branch manager, named Linda. My mom told me that one time early on a customer who she was helping starting getting irate and impatient with her, and started hurling abuses. All kinds of vulgar stuff. So Linda comes over and asks if there's a problem. Customer says that he doesn't want to deal with my mom anymore, and wants to talk to someone else. Linda replies that she is confident that her employee is helping in the best possible way, and that anyone else he talks to would offer the same exact service. The guy continues to abuse. So Linda tells him, "Look, either you can calm down and speak to her, or you can take your business elsewhere." So the guy cashes out the $80 left in his account and walks out! My mom still remembers the way Linda stood up for her... those kinds of things stick with a person. The other woman mom worked with, Alice, was Chinese. When my mom started, her English was weak. Alice told my mom, "Look, when I first came to this country, I was just like you. I will make sure that you learn English, I will take care of you." My mom never forgot that either. So much so that years later when she ran her own check cashing business, she hired a small, frail Mexican girl named Rosie who had no qualifications to handle money, spoke no English but had something inside of her that reminded my mom of herself. "Just like how Alice took care of me, I knew I had to do that for Rosie." I was floored. Here I was, about to pull the old pay the Bay Bridge toll for a stranger trick to show off to my mom how I know about pay it forward, and she drops a story about how she has been living it.

Blessed. That's how I felt as I kissed my mom goodbye at the airport. So I start these 6 months in India knowing that I'm riding the good karma of having two amazing parents, and you all, my amazing friends. I look forward to the adventure.

And yes, this blog is a big deal:

Third time's a charm baby
After 2 classics, another stripe up on my arm baby

Visiting Farmers

One of the best, perhaps the best, thing about the work I do is going to the field to visit with farmers. Over the last year I have become fascinated and enthusiastic about agriculture, but particular in the people who engage in it. I love farmers. I put farming up with teaching as the two positions in society which should get extra high pay because their work is for the public good: teachers because they create an educated society, and farmers because they care for the land.

The best part about working with farmers is that they are amazing people. Incredibly warm, generous, humorous, and humble. It is really easy to stay motivated to work hard on a daily basis when you know you are doing it for such people. You just want to return the warmth they so naturally and effortlessly show you. So far I have done only a little work for farmers in Gujarat, but they are very appreciative of even that. It is something special for them to know that of all the things in the world an NRI Gujarati kid can do, he has chosen to come back to do work that tries to help them. This summer, I caught wind that I have become known amongst a wider circle of farmers than I have met myself, some have discussed our work amongst themselves. Pareshbhai, one of my co-workers at DSC, even mentioned that this summer's work will make my name known throughout rural Gujarat. How amazing!

Over the past two summers, I have gotten to know many farmers. In fact, I would venture a guess and say I personally know about 100 farmers in Gujarat. And among them are some of the most thoughtful and progressive farmers in all of India. I've written about Sarvadamanbhai before, who I believe has the most advanced farm in Gujarat. I've visited big farms, small farms; organic farms and chemical farms.

A couple weeks ago I did a field visit with Pareshbhai and my manager from IBM, who visited DSC from Delhi for a few days. My manager afterwards said the day (which went from 6am to 1am) was "a lifetime experience". I know what he means. Anyway, I wanted to tell in words and pics about some of the memorable stories from the field.

We traveled about 600 km in total in the day, and went to really remote villages. At one point we were 25KM from the Pakistan border!

Our goal for the trip was to meet with farmers and discuss how they access information about their agricultural practices, what information they need, how best to deliver it to them, and challenges they currently face in accessing it. We did this in many ways, including free-form discussion, and a questionnaire I had prepared. We went to three villages, and in each place local farmers had organized meetings so that we could address a group. This pic is of the biggest meeting of the day, in a village called Beyok in Banaskantha jillo (district):


Notice how they set up the cots and sat around us in a circle. Also interesting was that the ladies, whom we expressly invited to be a part of our meeting, all sat on the ground outside of the circle.

We also discussed the radio program and what they thought about getting information over the phone. Then we went into specifics about our project. I prepared a paper prototype of the voice user interface that we have designed:


We had a bunch of flash cards with each of the voice prompts that the user would hear when they dialed our system. We asked the farmer to put a phone to his ear (which was off) and sit with his back facing Pareshbhai, who would act as the voice on the phone. Notice that we purposely had Pareshbhai speaking from behind to block any visual communication. I acted as the "computer", handing flashcards to Pareshbhai based on the participant's utterances. So if the user said "question", I handed Pareshbhai the prompt that said "Ok, you have chosen to ask a question. About which crop?" And so on. Explaining what we were trying to do itself was a challenge. It takes the ability to abstract in a particular way to understand that this was a mock version of a real system we would later build. We ended up calling it a "naatak" or "play performance".

We did the naatak several times, with some very interesting results. People were nervous, and some didn't get what we were doing, but on the whole we concluded that the basic interaction is going to work. In our third village, we met a women-only group and did the naatak:

This was totally fascinating. We learned that the ladies don't own phones themselves, and rarely use them. Moreover, they are very intimidated by the phone, expressing that they were not educated enough to even dial a number.

Doing the naataks made me wonder whether we were doing something completely new. After thinking about it some more, I've come to believe that we are designing the first ever voice interface in the Gujarati language. Cool!

The final story I wanted to share is about a farmer named Babubhai. Babubhai is 18 years old. He has been featured on DSC's quarterly magazine, Divaa Dandee (meaning "Lighthouse", a name given by a farmer) many times for his progressive farming practices. He has given speeches in front of high-level government bureaucrats without flinching in meetings organized by DSC. But the thing that amazes me most about Babubhai is that he is a born leader. Watching him interact with the other people in his village is a sight to behold. He commands the all-out respect of each and every person in the village, from the youngest to the village elders. He is a peer amongst the grown men in the village. They all go to him for advice about their farms, and he has no hesitation about telling them what to do. Also, it is clear that each and every person in his village are gushing with pride for him; they recognize that he is very special.

Babubhai is also an inventor, and he showed us the latest thing he has built:


It is a insect trap that he puts out in his field. It is actually three traps in one. There is at the top a water bowl to attract birds, who in turn hunt around for bugs on the plants. Then there are posts on the sides to hang faramine traps. In the middle he has fixed a small light bulb that attracts insects, and right underneath it is where he puts a bowl of another trap which the bugs fall into. He told us that he wants to take his invention and share it farmers around the world.

I would consider Babubhai a genius, in the mold of Ramanujan. He is a diamond in the rough. I feel lucky to know him and work with him. Despite having only a gradeschool education, Babubhai plans on going to college and studying social work. I have very little doubt that he will eclipse anything I will ever do for the upliftment of rural Gujarat.

Kapilbhai-isms

A couple weeks ago I went to Baroda for the long weekend to visit my Masi. I also took a day to visit the Vinoba Ashram where I lived last summer, and Jatan Trust, an organization working out of the ashram which I interned with. The heart, the soul, the engine of Jatan is Kapilbhai, who was eagerly awaiting my visit. Kapilbhai is one of my very few living personal heroes. His principles, the way he works, the way he lives, all deeply resonate with me and I admire him very much. Together last summer we developed an organic certification system for small farmers in Gujarat. Besides being the first and only organic certification in the Gujarati language (which means for the first time ever Gujarati farmers can actually read their issued certificate), there are many other aspects of the system that make it unique in all the world.

Just being back at the ashram and talking with Kapilbhai again in person, to be in his presence, gave me a wonderful feeling. I also enjoyed hearing him introduce Jatan and our project to some visitors who happened to be there that day. A highlight of this summer was when we were all sitting together, Kapilbhai looked at the visitors and said, "Neil is a great man." I was speechless and barely managed a reply: "No, I'm just lucky". It was one of the most meaningful compliments I've ever received.

I have rarely felt the pride for something I helped create like I did while listening to Kapilbhai talk about our work's guiding philosophies and how they have set us on a different path from what's been done before. To illustrate, he explained that in most certifications, organic agriculture's definition is reduced to farming without chemical fertilizers and pesticides. But JCS has a scoring system that we use to go way beyond this grossly simplified notion of sustainable agriculture. He explained as an example one of the criterias in our scorecard, which says that if your farm uses a tube well, you get 3 marks; if you use a canal, which is a little more sustainable way to get water, you get 5 marks; if you have a farm pond or check dam, that's even a better way to water you field, so that's 8 marks; if you don't water your field at all (that is, it is sufficiently fed just through rain), then you actually have the most sustainable (and advanced) irrigation system, so you get 10 marks. No other certification system in the world tabulates how 'organic' a farm is in this way.

Through the course of the day, there were a couple other nuggets of wisdom that Kapilbhai left me and this group of visitors, which stuck with me:

1. "No one is poor until they sit in a car and drive around". This quote sounds weird because I don't remember the whole context of the illustration he was making, but the point was that poverty is a conception, an idea in the mind. You are not poor until you decide that you are poor. In India, as Kapilbhai pointed out, "many people go to sleep at night with an empty belly, but they are happy." To a western person's ears, this is a heinous comment, blasphemous. But I think there is something deep in it. The very definition of happiness, what it means for each person on the earth, is a very relative thing. We assume that a person must have a certain way of life to be happy, but happiness is a slippery thing. Sometimes you mean to bring about 'development' in a community, but you may introduce as many (or more) problems than you solve. Like in the "Gods Must Be Crazy".
2. "If you've achieved short term success with a rural development project, you've done something wrong." Kapilbhai believes that working with a rural community is a lifelong task. It takes giving yourself fully, giving your life, to the cause and die trying to make a difference. For him it's the only way to roll: all out. I wouldn't take his quote literally, but what it means to me is that this work is not about cute little summer projects. If you are really commited to farmers and making a difference for them, you need to live with them and work as one of them. There are no shortcuts, and you shouldn't be in it for the awards or recognition or anything else like that. I couldn't agree more. I know that my way of working is exactly what he's railing against, and I am just too damn attached/scared/egotistical to go all out. But maybe one day.
   

Stuff Indian People Like #1

Lots of indistinguishable wall switches.


With these astonishing control panels, you can easily fall into the tedious ritual of toggling every damn switch to find the single one for the fan that you want. I wish there was a electricity-wastage impact study on this when multiplied by the millions of such rooms all over India.

And yes, you guessed it: this is the blogosphere's most exciting new running segment. We are going to give those white guys a run for their money.

Paying the Bills

This is my least favorite post to do, but it needs to be recorded for the sake of completeness: What am I working on this summer?

As I mentioned earlier, I am interning at IBM research Delhi, working with a team there that has developed a pretty interesting technology. The premise is the following: The WWW is great, but to really leverage it you need the Internet as well as the ability to read and write (...English). But believe it or not, most people in the world don't have one or both of these things going for them (the number of illiterate people in the world is more than double the number of those online).

But what a lot more people have access to is the telecom network in the form of cellular connectivity. So while the text-based web has a lot of reach, a voice web could give access to billions more. By voice-web (the IBM team calls it 'spoken web'), I mean content accessible through a mobile phone that is audio only; instead of websites, there are VoiceSites. For example, imagine Wikipedia set up as a VoiceSite, where instead of reading about check dams, you can listen to an audio version. VoiceSites can be linked to one another, and can be navigated with a broswer using HSTP (HyperSpeech Transfer Protocol).

The IBM team I am interning with has developed this technology, and I have come in this summer to try and understand how such technology might be applied in concretely useful ways. My previous work has been in the domain of agriculture, so I started looking there. One of the things I've known for some time is that agricultural extension, the process of adapting agricultural research to local contexts through farmer education, has for some time been utilizing radio as an effective medium for information dissemination. Radio isn't the sexist technology, but it is quite well-suited for rural development: it is cheap, flexible (hardware is lightweight, portable), familiar, can be localized (through community radio), and works well in oral and non-literate communities. But a big challenge is to make radio more interactive. More generally, it has always bothered me that in social/NGO sector, rural communities are only looked at as consumers; consumers of services, products, even information. But how can they also be made producers? Many farmers I've met have a lot of useful wisdom to share, and even at the the base level social services should be getting feedback from their constituencies on whether they are delivering their services satisfactorily.

So this idea of spoken web + community radio + feedback channel developed, and we are now working on a project that tries and make this vision come to life. Specifically, I am working with an NGO in Ahmedabad called Development Support Center (DSC), which among many activities centered around promotion of natural resource management practices in Gujarat, has a weekly radio program called "Sajjata no Sang... Lave Kheti Ma Rang" (Sajjata no Sang is a network of development NGOs in Gujarat... "They bring color to the farmlands"). Our goal is to develop a model for social communication (sharing of knowledge and experiences within a community) and information access through interactive community radio. Using the spoken web technology, we will create a system for farmers to call in and leave any feedback (questions, comments, personal experiences) to DSC. Other farmers can listen to the feedback and respond as can DSC staff and/or any interested expert scientists. Conversations can build amongst farmers and with experts, experiences can be shared, and questions can be answered in a distributed manner. Additionally, we will provide an interface for the farmers to access all of the last 2 years worth of radio programming content; the information is now at their fingertips. Finally, all the feedback submitted to the system is recorded for DSC radio broadcasters to later export and play straight away on a future radio program; this sort of completes a loop where before, the radio program was a one-way broadcast. A more engaging experience and a greater sense of ownership develops now that the farmers hear their own voices. This sketch is something I presented early on to describe this full-circle vision.

As a researcher, my goal will be to design a voice-UI that is simple and user-friendly for the farmers. The spoken web system should be intuitive and navigable all through simple spoken voice prompting. We will to the furthest extent possible involve farmers themselves in the design of the interface, testing our system and incorporating their feedback early and often.

Working with DSC has been great. It is my first experience working in a formal NGO (office, 50+ staff, etc.). Every day there are mandatory chai breaks at 11am and 4pm. It is a time for the group to sit together, chit-chat, bond, etc. There is a dining area where most people eat lunch from home-brought tiffins. Sharing food is the norm. People even feel offended if their contribution was not finished by the rest of the group.

I'm living as a PG (paid guest) in a bungalow just 5 minute's walk from my office. I am staying there with one Indian guy working in Ahmedabad, and Kareem, another DSC intern. Kareem is from Canada and just graduated from college. He's here on a project dealing with participatory irrigation management and will be staying for 7 more months. He hasn't been to India, and he's a relatively timid person, so I've tried to show him the ropes. In some sense I've taken him into a mother-child relationship, making sure he's fed, getting his clothes washed, helping him get items for his room, etc. I'm a little worried about how he's going to survive, but hopefully I will have helped him get stuck in by the time I leave.